← Hard Fork
Hard Fork
Charlie Kirk and Online Rage + Inside Trump’s Chip Flip + This Week in A.I.
01:13:47
“We as a culture are optimizing for rage now.”
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- [00:00]
Kevin Roose
This podcast is supported by the all new 2025 Volkswagen Tiguan.
- [00:05]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [00:34]
Casey Newton
Are you watching this alien Earth show? No. Okay, first of all, it's so good. It's my favorite thing I've seen this year. Second of all, one of the subplots is that there is a character who is a kind of like, you know, synthetic humanoid person, and she has mastered the alien's language. So she can communicate with the language, presumably using some sort of machine learning.
- [00:53]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, alien.
- [00:54]
Casey Newton
And it's paying huge dividends for her because that alien is eating a lot of people. He's leaving her alone. And that's why communication is so important.
- [01:03]
Kevin Roose
I do think that interspecies podcasting is going to be huge.
- [01:06]
Casey Newton
Yeah.
- [01:07]
Kevin Roose
Like, I recently got a pitch. There was, you know, a PR person I know who was sort of telling me, oh, you know, we have this AI company we're working with and they're, they're learning how to translate whale song using AI and would you like to have the founder on? I said, no, but I'd love to have the whale on. If the whale would like to come on Hard Fork. We would love to interview the whale. I have so many questions for a whale.
- [01:31]
Casey Newton
Well, like what would you ask?
- [01:33]
Kevin Roose
Feelings on SeaWorld. Free Willy. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about what it's like at the bottom of the sea. Tell us about the most interesting krill and plankton you've come across recently.
- [01:45]
Casey Newton
I feel like you don't actually have a lot of questions for this whale. I like the idea, though. In the old days, it was dog with a blog. Remember dog with a blog? And now it's going to be cod with a pod.
- [02:01]
Kevin Roose
I'm Kevin Roos of tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer and this is Hard Fork.
- [02:07]
Casey Newton
This week, our thoughts on the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the terrifying new reality of extremely online violence. Then the Times. David Yaffe Bellamy joins us to unpack a blockbuster investigation into a $2 billion investment in Trump's crypto company and a controversial deal to send high end AI chips to the Middle East. And final, it's time for this week in AI.
- [02:37]
Kevin Roose
Well, Casey, we're going to start the show on a more somber note than usual. Obviously, many of you, like us, have been reading about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which happened while we were taping last week's episode. So we couldn't really get into it then. We also just didn't know a lot. But in the week or so since then, we have learned a lot more and we've had a lot more time to think and reflect and try to figure out what, if anything, we could add to the conversation. So, Kasey, we're going to talk a little bit about what we've been talking about amongst ourselves, what we're seeing, what we're thinking about, and some of the connections between these Internet platforms that we talk about on the show and these violent events out in the physical world and what, if anything, can be done about that. So, Casey, how are you doing? How are you feeling? What has your sort of reaction been to all of these events over the past week?
- [03:36]
Casey Newton
Well, I think, like a lot of people, I was horrified by the event itself and have continued to be horrified as further events have unfolded. I was not a close student of. Of Charlie Kirk's work, but I know that he was a master of manipulating the platforms that I cover. And so over the past week, I have been thinking a lot about his relationship to the platforms, what has happened on platforms since his murder, and what it tells us about how media works in this moment and how politics and power work in this moment.
- [04:18]
Kevin Roose
Say more about that because I. I share your sense that, like, Charlie Kirk is sort of wrapped up in the Internet, and these were the platforms where he kind of made his reputation. Turning Point usa, the organization he started, was a major force in kind of early 2010s online activism and did a lot of viral content, for lack of a better word. And that's sort of how he. How he became fam. Famous, how he became who he was. It wasn't by running for office or going on cnn. It was. It was by making videos and posting them online.
- [04:56]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And specifically, I think he excelled at making what some of the platform nerds that I write about would call borderline content. So basically saying things that come right up to the line of breaking a platform's policy without quite going over. So, for example, you know, he speculated that vaccines may have killed more than a million people without backing that up. He said it was a mistake to pass the Civil Rights Act. He would criticize Jewish donors for funding, quote, radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi Marxist policies, then, then reject claims he was being anti Semitic, and maybe he wasn't. But over and over again, you see him flirting with this line. And the reason that that's important is because platforms love it when you flirt with the line. It turns out that the most compelling thing you can do on social media is to almost break a policy. So that is one of the key methods that Charlie Kirk used to gain notoriety, prominence, and then eventually power and money. And he did it by mastering this. This particular technique. And the thing about this technique, as effective as it was for Charlie Kirk, I think it's really corrosive on our politics because the more it succeeds, the more that when you open up TikTok or Instagram Reels, you're seeing something that is designed to upset you. It's designed to make you uncomfortable, to challenge you. And that kind of thing, which. Which Charlie Kirk was so good at, is now kind of the way that a wide swath of our politics works.
- [06:42]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I remember this graph that Mark Zuckerberg once posted on his Facebook account. This was a much earlier version of Mark Zuckerberg, who, you know, had not gone sort of, you know, full maga yet, but he was sort of sharing some of his observations about the kind of content that worked on Facebook. And maybe we could, you know, pull that graph up and put it in the show. But it basically showed that the closer you get to the line, no matter where the line is drawn, this was the interesting thing. It was like, no matter where a platform decides to draw the line and say this content is unacceptable, the closer you get to that line, the more engagement you get. And he was sharing this not as sort of a celebration of this phenomenon. He was just kind of like, look, this is what we observe happening on our platforms. And it didn't seem like he knew what to do about it then, and it doesn't seem like anyone knows what to do about it now.
- [07:39]
Casey Newton
Well, what platform said, and both, you know, Facebook at the time and YouTube said, was that they were going to downrank this kind kind of thing. They said, hey, we see you edgelords out there. We're not going to let you get away with this. So we're going to try to restrict the spread of this borderline content. But as we look at the media landscape today, Kevin, it's a lot of stuff that is just right on the border, right? It's stuff that you kind of can't believe that people are getting away with. So people are sort of always finding these new borders and they're. And they're trying to exploit them, and they're not always political. I'm thinking about. You remember the milk crate challenge on TikTok?
- [08:15]
Kevin Roose
Yes.
- [08:16]
Casey Newton
People are stacking up milk crates and then trying to, like, walk across them, even though it's an incredibly rickety and dangerous structure. You know, at the time, TikTok didn't have a policy for that. But then TikTok watched a bunch of, you know, kids falling off milk crates, and they had to say, you know, we're not going to promote this sort of thing anymore. So this is just the nature of platforms that are looking for the most engaging thing for you to look at. They're always going to be drawing your attention to something that is just on the brink of maybe not being okay. And in the wake of the Kirk assassination, Kevin, I've been struck by how it seems like the entire cultural moment just feels like so many people are making borderline content. Right. It's people making edgy jokes online. Some of those people are being fired, some are being celebrated, some are getting, you know, angry letters from politicians. And in a way, this whole thing, it would have been a perfect story for Charlie Kirk to comment on. Right. And to say some really edgy things about. So you really cannot separate him from these platform dynamics that he mastered and are now the primary mechanism by which his death is being discussed.
- [09:29]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I mean, I, unlike you, I have watched a lot of Charlie Kirk videos. A couple of years ago, I made a podcast called Rabbit Hole about sort of the world of online radicalization and extremism. And as part of that, I spent a long time watching the videos and listening to the podcasts of the people who were sor of big parts of that story. And Charlie Kirk was one of them. And I should say I don't think he was the edgiest or the most sort of radical by any means. In fact, if I had to sort of put him into a bucket of online political influencer, it would be kind of the kind of debate me bro genre was sort of what he was known for, where he would show up at a college campus and have some debates, and then there'd be clips of those debates that'd be posted on YouTube or other platforms. And sometimes the video title would be like, you know, Charlie Kirk destroys liberal. There was always this sort of very violent verb in there, you know, destroys, humiliates, owns. This was sort of the blood sports of that era. And I'll never forget this conversation I had with a left wing YouTuber around this time. And he was sort of saying, well, yeah, like we have decided to fight fire with fire. Like we cannot get any reach, any views, any distribution for our content on the left if we do not sort of mimic the aesthetics of the right. So they would do their own videos that were like, you know, liberal destroys Charlie Kirk, or, you know, college student owns Ben Shapiro. And so it was almost like they were just sort of adopting the same kind of rage optimization framework, but just like switching the sign on it. And that really struck me because it was like, I feel like the whole culture you're talking about now, like our whole society has kind of absorbed this optimization strategy. Like we as a culture are optimizing for rage now. You see it on the social platforms, you see it from politicians calling for revenge for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You even see it in these kind of individual cases of people getting like extremely mad at, you know, the person who made a joke about Charlie Kirk that was, you know, edgy and tasteless and gonna, you know, report them to their employer and get them fired. It's all this sort of spectacle of rage, this culture of destroying and owning and humiliating. And I guess to me, what I've been feeling over the past week is that there just don't seem like a lot of checks on that. There don't seem like a lot of stabilizing forces right now. And the temperature of the Internet and of our society feels really high right now.
- [12:22]
Casey Newton
Yes. And I think it is particularly true on X. And I think it might be worth drawing a distinction between how X handled this situation and how the Twitter of old may have handled a similar kind of murder. In the old days of Twitter, when there was a very violent video that was spreading, you would have teams that would either try to take it down or to ensure that it was hidden behind a screen and they would probably downrank it, you know, try to ensure that it was not being recommended to people. Twitter was never perfect at that sort of thing. But there, at the Twitter of old, there was an effort to try to prevent people who didn't want to see this, this content from seeing it. Of course, Twitter also banned some of the most aggressive and violent right wing accounts, right? People who had posted really racist and inflammatory stuff, they all got banned. Then Elon Musk buys it, turns it into X, and what does he do? Well, first of all, he brings back all those right wing accounts, lets them post almost whatever they want, and then crucially, he decides to use the platform to push his own very inflammatory views right in the immediate aftermath of this, before we know anything about the shooter, he tweets, the left is the party of murder. And so today, if you look at X, it is easy to get the sense that we are on the brink of civil war and the right wing is gearing up for battle. In reality, I think the vast majority of Americans are not on the brink of civil war. But if you were one of these elites who is still Twitter brained and is still checking this site 2100 times a day, it is going to change your perception and it is going to polarize you and it is going to make you think that things are worse than they are. So this is just a set of dynamics that I think is enormously consequential because the elites of this country are still on X and what they are seeing is a sort of very bloodthirsty vision of America. And that scares me quite a lot.
- [14:27]
Kevin Roose
I don't know, man. Don't you feel like this is happening sort of on every platform? Don't you feel like the temperature is rising on blue sky and TikTok and, and Instagram? Like, I feel like this is broader than X to me and obviously X is a particularly potent example of a platform that has shifted its policies and its approach to sort of borderline content. But I feel this everywhere I go online. I do not feel like there is a place on the Internet right now that is being optimized for civil and respectful discussion and debate. I feel like it is all rage bait.
- [15:04]
Casey Newton
I basically agree with you. But I do think it matters that the leader of one of the platforms is using his platform, where he has the largest audience of anyone on the platform, to promote these views as aggressively as he has been doing. But to your point, yes, like the broader dynamics do hold. If you go on Blue sky, you will see a very angry version of the left. Now, for what it's worth, what I have seen there has seemed far less violent than what I have seen on X. I have actually seen much more violent leftist content on X than I have on Blue Sky. But, but, but I think your, your point is a good one. That this broader dynamic of rage bait everywhere, polarizing us all the time is not just an X phenomenon and it does just seem to be how the app based media ecosystem works.
- [15:54]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, and like, to be clear, we don't fully understand all of the, the motives at play behind this particular violent act. I don't believe that anything is ever just the Internet's fault. But it does feel like everyone has kind of absorbed the logic of the platforms. And there used to be people inside the platform companies who thought about this stuff. Like during the 2020 election cycle, there was an effort at Facebook to sort of take down the temperature of the news feed. There was this whole set of what they called break glass measures. Basically, if it looks like the country is spiraling into some kind of civil war, there are these levers we can pull and these knobs we can turn inside Facebook to like bring down the level of, of discord and hostility on the site. And not all that stuff was implemented. They very quickly sort of, you know, figured out that it was bad for engagement to, to do that. But like, it is an option. And I, I wish there were more people at the platforms who cared about this and thought about maybe sacrificing some of their engagement. But as we know, this stuff is very good for engagement. And it turns out that last week, X had more first time downloads in the United States than any single day in its history, including before Elon Musk owned it. That's according to Nikita Beer, who works in product over at X. So as violent and as awful and as rage filled as the platform is right now, that does appear to be working for them, at least by this one very shallow metric.
- [17:38]
Casey Newton
Yeah, this makes me want to talk about one potential solution that I think has not been fully explored. It would not be a complete solution. It would just be something I'd like to see more platforms try. And it's called bridging based algorithms. We talked about them on the show before. This is an idea from a guy named Aviv Ovaja who's come on hard for. It's probably been a couple years since he was here, but he came up with the idea that is now at the heart of the community notes that you now see on X and on Meta's platforms. Right. You know how if you see something that's wrong on X, you can add a note to it and say, well, no, actually this is the truth, and then link to whatever the truth is. And the way that bridging based algorithms work is they show them to people across the political spectrum. Right. They have various ways of figuring out sort of where you're aligned politically. And they only show the note if people who are more on the left and more on the right. Agreement. Right. They sort of see a bridge between the two of you and they think, well, if Republicans and Democrats both think this is true, this is likelier to be true. And so we're going to show that note. And that is a way that using an algorithm, you can try to create some consensus. Right. You can try to build a bridge. I'm not aware of any platform that has tried to do this in the sort of core feed. It may be that this is less engaging and a worse business than the ones that we have today. But we do know that there is a way to build technological systems that bring people together because they are already in use today on some of the worst platforms on earth. So I do think that there is an opportunity here for somebody who cares to try to bring this idea to more places.
- [19:16]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. Okay, so if that's the platform piece of it, what are you looking at now? Looking forward? Like, obviously we've seen not just the kind of, you know, culture war side of this, but we're now seeing a government crackdown on speech. You know, we talked on this show back during the the sort of early days of the. This Trump administration about people like Brendan Carr, the chairman of the fcc, who had explicitly sort of stated that one of his goals was to take the fight over free speech to the broadcast networks, to the platforms. We're now seeing things like Jimmy Kimmel being put on indefinite leave from his ABC show after Brendan Carr went on a podcast and condemned his comments about how the right was characterizing Charlie Kirk's alleged shooter. So what are you thinking about the free speech of it all?
- [20:07]
Casey Newton
I mean, this is just terrifying, full stop, right? This is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect us from, political speech, and in particular, offensive, tasteless political speech. This is why we have a First Amendment. And over the past decade, I've watched Republican after Republican complain about policies on platforms that they felt did not enable the free speech to the degree that they thought they deserved it. Charlie Kirk himself was a big free speech warrior, and he was part of this culture. We're arguing that conservatives were being disadvantaged on these platforms when the Trump administration retook power earlier this year. At first it was just essentially, let's make things fair and balanced so we'll approve your media merger, but we're going to put some sort of minder at your company to make sure that you're not too mean to President Trump. That was already a bridge way too far for me. Now for the government to come in and to threaten individual broadcasters because of political speech that they made that we're getting pretty close to as bad as it gets. So this is something that I think all Americans should be paying attention to, because, trust me, you do not want to live in a country where you no longer have the First Amendment.
- [21:16]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. Or to put an even finer point on it, I've seen a lot of people pointing out that, like, you really do not want to live in a country where the comedians on TV cannot make fun of the President. Like, that is, that is not rarely a sign of a healthy democratic society.
- [21:30]
Casey Newton
Yeah.
- [21:31]
Kevin Roose
I also have been fascinated and disturbed about this whole sort of crowdsourced surveillance and snitching culture that the Internet seems to have created. Like, I'm sure you saw this, but in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, there were these kind of accounts that would signal boost, you know, people reporting their Facebook friends, their neighbors, the people who, you know, ran small businesses in their towns saying, oh, this person made a tasteless joke. And then they would, you know, get retweeted by libs of TikTok, or they'd send it to some, you know, Charlie Kirk people saying mean things about Charlie Kirk database that would like sort of publish it. And people would sort of write letters to their employers urging them to be fired. And like, that's not new behavior that has been happening since at least, you know, the mid 2010s with gamergate. But this kind of incentive structure where like social media and these sort of influencers are incentivizing regular people to sort of engage in this kind of surveillance and reporting. I have seen that before, but I have not seen it at this scale in this organized a manner. So I wonder what you make of that.
- [22:43]
Casey Newton
I mean, to me, this is just another platform incentives thing. Right. This kind of surveillance and doxing is essentially a kind of video game that you can play on X. And people like to play video games. Right. And because you're playing with people's real lives, it feels really edgy and cool and fun for those who, who are participating in this. And you know, candidly, like part of this is the flip side of free speech. Right. It's like if you want to say that people have the right to express themselves online, one thing that they can express is this person made a tasteless joke and I think that they can lose their job. I'm willing to accept that as a fact of life as long as I still get to engage in political speech. You know what I mean? And so I think we also need to start thinking about what kind of trade offs we want to have in a world where these platforms are mediating so much of our reality.
- [23:38]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I think that's right. I, I just want, I, I just wish I felt like there was any stabilizing force, any, anyone in any position of power right now, who could sort of take down the temperature, turn down the knobs, turn, sort of encourage people to, like, take a deep breath, either sort of, you know, literally or spiritually. And, like, I just. I am. I am feeling very anxious. I've just noticed my anxiety over the past week has. Has really gone through the roof. And I think it's because I just. I feel this sort of ambient rising of rage in our society, and I want it to stop. I want people to take a deep breath.
- [24:20]
Casey Newton
People should absolutely take a deep breath. I would say if you're looking for reasons of optimism, we are now a week out from this shooting. There have not been huge upsurges of violence across the country. I think people are very sad, they're very anxious about the future, but so far they're not taking to the streets with guns. And I think that speaks to the fact that the vast majority of Americans do not want to participate in a violent cultural war with people who disagree with them. And that when we get most of our information from platforms, we are always at risk of forgetting that because on a platform, it always looks like civil war is about to break out. So if nothing else, I think this is a moment for all of us to think about our media diets, think about the way that whatever media we're consuming is manipulating our emotions and then deciding if we want to make a change there. Right. Because perception can become reality in too many cases. And it just might be a moment to. To find something a little bit calmer to help you understand what's going on in the world. For example, a podcast hosted by two friends who mostly like to tell jokes about technology companies. Just throwing that out there.
- [25:32]
Kevin Roose
I mean, you're joking, but I am thinking about our role in this moment and what we do. And I want to continue to encourage people to look around, to touch grass, to not just see the world through this kind of refracted fundamen house mirror of social media. Because I think when you do that, it leads to some really dark places. Wow. I couldn't help but end this one on a dark note. Sorry, where my head's at.
- [26:00]
Casey Newton
I brought it to such a nice place and then you were just.
- [26:03]
Kevin Roose
I know. And then I brought it back down into hell. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let's talk about something else. Well, Casey, when we come back back, we're going to talk with DYB about the UAE and GPUs and AI. This podcast is supported by the all new 2025 Volkswagen Tiguan.
- [26:55]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [27:24]
Casey Newton
This episode is supported by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast or wherever you listen.
- [27:55]
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- [28:23]
Kevin Roose
Well, Kasey, there was another big story this week involving politics and tech and this one did not get a ton of attention relative to the Charlie Kirk assassination story. But I thought it was a big important investment investigation from my colleagues at the Times that deserved more attention than it got.
- [28:44]
Casey Newton
I completely agree with you. This one is a really extraordinary piece of journalism and so I'm glad we're highlighting it today.
- [28:52]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So this story involves two seemingly intertwined deals between the Trump administration, World Liberty Financial, which is the Trump family part owned cryptocurrency company, and the United Arab Emirates. And it raises just a ton of fascinating questions.
- [29:11]
Casey Newton
Yeah. But it's also a story about the future of AI and potentially AI safety. As you know, there are so many people all around the world who want to get their hands on state of the art chips. But the United States has export controls in place that prevent some of our adversaries or countries that we're just kind of worried about from getting them.
- [29:31]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, and I think it would be a really big deal in any other administration. I think it would have gotten, you know, months of airtime. It would have been all anybody would have would have talked about for weeks on end. There would have been hearings and, you know, calls for impeachment and things like that. But I think we've just gotten so inured to the sort of everyday business dealings of the Trump administration and the Trump family and the various associates that it sort of passed by without much notice.
- [29:59]
Casey Newton
Yeah. This is the sort of story that in the old days we would have been on Twitter saying this is not normal with a bunch of those clapping hands emojis in between all of the different words. So if you're a person who likes to know when this is not normal, we're here to tell you today, this is not normal. This is not normal.
- [30:17]
Kevin Roose
So to talk about this very abnormal story with us today is one of the reporters who wrote it, my colleague and friend of the show, David Yaffe Bellamy. David Yaffy Bellamy, welcome back to Hard Fork.
- [30:33]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Thanks so much for having me.
- [30:35]
Kevin Roose
So Dyb, this story that you reported, this very interesting and complicated story starts, as all great tech stories do, on a super yacht. Specifically a super yacht off the coast of Sardinia where you wrote about a meeting that took place this summer between the owner of the yacht, a man named Sheikh Tanun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, and Steve Witkoff, President Trump's envoy to the Middle East. Now before we get into the contents of this meeting, I have to ask Dyb, what is a super yacht? What makes it different than a regular? And how can I get invited on one?
- [31:13]
Casey Newton
Doesn't it just have guacamole and sour cream?
- [31:17]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Well, did you guys read that New Yorker story from a few years ago? The haves and the have yachts?
- [31:23]
Kevin Roose
That's very good.
- [31:24]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
That's my main reference point for all yacht related questions. And I believe that there are actually very formal distinctions between yachts, super yachts and mega yachts, and that it has to do with the length of the vessel. But clearly you guys aren't spending a lot of time on the coast of Sardinia.
- [31:40]
Casey Newton
I heard it wasn't about the length of the vessel, but how you use it.
- [31:44]
Kevin Roose
It's about the motion of the ocean.
- [31:45]
Casey Newton
That's right. Anyway, we're getting off track here.
- [31:47]
Kevin Roose
We're getting off track. Okay, so Dyb, let's talk about this meeting. What were Sheikh Tanoon and Steve Witkoff there on this yacht to discuss?
- [31:58]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
So the White House told us that this discussion centered on resolving international conflicts, essentially. But what our reporting showed is that the relationship between these two men, you know, spans both diplomatic matters like that and also, you know, essentially a business partnership between Steve Witkoff's family company and Sheikh Taknun's sort of family investment fund in the United Arab Emirates.
- [32:27]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So you're reporting Dyb, and that of our colleagues centers on these two big deals that took place earlier this year. Tell us about these deals.
- [32:39]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
So one deal involved crypto. The other deal involved artificial intelligence. The first deal, which is the crypto deal, the parties to that were World Liberty Financial, the Trump and Wyckoff family crypto company, and an investment firm in the United Arab Emirates called mgx, which is essentially owned, run by the royal family of the Emirates. And the deal was that MGX would use the World Liberty Financial stablecoin to make a $2 billion investment in another party to this transaction, Binance, the big crypto exchange. And this was a huge deal for World Liberty because the company's trying to get traction for its stablecoin. And as you guys know, the way stablecoins work is if somebody is using the coin, then there are deposits backing it up. And the issuer of the coin can invest those deposits in ways that generate a yield. And it's a very profitable business in the crypto world. So that was the.
- [33:36]
Casey Newton
Of these two deals, you suggest in your story that just by getting that $2 billion infusion of cash, that World Liberty will likely be able to make tens of millions of dollars in sort of interest.
- [33:48]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Yes, exactly. And companies like Circle and Tether in the crypto world have found this business model is really profitable and frankly, not that complicated. You just kind of sit on these deposits, you can invest them in fairly safe ways to generate a big return if the principal is large enough, which in this case, it was $2 billion.
- [34:07]
Casey Newton
So tell us about deal two.
- [34:09]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
So deal deal number two is the, is the artificial intelligence deal. And this is a tentative agreement between the United States and the Emirates for the US to allow the export of American made chips to the uae. These are, you know, the most valuable, powerful chips that, you know, fuel AI. They're developed by Nvidia, and without them, you can't really become sort of a tech powerhouse in the way that the UAE wants to be. And the Emirates has been trying to get access to these chips for years and years. And the issue has always been that U.S. national security officials worried that if we give these chips to the uae, then they'll end up in the hands of China because there are really tight ties between those countries.
- [35:00]
Casey Newton
Yeah, tell us about some of those ties.
- [35:02]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Joint military exercises, technology sharing agreements. At the center of this is G42, which is another kind of Emirati tech firm also run by Sheikh Tahnoon. And so, yeah, the fact that the Emirates is getting these chips was a big deal and not necessarily an inevitability given the posture of the Trump administration toward China and given the resistance in the Biden administration toward, you know, kind of giving free access to these chips.
- [35:32]
Casey Newton
And there was resistance in the Trump administration as well to giving the UAE those chips, is that right?
- [35:39]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Absolutely. This is something that we found in our reporting that there were disputes within the White House and people who were very concerned about the national security implications of allowing access to these chips. You know, I should be clear, you know, this is like a preliminary agreement and there might be new security guarantees that are built in when those chips actually leave the US and go to the uae. But at the moment, there are definitely kind of concerns from some people in that national security community.
- [36:07]
Kevin Roose
Right. So, David, let me just repeat back what I think I heard from you describing these two deals and maybe drawing some lines that maybe are suggested but not explicitly said in your reporting. So correct me if I get any of this wrong. The UAE wants to be a global player in AI. They look at this technology, they say, we want to be one of the countries that's developing these sort of frontier models. But it has a problem. It can't get the chips that it needs to run these powerful models because under the Biden administration, the export of the most powerful Nvidia chips was limited to the US and its allies. And the uae, while technically, you know, not an adversary of the United States, also does some stuff with China. And so people worried that maybe they would send some chips to the UAE and China would get access to them. So the UAE can't get all the kinds of chips they want, and then it plows $2 billion, a cryptocurrency controlled by the Trump family business. And around the time of that deal, the Trump administration changed its posture about chips, rolled back some of these restrictions, at least in a tentative agreement, fired the, we'll get to this, but fired the main guy who was sort of advocating for these export controls and kind of lets the chips flow to the UAE as they had wanted. Am I missing anything important?
- [37:29]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
I mean, I would say that the main thing that we kind of say in our story, and that is important to understand, is that we, we did not find ev of a kind of direct quid pro quo here. What the story basically shows is that these two deals involved many of the same people. They were negotiated in roughly the same time period, and they were interconnected in ways that people weren't aware of when these sort of back to back announcements happened in May. I'll give you an example of that from our reporting an employee at G42, the big Emirati tech firm that wanted the chip, was simultaneously working for that firm and for World Liberty Financial at the same time while all of this was going on. And so you see this sort of intermingling, and it raises all sorts of concerns about ethics, rules, conflicts of interest, whether US Interests are being subordinated to the kind of commercial priorities of the Emiratis and the families of the people in the Trump administration. All of that is at play in our story, but we certainly can't say that there was an explicit quid principle, pro quo.
- [38:34]
Casey Newton
You can't say that. But I mean, just this character of Steve Witkoff, who is President Trump's envoy to the Middle east, this longtime golf buddy and friend of Trump's, at the same time, he is the envoy to the Middle east, where he is supposed to be representing America's interests. He is also, what, a co founder of World Liberty Financial, which is about to reap the rewards of this $2 billion investment, is that right?
- [38:59]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, still has a financial interest in World Liberty, you know, even now. I mean, his financial disclosure form was released just a couple of days before the story came out, and it showed that he still has an interest in World Liberty despite statements by World Liberty that he was going to divest. We were told he's still in the process of divesting.
- [39:19]
Casey Newton
Yeah. How unusual is it for an envoy like this to also have an interest in a business that is benefiting directly from a foreign government he is directly dealing with as a diplomat?
- [39:31]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
These sorts of overlaps between, you know, personal, business and government responsibilities don't have that much precedent in the U.S. this is a new thing in the Trump administration that's sort of becoming increasingly common. I mean, these lines are blurring. I mean, even before the Trump administration started back in December, Steve Witkoff flew to the Middle east, was taking diplomatic meetings. He appeared at a crypto conference where he met with a World Liberty financial investor. At that conference, he was sort of presented as the US Middle east envoy, even. Even though, you know, Trump hadn't actually taken office yet. This sort of blurring of lines started immediately and, you know, it's continued throughout this administration.
- [40:14]
Kevin Roose
Now, let's talk about some of the other figures involved in this story. In particular, I want to ask you about the role played by David Sacks, who's the AI and crypto czar in the Trump administration. He was also, as you report, involved in some of these deals. So. So what is David Sacks role in all this?
- [40:34]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
So David Sacks, he's the AI in crypto czar. And he's interesting because, similar to Wyckoff, he has a foot in both worlds. He's simultaneously working in government, and he has this tech job at Kraft Ventures, his VC firm. And what we found in our reporting is that he was one of the driving forces behind the chip steal with the uae. He was pushing forward aggressively in public and also behind the scenes within the White House. And that raised concerns from some of his White House colleagues. Colleagues about potential conflicts of interest. The reason being Sachs is a tech investor. He's still working as a tech investor. His company has invested in AI ventures in the past. And one of the original backers of Kraft was another kind of Emirati investment firm that is currently chaired by Sheikh Taknun. And so those concerns bubbled up within the administration while this deal was being negotiated. I should also say that Sachs received ethics waivers from the White House that basically said, you're divesting from a lot of these stakes. What's left is sort of de minimis and isn't gonna affect your work and sort of it's okay for you to kind of play in these areas that kind of intersect with your business. So he did get that sort of permission slip from the Trump administration, but there were still concerns from colleagues.
- [41:57]
Casey Newton
I have to say, very little is funnier to me in this moment than the idea of getting an ethics waiver from the Trump administration. Just what is that process? Process like?
- [42:05]
Kevin Roose
Okay, I have one more character that I need to ask you about. David, who is another David? David Fyeth. He was Trump's senior director for technology on the National Security Council. So a member of the Trump administration who was known inside the government as being sort of the export controls guy for chips, the guy who thought it was a really bad idea for the US and its companies to be shipping the most powerful AI chips overseas. This was a view that he shared with some folks in the Biden administration administration and its Security Council. And he was fired earlier this year as part of sort of a clearing of the house at the NSC by President Trump. So what did you report about that firing and what may have motivated it?
- [42:53]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
I mean, that was a crucial moment, you know, during these chip negotiations, where a kind of, you know, potential roadblock to a deal going through was abruptly removed. And it kind of cleared the field in a way that allowed David Sacks to eventually kind of take control of these negotiations. So it was definitely a good thing for the Emiratis and their priorities that this happened. The reason that he got fired is that Laura Loomer, the kind of right wing agitator, had a meeting with Trump in which he urged the firings of Fife and several other national security colleagues. And the reason that Loomer gives for this is partly that Fife's father, Doug Fyith, was sort of aligned with the kind of neocon, sort of Bush era Republican Party, which she sort of advocates against. And so she essentially argued, you know, to Trump, like, you've got to get rid of all these people for that reason.
- [43:46]
Kevin Roose
We should also say for people who are not familiar with Laura Loomer and her work, this is a woman who has been banned from every major tech product, including my favorite, Laura Loomer. Fun fact, she's both banned from Uber and Lyft for being too racist. Do you know how hard it is to get banned from Uber and Lyft for being too racist?
- [44:04]
Casey Newton
Think about how many racists use Uber that still have their accounts.
- [44:07]
Kevin Roose
Anyway, so Laura Loomer for some reason gets a bee in her bonnet about this guy David Fyfe, and sort of talks to Trump and then Trump fires him and a number of his other colleagues. This is part, the part of the story where I sort of, something a light bulb went off for me because I remember earlier this year when the Trump administration was sort of seemed to change its posture on AI and AI, AI sort of proliferation very suddenly. Right. This was an administration that had a lot of people in it that were very hawkish on China, that saw us as being in a kind of race with China to develop powerful AI systems. And if you are in a race with your biggest adversary to develop a technology that is dependent on powerful chips from Nvidia, you do not want your adversary getting those chips from Nvidia. Like that seemed to be a pretty exciting accepted part of the Republican tech policy platform. And then all of a sudden, the tune changed. Then all of a sudden, David Sachs and other people in the administration started talking about how it was actually good if these American Nvidia chips got to China and all of our other adversaries because we wanted companies and governments to be building AI on top of our technology. That was sort of their America first strategy. And I could never quite understand why that change had occurred so quickly or what was motivating it. And DAV story helped me kind of connect some dots there that had been missing.
- [45:39]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Yeah, I mean, that sort of moment where the kind of Trump administration's tone on this shifts is kind of really important to what's going on and again, I mean, like, this reporting is really difficult and complicated. And I'm sure there's more about these two deals that will come out over the coming years. And we don't know exactly what went into all of the sort of decisions behind the scenes, but, you know, I think what we were able to show is sort of, you know, broadly the timelines of how these two deals developed and how they intersected.
- [46:12]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I mean, tell us, give us a little flavor of the behind the scenes reporting process, because there are a lot of bylines on this story. It's you, Eric Lipton, Bradley Hope, Trip Mickle and Paul Moser. What can you tell us about how this story came together?
- [46:25]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
I mean, this is one of those kind of big projects that require a lot of collaboration among different departments within the Times. I mean, not of a lot. Not only is it five different reporters on the byline and like a bunch of others who contributed as well, but, you know, three different continents, you know, people in different parts of the world have access to different types of sources. The reporting for this story really began for me when I was in Dubai in late April and early May, which is when Zach Witkoff, Steve Witkoff's son, went on stage at a crypto conference and kind of announced this $2 billion deal. And I was there in the room for that and kind of covered it at the time. And from the moment it happened, we wondered, how did this come together? It was just so unusual for a foreign leader to be channeling money to the family of a top White House advisor. That's just not the sort of thing that happens in the United States. In a way, these sort of interconnections between business and government are more kind of familiar to the way business is done in the Persian Gulf and has been for years. And one interesting thing that Zach Witkoff said on stage, stage at that event is that we should really take a page out of the Emirati royals book. Essentially, we should try to be more like them. So that's when the reporting started for me. And then, yeah, it became this really fruitful collaboration among people with different expertises all over the world.
- [47:48]
Casey Newton
Did you get to try any of that Dubai chocolate while you were over there?
- [47:51]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
I saw the Dubai chocolate, I looked at the price tag. I wondered whether it would fit within the New York Times expense policy, and I passed. I didn't get an ethics waiver to buy the Dubai chocolate.
- [48:04]
Casey Newton
Yes, got it, got it.
- [48:07]
Kevin Roose
How has the White House responded to this reporting? What did they say? Did they acknowledge any of what you had reported was newsworthy or interesting.
- [48:18]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
Both the White House and World Liberty Financial told us that there was no connection between these two deals. One was government business, one was private business. They weren't connected. That was a statement that both those kind of parties made. The White House also told us that David Sachs didn't have any financial stake in the UAE chips deal, that he didn't know the key Emirati players in that deal before it came together, and that he was really just focused on advancing the administration's priorities. And then the White House also told us that Steve Witkoff is working with ethics lawyers to make sure that he is in compliance with all the relevant rules and that he's still in the process of divesting eight months into the administration. So that was kind of basic, basically, the response. And I should say the Emiratis also told us that G42 spokesman said that they have protocols to protect against conflicts of interest and that type of thing.
- [49:14]
Kevin Roose
Right. So let's kind of take a step back from this and zoom out a little bit. David, you've been covering crypto for a long time. You've been on the show many times to talk about the various entanglements that the Trump administration has with the crypto industry. It seems to me like what this story really illustrates is that crypto has become the primary vehicle for influence in the Trump administration. That basically people around the world are starting to figure out that if you want to change the Trump administration's mind about something or influence its policymaking, one way you can do that, and potentially a very direct and effective way, is by buying a bunch of stuff that the Trump family has a business interest in through this World Liberty Financial crypto company. Is that true?
- [50:04]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
It has certainly become a pattern in the crypto industry that players that want something from the US Government and virtually everybody in the crypto world wants something. It's such a kind of nascent area that there are new regulations in the works and all sorts of things that everybody's pushing for. And so many of these players are now connecting themselves to the Trump business in some way, whether that is investing in the World Liberty Coin or attending the Meme Coin Dinner. And again, in none of these cases can you point to, like, an explicit sort of quid pro quo. But it's just become part of the way that business is done in the crypto world is that you at least consider, you know, some sort of collaboration with the sort of Trump family apparatus.
- [50:51]
Kevin Roose
It's sort of like it reminds me of during the first Trump administration when, like, there were all these stories about the Trump Hotel and people choosing to hold their big events there and their banquets and their dinners and, you know, book big blocks of rooms when they would go visit Washington, in part because they thought that, like, Trump or someone in his family might notice, hey, these guys are really supporting our hotel here. This is just a much more direct route to getting the attention of the Trump administration. If you say, I'm going to buy $2 billion worth of your stablecoin from you, I mean, it's really hard to book $2 billion worth of anything at one hotel. But you can go online and buy $2 billion worth of stablecoin.
- [51:32]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
It's a good. The hotel is a good reference point. It is sort of like the Trump Hotel on steroids. And it's way more global, too. I mean, anybody anywhere in the world can buy the Trump meme coin or buy the various tokens associated with World Liberty. And, you know, in previous reporting, we found that there are huge numbers of foreign buyers of all of those things. And remember, foreigners are restricted from making campaign contributions. So this is a way for people in other countries to support the president without going through the channels that have traditionally existed and been kind of restricted to them.
- [52:10]
Kevin Roose
David, I'm curious. What has the reaction been to this story?
- [52:14]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
The reaction's been really interesting, and it's been similar in certain ways to how previous reporting we've done on conflicts of interest within the Trump administration has been received. I mean, a couple of Democratic senators put out statements sort of condemning these sorts of business dealings. You've got various kind of good government groups, ethics lawyers, sounding the alarm over this. But ultimately, in the Trump era, those Democrats and those sorts of ethics lawyers are kind of impotent. I mean, they don't have the ability to turn this into kind of a giant investigation. And so there's a limit to what can happen. I mean, we. We did a previous story about World Liberty Financial and the conflicts of interest associated with it, and that contributed briefly to a delay in the stablecoin legislation moving through the Senate as Democrats sounded the alarm. But ultimately that legislation passed and with Democratic votes. So it sort of remains to be seen whether the left will take a major stand on this issue.
- [53:21]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, well, David, fascinating reporting. Really, really important work, and I hope you keep going, and next time, bring us some of that Dubai chocolate.
- [53:29]
David Yaffe-Bellamy
All right, thank you so much.
- [53:31]
Casey Newton
Thanks.
- [53:35]
Kevin Roose
When we come back, an update on Italian brain rot and other news from the week in AI. This podcast is supported by the all new 2025 Volkswagen Tiguan a massage chair.
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Casey Newton
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Kevin Roose
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- [55:38]
Kevin Roose
Well, Casey, that's enough politics for today. Because as with every week, seemingly, it has been a huge week in AI. So it's time for our segment this Week in AI. Now, before we get into the big AI news of the week, let's hit our disclosures. I work at the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
- [56:01]
Casey Newton
Yes. And this week in Boyfriends.
- [56:03]
Kevin Roose
My boyfriend works at Anthropic this week in Boyfriend.
- [56:08]
Casey Newton
Honestly, it would be a great segment. Boyfriends are always up to something.
- [56:14]
Kevin Roose
Okay, well, Casey, the big AI stories of the week. Let's go through them. Number one Business Insider tells reporters they can use AI to generate first drafts of articles. This was first reported by Oliver Darcy in his Great Status newsletter. This is about an internal memo that went out to the staff of Business Insider last week from Editor in Chief Jamie Heller, telling them that they could use AI not just for research and various other things, but for writing the first drafts of their stories. As long as reporters, quote, make sure your final work is yours. Casey, what did you make of this?
- [56:52]
Casey Newton
Very curious what she means by make sure your final work is yours. That they did all of the research and wrote the first draft. You what changed the placement of a couple of commas? Look, I'm very curious to see what happens with this one. The cynic in ME suspects that this sort of thing is going to become a lot more common. And as AI writing tools improve, I think more reporters are going to feel like maybe I should let it take a stab at a first draft. I should say for myself, I do use AI systems to edit my copy. So not to do the writing, but to catch the typos and some of the factual errors. So there is kind of a spectrum of what I think you and I think is like, okay, right now this goes further than I would, but this just seems like one of those frontiers that keeps advancing, and before long, a lot of other folks are going to do it.
- [57:45]
Kevin Roose
You know, right now, I think that letting reporters draft the first versions of their articles with AI is actually kind of risky from like a reputational standpoint, because, look, the AI writing still has sort of various stylistic flaws in it. You can kind of tell when you're looking at something.
- [58:02]
Casey Newton
I can always tell. I can always tell.
- [58:04]
Kevin Roose
I don't think you can always tell, but I think you can sometimes tell. And I think that's a big problem because if users, readers start to sort of find evidence of AI generated content on your website, I think they're just going to start losing respect for you as a publication. But I think probably at some point the writing will get good and then we won't be able to tell anymore. And I think this will just sort of become part of the background noise of the Internet.
- [58:26]
Casey Newton
I don't know. If you're a reporter and you start doing this, I think you have to ask yourself the question, am I participating in the automation away of my own job? Right there is not that far of a bridge from AI is writing the first draft of my story to AI just has the job that I used to have. So this is Business Insiders playing with fire.
- [58:46]
Kevin Roose
Well, it's really interesting. The Business Insider in particular is the outlet that's sort of pushing the vanguard here, because Business Insider and several other publications had to take down articles from their sites earlier this year when it was discovered that they had published sort of fabricated stories that supposedly came from a freelancer who had generated them using AI. So they want their own staff writers to use AI to create the first drafts of stories. But if freelancers use AI to submit fake stories, that will apparently not be okay.
- [59:17]
Casey Newton
I just have. That's very stupid.
- [59:19]
Kevin Roose
The whole thing.
- [59:20]
Casey Newton
This whole thing. We're just sort of in stupid town right now.
- [59:23]
Kevin Roose
Well, Casey, to continue on the theme of AI and media, I want to bring you the next story this week in AI which is about Penske. Penske, the parent company behind Rolling Stone and the Hollywood Reporter, is suing Google. Google over its AI overviews. The company says that Google is illegally using its reporting in the AI generated summaries and as a result, is depressing its online traffic. Penske claims in the suit that revenue from affiliate links, that's the kind of, you know, e commerce link that supports a lot of the sort of websites that recommend products online. They say that the revenue from affiliate links was down by over a third at the end of last year compared to its peak. And they attribute that directly to a drop in traffic from Google. Kasey, what did you make of this?
- [60:10]
Casey Newton
So that the stat that you just pulled out to me is the most interesting part of this lawsuit. We talk to Google all of the time, and we've been asking them for over a year about this exact possibility. Right. What happens as you shift more people to AI overviews? What happens to all the publishers that rely on your traffic? And we reliably get this message from Google. You know, Casey, Kevin, we send billions of clicks every single day. It's very important to us to have this thriving ecosystem. But then you get down to the level, the individual publisher, and it's like, well, a third of our revenue is gone. Right. So I'm very interested to see where this case goes. You know, I. I can't say for sure that what Google is doing is illegal, but I do know that this is bad for the overall health of the web and that Penske is not the only suffering publisher here.
- [60:53]
Kevin Roose
Yeah.
- [60:54]
Casey Newton
All right. Well, Kevin, this one caught my eye. Albania has appointed an AI Minister. Yeah, this comes from the BBC. Albania has a new AI Minister named D? Ella, which appears, apparently means sun in Albanian. Sun like the star, not the child. And Diella is going to be tasked with ensuring that Albania will become, quote, a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption. So an anti corruption minister that is made out of AI. What do you make of that?
- [61:26]
Kevin Roose
Well, I was gonna say that sounds like a terrible idea, but after the story we just heard from David Yaffe Bell and I'm ready to replace all of our ministers with AI tube.
- [61:33]
Casey Newton
I do think that, like, Chat, GPT in general has a stronger moral compass than some of the people now running the U.S. government. I'll say that. Now, I mean, look, this is one where I think AI can be useful for a lot of things. I'm not sure it's quite good enough yet to put into a role monitoring public corruption.
- [61:53]
Kevin Roose
Totally. I Mean, do you remember when we had that guy on who ran for, what was it? Mayor using AI?
- [61:59]
Casey Newton
Yeah.
- [62:00]
Kevin Roose
And he was just kind of going to be the human face of the, of the chat bot and like, you know, do all of the, the, the votes that the chat bot recommended and put into place the policies that the chat bot suggested. I think there's probably some meaningful percentage of lawmakers today who are using ChatGPT to help them decide what to vote on and how to vote and, you know, how to run their, their piece of the government. And and so, yeah, I think it is inevitable that someone will just say, let's cut out the middleman and just put the AI in power directly.
- [62:33]
Casey Newton
Well, at least in this case. Do you know who I would have put in charge of overseeing corruption in Albania?
- [62:38]
Kevin Roose
Who?
- [62:39]
Casey Newton
A person of prominent Albanian heritage. Dua Lipa.
- [62:42]
Kevin Roose
Really? She would have done a great job. She's Albanian.
- [62:44]
Casey Newton
Yeah, absolutely. I think she would have done a great job. All right, what else is in the news? Kevin?
- [62:48]
Kevin Roose
Well, our next story comes to us from the world of Roblox. That is of course the hit game creation platform where according to several accounts that track Roblox activity on X, a new game recently broke the all time record for most concurrent players on the platform. Something like 23.4 million people were simultaneously playing a game based off the viral AI sensation of Italian Brain Rot.
- [63:18]
Casey Newton
Italian Brain Rot, I think one of our favorite finds of the year. And you're telling me it's a video game now?
- [63:23]
Kevin Roose
Yes. So this game, which I, I guess you can build games inside Roblox. I'm not myself a big Roblox user is called Steal a Brain Rot. And I did spend some time on YouTube trying to understand this phenomenon. Yesterday I watched a video about a guy who spent 24 hours playing steal a Brain Rot inside Roblox.
- [63:43]
Casey Newton
That sounds good for you.
- [63:44]
Kevin Roose
Yes. The video thankfully was not 24 hours long. But basically this is a video game that users of Roblox or one user in particular has created where you kind of just go around stealing people's characters. Characters from the Italian Brain Rot franchise, which as you will remember as you introduced me to earlier this year, was created on TikTok as kind of a, a self referential form of Zoomer humor.
- [64:09]
Casey Newton
So is this kind of a like play on Pokemon, except instead of stealing Bulbasaur, you're stealing Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Ballerina Capuchina. Yes.
- [64:18]
Kevin Roose
You can go around, you can buy various characters with your Robux, you can buy a new Beni Pizza Nini and. And. And do various things. You can then go around stealing other people's characters that they've bought. This has become a huge sensation. 23.4 million people is massive. And I think this is a phenomenon that is essentially invisible to people who are over the age of 18. But if you are a teenager, this has been a very big deal. And I think it goes to one of the things that you've been saying on this show for a while now, which is that there is just a generation of people who love AI generated content, who are not bothered at all by any of the moral or ethical or copyright concerns, who are just like, yes, I love Bannonini, Chimpanini or whatever.
- [65:05]
Casey Newton
Kevin, it's Chimpanzini Bannonini. Please show some respect.
- [65:10]
Kevin Roose
And I am going to devote many hours of my life to playing a video game in Roblox inspired by these characters.
- [65:15]
Casey Newton
Very interesting. We'll have to give that a shot.
- [65:17]
Kevin Roose
I have one other wrinkle to bring you. This is a late breaking wrinkle in this story, which is that apparently the Tung Tung. Tung Sahur character has done disappeared from the Roblox game due to a copyright dispute.
- [65:32]
Casey Newton
Really? Who owns the copyright on Tun Tun Tung Sahur? Is he part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe now?
- [65:38]
Kevin Roose
Well, according to Dexerto, this character was removed from the game by an agency representing the creator Nox, who claimed that the Steal A Brain Rot developer Sammy pulled the character While legal discussions overlooked, licensing were ongoing.
- [65:56]
Casey Newton
Wow. What more iconic move could you make than literally stealing Italian brain rot from the Steal An Italian Brain Rot game? I think that person won the game, I have to say. Congratulations, Kevin. Here's a more serious one I'm curious to get your thoughts on. OpenAI is launching a new chat GPT experience for teens. So over recent weeks, as we've talked about on the show, there has been more scrutiny of Open AI over the way that younger and more vulnerable people are using the platform. Some of those people have died by suicide. There was a hearing in the Senate about these issues this week. On Tuesday, OpenAI said it's building a system that will try to identify users who are under 18 and will give them a more limited version of chat GPT that will block graphic sexual content and in rare cases, potentially involve law enforcement. So what did you make of this story when you saw it?
- [66:51]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I thought this was largely a positive development. Like, I am very worried about the increasing frequency with which young people especially are using these chatbots as sort of emotional support companions are forming these intimate relationships with them. And as we've discussed, like, for some set of them, this does really appear to be taking a toll on their mental health. So I am all in favor of OpenAI doing what it can to determine which of its users are under 18 and to give those users a different experience. They also have been under some pressure. Last Thursday, the FTC launched an inquiry into these AI chat bots, including OpenAI's. And the company is also facing a lawsuit from the family of adam Rain, a 16 year old boy who died by suicide after talking with ChatGPT. So this did not come out of nowhere. They have been under a lot of pressure to do something for their younger users, but I think this is probably a good and overdue step.
- [67:49]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I agree with that. At the same time, I worry that this truly is not going to be enough. You know, right now, I think one reason why younger people and vulnerable people are talking and are sharing their most intimate thoughts with ChatGPT is because they're confident that those communications are private. Now that they know that those could potentially be shared with your parents, with law enforcement. My guess is those teens and vulnerable people are simply going to go elsewhere. They're going to go to other platforms that don't have those same protections. So while I agree with you, I think this is the right thing for OpenAI to do, I think we need to look around the industry at platforms that do not have have these protections and ask them, well, what are you going to do? And even after all of them do it, there's the risk that teenagers and vulnerable people are just going to start talking to large language models that live on their laptops that don't communicate with anyone. Right. So the horses are sort of out of the barn here in a way that makes me nervous, but I am happy to see at least one company doing something about it.
- [68:52]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, and look, I think this is very much a secondary element to the story here, but I am also interested in how OpenAI is going to try to determine the ages of its users. It is apparently not going to do what lots of other Internet services do, which is just put a little, you know, box on the sign up page that says, hey, tell us how old you are when your birthday is, and then trust that people are not going to sort of lie their way around that. It is instead going to try to infer a user's age from the things that they're chatting with ChatGPT about. So if you're asking about your 8th grade math homework, it might flag you as being, you know, underage and show you the kind of nerfed youth version of ChatGPT instead. I did see some speculation that maybe teenagers are going to try to get around this by talking about like back pain and mortgage interest rates and things like that. So the system thinks they're middle aged chatgpt.
- [69:44]
Casey Newton
My wife, she's busting my chops.
- [69:47]
Kevin Roose
You got to help me. But I think we'll have to see how that goes.
- [69:51]
Casey Newton
All right, well, here's one more, Kevin. Both OpenAI and Anthropic put out new reports this week on how people are actually using their chips. Chatbots.
- [70:00]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I thought this was really interesting. This is a kind of data that's been relatively sparse. We just don't know a lot about how people are actually using these chat bots. And the companies that make the chat bots are the ones, of course, with the access to the best data about that. But we got reports this week from both OpenAI and Anthropic who talked about the various ways that people are using their models. We should also say that these are not exactly apple to apples. OpenAI's report just looked at the sort of consumer version of ChatGPT. So not counting all of the like, business and enterprise users who are using it through the API, Anthropic's report did include both the sort of consumer clawed version as well as the sort of more enterprise focused coding tools. But let's talk about a few things from this. One thing that stuck out to me was that with ChatGPT there is a closing gender gap in usage. So a year or two ago it was the case that many more men than women were using ChatGPT. But now, according to OpenAI, more than half of ChatGPT's users appear to be women, which is surprising to me.
- [71:08]
Casey Newton
That's so interesting. Now, did they share any speculation on what has managed to close that gap?
- [71:14]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
No.
- [71:15]
Kevin Roose
The researchers who conducted this study did not give any hypotheses for why this gender gap has narrowed. But they did say that By July of 2020 25, the share of ChatGPT users with sort of typically feminine names had risen to more than half of all ChatGPT users, 52%. They also said that this has become a fast growing tool in low and middle income countries. Maybe there's some sort of relationship there. They said that by May 2025, ChatGPT was growing much faster in the lowest income countries than in higher income countries. So they're seemingly to be kind of a an expansion of use of ChatGPT both among women and people outside the sort of richest Western countries.
- [72:04]
Casey Newton
It's interesting to see. I mean, and I would say that if there remained this huge gender gap that we were seeing a year or two ago, to me that would be like a really like negative signal about AI. Right. Because if this technology is as useful and general purpose as executives are always telling us that it is, there should actually be relative gender parity in of terms, terms of who's using it.
- [72:25]
Kevin Roose
Yeah.
- [72:26]
Casey Newton
What else was in this report?
- [72:28]
Kevin Roose
Another interesting thing from the OpenAI version of this report was that something like 73% of ChatGPT messages are not work related. This was surprising to me. I thought that maybe the usage of ChatGPT for sort of personal and work related tasks would be split pretty evenly. I certainly, you know, would guess that my own usage of ChatGPT is about half work and half non work. But. But apparently the non work related use cases of ChatGPT are growing really quickly and they comprise now the majority, about three quarters of all ChatGPT usage.
- [73:01]
Casey Newton
I mean, to me that just speaks actually to the challenge that Google has here. Right. Which is I think that a lot of those queries are things that used to go into the Google search engine that were not about work but were just sort of like, hey, like how do I fix my doorknob, you know, or like, you know, tell me about Canada. Cause I'm going there next week and all of a sudden chatgpt is serving a lot more of those queries.
- [73:24]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, actually that is the number two use case in this study is as a replacement for web search, what they call seeking information. What do you think the number one use case of ChatGPT is?
- [73:35]
Casey Newton
Cheating on homework?
- [73:38]
Kevin Roose
No, they did not break that out as its own category. It's what the researchers called practical guidance. Basically. Help me make this decision, help me think about this conversation. It's sort of the more kind of companion like use cases that we just talked about being sort of worrisome now.
- [73:54]
Casey Newton
The things we used to rely on friends and family for but no longer have to.
- [73:57]
Kevin Roose
Exactly. So that's the OpenAI report. The anthropic report emphasized something totally different. They found that adoption of CLAUDE was being driven primarily by coding and what they called automation usage patterns in businesses using CLAUDE through the API. Anthropic also found that their highest clod use per capita was in Singapore and Israel and within the us the leading per capita users of CLAUDE were not in California or New York, as you might expect, but in Washington D.C. and Utah. The Mormons love Claude.
- [74:34]
Casey Newton
How about that? To me, what this suggests to me is that OpenAI and Anthropic are really diverging in who their customers, customer bases are. OpenAI wants everyone. It's like a chatgpt in every house, on every phone. Anthropic is increasingly going after the businesses and the enterprises. And so my assumption is that as you sort of fast forward in time of year, you're going to see that trend sort of continue where ChatGPT becomes sort of ubiquitous and Anthropic becomes a thing that you use if you're building something with code.
- [75:06]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So let's keep tabs on this data over time. This is a kind of data that I think we need more of from all of the big companies and I think it's important that they do this collection and sort of analysis in a privacy protecting way. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have said, you know, it's not like we are looking line by line at users conversations. They've sort of built these tools to sort of anonymize and collect, you know, insights about users conversations without peering into them. But I think this is very valuable. We actually do need to know what people are using these things for.
- [75:39]
Casey Newton
I'd really love to see it for croc, by the way, what would come out ahead? Would it be gooning toward anime companions or racism? I think it would be one of the two. Yes.
- [75:51]
Kevin Roose
There's a strong uptick in usage from the Mecca Hitler adjacent region. What's that about?
- [75:58]
Casey Newton
What's it about?
- [76:26]
Kevin Roose
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Casey Newton
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Kevin Roose
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Casey Newton
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Casey Newton
Stop waiting on developers, start running your business smarter with base44. Visit base44.com and turn your idea into a live app today. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyatt. We're fact checked this week by Will Pishel. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Alicia Maitou, Marion Lozano, Sophia Landman, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nimisto and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nichol and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube@YouTube.com hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Huiwing Tam, Talia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us@hardforkytimes.com which Italian brain, Roger, do you steal?
- [79:05]
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