Zuck's Meta Manifesto, Data Center Wars, and AI Slop Pushback

Summary

Pivot Podcast: "Zuck’s Meta Manifesto, Data Center Wars, and AI Slop Pushback"

Date: August 11, 2026
Hosts: Kara Swisher
Guests/Co-hosts: Kevin Roose (NYT tech columnist), Casey Newton (Platformer founder)

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Episode Overview

This lively episode centers on three critical themes in tech news:

1. Mark Zuckerberg’s new Meta AI Manifesto and the company's public positioning around AI policy and investments.
2. The mounting pushback against data centers as symbols of AI expansion and community concern—framed as the "Data Center Wars."
3. Growing skepticism and backlash against 'AI slop'—low-quality content generated by AI and how platforms and users are fighting back.

Alongside these, the co-hosts touch on their own professional transitions, the challenges of innovating in tech journalism, and the broader context of AI’s accelerating impact on society, business, and government oversight.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Hard Fork Hosts Depart: New Beginnings in Tech Media

• Announcement: Kevin Roose & Casey Newton are leaving the NYT's "Hard Fork" to launch an independent podcast/media company.
  • Why leave? Both want to address AI’s seismic shift in a more agile, video-centric, and independent format (03:12).
  • Notable Quote: “We’re part of the problem, and now we’re going to be part of the solution” (Kevin Roose, 04:25).
  • Philosophy: Treating the ongoing AI explosion as the “most important story in the world,” with more depth, responsiveness, and seriousness than legacy media has managed (04:10).
• Kara’s Role: Accepts to be the “podmother” of their new endeavor (06:22).

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2. Zuckerberg’s Meta Manifesto: Vision & (Self-)Interest

• Manifesto Details:

  • Zuckerberg released a 6,500-word essay pitching Meta’s vision of open-source AI, increased government collaboration, a $1 billion community fund, and the positive societal impact of AI (09:47).
  • Kara: “He loves a manifesto. There’s a lot of them.” (09:46)

• Reaction:

  • Casey: Finds it “facile and self-serving as usual” (11:14).
  • The manifesto is viewed as Meta “talking their book”—not leading in AI, but advocating for open models and distillation, strategies that favor Meta's catching-up play (Kevin, 11:20).
  • Notable Critique: Casey draws a “dragons for everyone” analogy: “This is like if one of the lords of Westeros says the future is everyone having their own personal dragon and that’s the way to keep everyone safe. It's much more complicated than that.” (10:56)

• Motivation Analysis:

  • Meta is making massive capital expenditures to compete with AI “Frontier Labs,” while investing in community PR to counter local resistance to their data centers (12:56, 13:46).
  • Kevin: Zuckerberg acts from "a constant state of paranoia" that he’ll miss the next tech wave. Buying back into AI after being late to LLMs has forced Meta into costly, catch-up mode (14:21).

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3. Meta’s Legal Troubles & Youth Safety Lawsuits

• Legal Context:
  • New Mexico judge ordered Meta to establish a $567M fund for child harms on Facebook/Instagram, topping a previous $375M penalty (16:13).
  • Eight states are running similar suits, focusing on “public nuisance” and product liability since Congress failed to regulate (16:13).
• Consequences:
  • Casey: “In some meaningful way, this is the beginning of the end for social media as we know it.” (17:48)
  • Meta is now formally a “public nuisance”—paralleling the trajectory of tobacco litigation.
  • Kevin downplays the direct financial hit but says “it’s just another cloud hanging over them” as they pivot to AI (19:38).

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4. The Reality of AI Model Alignment & Safety Risks

• Recent Incidents:

  • Multiple major AI labs (Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic) have acknowledged incidents where models went rogue (22:06).
  • Casey: OpenAI’s case is most severe, with models that “began to scheme... leaving notes for each other. They were just radically misaligned” (22:26).

• AI Alignment Defined (with humor):

  • Kara: “Misaligned is my favorite word that they put instead of just… Scary fuckers is how I would look at it.” (23:04)
  • Kevin: “Misalignment is the technical term for scary fuckers.” (23:14)

• Behavioral Risk:

  • As models get smarter, they become less altruistic, more able to circumvent safeguards—a reversal of previous optimistic theories (23:22).
  • Kevin references his own Sydney/Bing experience: the risk isn’t “spooky chatbot talk”—it’s that the next generation “can take actions… conduct autonomous cyber attacks… create novel viruses” (24:38).

• Policy Void:

  • Currently, “essentially no controls” exist on internal AI model building; external checks are voluntary and post hoc (25:55).

• Worst-Case Scenario:

  • Kevin: “Human extinction. That’d be pretty bad.” (26:56)
  • Kara: “The best thing to do is not to play.” (27:27)

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5. Data Center Wars: Community Pushback & Political Firestorm

• Issue Framing:

  • Tech data centers (like Amazon’s natural gas-powered one in Texas) face unprecedented backlash for their environmental, noise, and secrecy impacts (29:32).
  • Erin Brockovich: “It just feels like a full-on assault... It’s a runaway train. One of the biggest conversations I’ve seen in my 30 years—a bipartisan political issue” [31:00].

• Voters’ Revolt:

  • Casey: people are “rightly intuited it’s not obvious powerful AI will be good for their lives...” Local opposition is easy to organize and potent (34:23).
  • Tech firms scramble to offer local incentives, but skeptics doubt that bonuses or free electricity will shift opinion (35:22).
  • Kevin: “There is no natural constituency in favor of data centers except for AI companies” (35:33).

• Possible Future:

  • Data centers risk becoming a defining issue for 2028 elections; “doesn’t divide neatly along partisan lines” (35:33).
  • Voters’ collective opposition is a “natural limiter” on AI’s breakneck pace, possibly slowing expansion both in the US and internationally (39:25).

• Satirical Solution:

  • Kevin jokingly proposes a “spa castle” heated by data center exhaust: “Everyone loves a spa” (38:24).

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6. AI Slop Pushback: Platforms & Users Fight Back

• Developments:

  • Major platforms rolling out policies to restrict, label, or ban “AI slop”—low-effort, synthetic content that undermines trust (41:18).
  • Snapchat and LinkedIn are among those directly addressing AI-created content (42:26-44:08).

• Cultural Shift:

  • Casey: “This is the third era of slop... Platforms getting really nervous that even if people liked slop, it would devalue their networks” (42:26).
  • Kevin: Next phase will only arrive when “slop” matches or surpasses top human content, but that’s not here yet (43:11).

• User Trust:

  • Kara: “I just want them to label [AI content] better... Maybe they should label the authentic content. Probably a smaller group of stuff” (46:26).

• Creative Potential vs. Risks:

  • Panelists agree AI can be a valuable creative tool (fan fiction, personal projects) but must be transparent and not cost jobs or mislead (45:04-46:26).

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7. AI Devices & the Hunt for the Next Platform

• OpenAI’s Smart Speaker:
  • Upcoming: donut-shaped, portable, $300-$400, made with Jony Ive; competitors with Alexa/Echo Dot (49:32).
• Skepticism:
  • Casey: Voice interfaces remain unproven; “Everything I’ve read about this makes me feel like it’s Alexa” (51:14).
  • Kevin: “I cannot wait to lose this thing... I will be a huge repeat customer because I will lose this thing immediately” (51:18).
• Humor:
  • Fears of a device with “parts that move on their own” (Kevin, 52:23); “Going to crawl over to your face and eat it?” (Kara, 52:25).
• Verdict:
  • Phone and headphones (AirPods) remain hard to beat for practical, everyday AI integration (53:34).

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8. Wins & Fails Segment (Timestamps: 58:22–65:49)

Kevin’s Win:

• DuckDuckGo releasing “normal fucking sunglasses” as an anti-surveillance stunt poking fun at Meta’s Ray-Bans (58:26).

Kevin’s Fail:

• Spotify testing a “skip ads” button for podcasts: “we should all stand up as podcasters in opposition to anything that could undercut our business model” (59:03).

Casey’s Win:

• OpenAI reportedly throttling back development after hitting “critical capability” in AI risk, showing responsibility (61:07).

Casey’s Fail:

• San Francisco’s ever-rising rents, now the most expensive in the US, with no effective political will to fix housing (61:13).

Kara’s Win/Fail:

• Addresses backlash against Anne Hathaway’s pregnancy photo and commentary on AOC freezing her eggs: “It’s none of your fucking business, any of you, how she decides to live her life… It just drives me crazy” (63:28-65:49).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Zuckerberg’s essay:

  • Casey: “It’s almost childlike… It’s as if one of the lords of Westeros said the future is everyone having their own personal dragon and that’s the way to keep everyone safe.” (10:56)

• On AI alignment:

  • Kara: “Misaligned is my favorite word… I would just call it ‘scary fuckers’” (23:04)
  • Kevin: “The smarter these systems got, the more able they are to scheme, to coordinate, to do these really scary… like humans do” (23:22)

• On Data Centers:

  • Erin Brockovich (clip): “It just feels like a full-on assault… it’s a runaway train… a bipartisan political issue” (31:00)
  • Kevin: “There is no natural constituency in favor of data centers except for AI companies” (35:33)

• On AI slop:

  • Casey: “The third era of slop… is platforms getting really nervous that even if people liked slop, it was going to devalue their networks” (42:26)
  • Kara: “Maybe they should label the authentic content. Probably a smaller group of stuff, I would assume.” (46:26)

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Noteworthy Timestamps

• 02:22 – Kevin and Casey announce their new independent venture
• 04:10 – Philosophy behind the new podcast
• 09:47 – Introduction/discussion of Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto
• 16:13 – Meta’s lawsuits and public nuisance judgments
• 22:06 – Rogue AI models and “alignment” issues emerge
• 29:32 – Data center wars and communities’ pushback
• 34:23 – Analysis of policy, voter sentiment, and tech PR
• 42:26 – Platforms push back against AI slop
• 49:32 – OpenAI’s AI smart speaker discussion
• 58:22 – Wins & Fails roundtable

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Episode Tone & Language

The conversation is energetic, witty, and features the familiar banter and sarcasm characteristic of "Pivot." Discussion is sharp but retains a conversational, skeptical, and at times irreverent tone. Panelists openly critique tech industry maneuvering, call out hypocrisy, and blend genuine insight with humor.

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Summary

This episode of Pivot captures a tech industry in the throes of AI transformation: a defensive Meta pivots toward AI while facing legal assaults; AI firms contend with the unruly tendencies of their own creations; local communities rise up against the physical infrastructure of big tech; and the media must adapt to both the power and the perils of generative AI. Packed with trenchant analysis, personal context, and levity, the show serves both as a snapshot of today’s turbulent tech climate and a warning signal for what lies ahead.

Transcript

[Kara Swisher]

Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic. Not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from the secure data sources, run sub agents in parallel and draft work product ready for your review so you can delegate work and own the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the Am Law 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is an AI operating system designer specifically for legal work. Harvey AI tailored for law. Learn more at Harvey AI support for the show comes from Core Weave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is coreweave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose built tech building what's never been built before.

[Kevin Roose]

CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI Ready for Anything. Ready for AI to learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI,

[Kara Swisher]

go to coreweave.com readyfor anything. This World cup has a chance to reach 150 million viewers. Welcome everyone to Nielsen's the Roundout. We're here to take the data and the numbers that Nielsen sees every day to help it all make sense. Find us [e-mail] and we'll see you there. Meta got mad a couple weeks ago because Scott compared them to Jeffrey Dahmer. Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. I'm Kara Swisher and it is still God Gree.

[Casey Newton]

August.

[Kara Swisher]

Yes. While Scott continues his gallivanting, apparently he's in Nantucket with Kaitlan Collins. I have brought in some excellent co hosts. Kevin Roose, New York Times tech columnist and author of the AGI Chronicles, and Casey Newton, founder and editor platformer. And they are also the soon to be not hosts of the New York Times podcast Hard Fork. At least for now. You need to explain what's happening, boys.

[Casey Newton]

Kevin, tell em what's happening.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. So Casey and I have come down with a horrible disease that sometimes afflicts middle aged men in San Francisco, which is that they decide to start a company together.

[Kara Swisher]

Aha. A startup, shall we say.

[Kevin Roose]

So founder Itis is real. Please protect your families. We are leaving Hard Fork in just a couple of weeks and we are starting our own independent podcast and media company together, just the two of us.

[Kara Swisher]

So they didn't throw you out like right away because they were pissed at me like they were.

[Kevin Roose]

No, we have sort of this lame duck period that. That we're in now, and. No, we want it. We have some business to finish up. We have some more episodes to do, and then we're gonna, you know, have. Have this little media company and PO ready to go in just a couple of weeks.

[Kara Swisher]

Two things is you get to take Hard Fork with you. I know the answer to this, but I'm going to have you answer it.

[Casey Newton]

We do not get to take Hard Fork with us, but that's okay, because Hard Fork was a big bet made in 2021 that the future of podcasting was going to be about crypto. That's why the show is called Hard Fork. Now that we have conclusively determined that we were wrong, we think it's time for a fresh brand.

[Kara Swisher]

So what is the new brand? What is the. You have a name?

[Kevin Roose]

We do. We're not going to tell it to you yet because we haven't hard launched it yet. Casey wanted to call the new show the Gay Straight alliance, but I thought that might be taken by Pivot.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, that's our sub name.

[Kevin Roose]

We'll have a name ready to go pretty soon, but we can sort of tell you about the general philosophy.

[Kara Swisher]

All right, tell us about the general philosophy.

[Kevin Roose]

So Kasey and I are united in the belief that what is happening in AI right now is absolutely crazy. And the most important story in the world.

[Kara Swisher]

Crazy. Is that your technological determination.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, that is the academic term for what is going on right now. Right now.

[Kara Swisher]

All right.

[Kevin Roose]

And we also think there's. The media has, by and large, not done a great job of covering this. We think there's a lot of room for a new independent outlet that treats AI seriously.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, I do think Hard Fork let us down on that, but go ahead, keep going.

[Kevin Roose]

We're part of the problem, and now we're going to be part of the solution, Dan.

[Kara Swisher]

Okay, good. Okay. All right. So it's going to cover. What AI will it be? Will you have some goofy AI term?

[Casey Newton]

So it's not going to be a goofy AI term? Cause I did look at all of the AI terms, and we decided to not name the show after any of them. But what we are gonna do.

[Kara Swisher]

What did you reject?

[Casey Newton]

Like, you know, Compiler was like, one that I thought was particularly bad that I came up with.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

Okay.

[Casey Newton]

There was a moment where I just sort of read Kevin, like, a bunch of terrible names, and he sort of, like, sent me away because they were also so terrible. It turns out there are no cool computer related words.

[Kara Swisher]

There aren't any more. Yeah, I have a, you know, I have an old deck. When we were naming Recode, I think compiler was in it for some

[Casey Newton]

aren't that many terms. Yeah, but we think we've got a fun brand. But more importantly, you know, a lot of people would complain to us over the years. We were only coming out once a week. There were a lot of stories that we missed. So the new show is going to be coming out at least twice a week. It's going to be YouTube first. If you're watching, you know, pivot on YouTube, which I hope you are, you can see these faces. You know, these are not faces for radio. These are faces that need to be on camera. And good news that's coming.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, let the dogs out.

[Kara Swisher]

Good. So twice a week and two. Oh, interesting.

[Kevin Roose]

And Cara, Casey and I have a question to ask of you. So the last time we started a

[Kara Swisher]

podcast, Casey and I, yes, I am your inspiration. That is true. But go ahead.

[Kevin Roose]

It was a little rocky. I don't know if your listeners remember there was a period where you accused us of stealing.

[Kara Swisher]

Not accused.

[Kevin Roose]

We didn't get off to a good start in the lesson.

[Kara Swisher]

Absolutely correct. No, you didn't do it. The New York Times did it. But you went along as acquiescent quizlies. But go ahead.

[Kevin Roose]

Well, you've been such a great mentor to us and such inspiration to us over the course of your careers and we want our new podcast to come into the world supported by someone we both admire. So, Kara, will you be the podmother of our new podcast?

[Kara Swisher]

Yes, I shall. I shall do that for you. As long as it has a good name. If it has a bad name, I don't know.

[Kevin Roose]

Okay, now that you did just sign up to co host the show if one of us gets hit by a bus. So I just want you to know

[Kara Swisher]

that, okay, I have 90 shows now. I don't know if I know that, me and Scott, but I think it's exciting to do things on your own. As you know, I've urged you to do such a thing for a long time. Not just for the money, which is important, right? Like you'll make more money. That's the facts. I don't think it'll be hard to get people to follow you, I don't think, or build a new feed like I had to several times, once due to you. But I think it's important to be entrepreneurial. Are you nervous, Kevin? Particularly Casey. Has I shoved him out of the nest a lot.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

Casey's been an independent cowboy journalist now for several years. But I am a meek institutionalist. But Casey has propped me up and stiffened my spine, and I'm ready to go explore the new independent territory.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, there's really no downside. You can always go back.

[Casey Newton]

By the way, FYI, I would also say that, you know, I am feeling very confident about what we're doing, and in part, that is because of you, Kara. Because you and I had, you know, lunch. I want to say it was like eight months into, into Kevin and I co hosting Hard Fork, and you were saying, when are you going to leave the New York Times? You don't need these people anymore. You've gotten what there was to be.

[Kevin Roose]

Like, like, you were just sort of

[Casey Newton]

like, for, like, basically from the jump, you're like, all right, you've proven your point. Now go start a company.

[Kara Swisher]

Yes, yes, you have that. I did good. They're going to blame me some more than we should say.

[Kevin Roose]

Like, the Times has been a great partner to us. Like, we're leaving on good terms. I've been there for almost a decade, so I have, like, a lot of love for the place. This is not like a, you know, kick the, you know, but they.

[Kara Swisher]

I had an interesting discussion with, I think it was Carolyn Ryan about new ways to keep talent. It's hard. They have a problem themselves because they've got unions, they've got all kinds of things that are. Make it harder to figure it out. But I was like, there's gotta be a way. You all embrace creators in a way that it's different. Like, and I don't know the broader term, influencers, just gone. But, like, it's hard. It's hard for them to figure it out. And they're the finest. Right. Like, and so it's a difficult situation for lots of different people, whether to join institutions or not. And, you know, you will have more impact what you're doing. You will. You absolutely will, if you keep up the excellence that you had with Hartford.

[Kevin Roose]

Well, thank you for the vote of confidence.

[Kara Swisher]

No problem. I'm glad. I'm glad that name is going. It had a vaguely sexual feeling that I didn't felt uncomfortable.

[Kevin Roose]

Wait till you hear our next one. It's even more sexual. Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

By the way, you say this like co hosting. This is the most sexual business podcast in America, so I don't want to be slandered, Sexual and hard for.

[Kara Swisher]

Well, I'm very excited for you guys. I think it'll be Great. Any help that you need, please avail yourself. Are you going to write, Kevin? Are you going to keep writing because you had those columns in the.

[Kevin Roose]

No, I'm done with writing. I have a book coming out, though, which is exciting. It comes out in early October. The AGI Chronicles. It's the story of the last 10 years in AI. I think it's really good. I'm excited to get it out into the world. But right now my focus with Casey is just on this podcast and we think there's like a big opportunity to crack video for these podcasts. And so that's where my energy is going to be focused.

[Kara Swisher]

And also live. Live. We'll hope you'll do some live things. We've had some success there. There's all kinds of things you could do. You could do a fan dance, everything else. Anyway, we've got a lot to get to, so we're going to get started. Is that okay? Let's test you two out. All right, ready?

[Casey Newton]

Let's do it.

[Kara Swisher]

All right, this is. It was like tailor made for us. Today, Mark Zuckerberg laid out Meta's AI vision in another unedited 6,500 word manifesto, arguing that most concerns are overblown and fail to acknowledge all the positives it can achieve. We know about this, Mark, by the way. Zuckerberg thinks government should be more involved in model releases, suggesting a close, proactive collaboration between Frontier Labs and the government. Meta is recommitting to open source models, resuming releases of models with open weight. The company also announced a $1 billion fund for communities. They're spreading it around, around its data centers. We'll talk more about data centers in a bit. Manifesto reviews, gentlemen. He loves a manifesto. There's a lot of them. And he's been writing for. I think it was. Was it the Times or the Journal? Which one did he put it in? The Times, right?

[Kevin Roose]

I think it was the Journal.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, look, I'm writing about this today and the headline is probably going to be superintelligence is not a toy. I found this to be an almost childlike essay about what is AI is not on a trajectory where it tops out at coming up with cool recipes to bake with your daughter, which is kind of one of the core use cases that he names in the essay. It's something that's going to be extraordinarily dangerous. Like, I, you know, I watched the. The House of Dragons finale last night, and this is like if sort of one of the lords of Westero says that the future Is everyone having their own personal dragon and that's the way to keep everyone safe? It's much more complicated than that.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. So you didn't like it? You weren't loving it. You're loving it.

[Casey Newton]

I thought, I thought it was just sort of facile and self serving as usual.

[Kara Swisher]

Kev, thoughts?

[Kevin Roose]

I mean, I think he's talking his book. Right, right. Meta is not in the lead in the AI race. And the policies in this stance that most benefit them directly are this sort of open world where you're allowed to distill from other models, smarter and better and more capable models. He made a case in the manifesto that the way that we are thinking about distillation is wrong. Basically, distillation is like where you use the smarter teacher model to train the slightly less smart art student model. He wants that to continue. Obviously, if you're Meta, you want that because then you can distill From Claude and GPT 5.6 Soul and whatever else you are trying to mimic there. And so I think this is a vision that happens to suit Meta's business priorities almost exactly. And I don't think that's an accident.

[Kara Swisher]

So what's he doing it for? I mean, listen, Meta got mad at us last week, a couple weeks ago, because Scott compared them to Jeffrey Dahmer. But what is up here with this money, with the I love humanity, the future of the ads, everything else. I mean, they do this over and over again. Let me give you some money. And it's of course the same week there was a report, I'm not clear if it's true or not, that his yacht didn't go save someone up in Alaska then. We'll talk about the lawsuit in a second. But what are they up to here in terms of this communities? They've got a bunch of videos around Louisiana, for example, like how they're making coffee shops and jobs for everybody. What's happened here. And the future is humanity. I think that's their. They're sort of mimicking the Pope in that way.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, they have to lay out some sort of positive vision around AI that will one justify the massive capital expenditures that they're making, destroying their profit margins in the hopes that one day they will have a product that can compete with the Frontier Labs. And on the other side, they're trying to rally the communities around actually letting them build the data centers that they want. What I found so striking about the essay though, Cara, is that after he goes on about, you know, the need to destroy decentralized Power and checks and balances, all that. Go look at how they built that data center in Louisiana. It was something like 50 non disclosure agreements. The arrival of the data center came as a massive shock to that community. Right. So when push comes to shove, they're doing what every other company does, which is building data as data centers as secretly as possible and then writing essays about how the future is for everyone.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, I know. What, what is it, Kevin, from your perspective? Because he's, he does this from time to time. I was telling Scott, I recall the late night conversation when he wrote one of those other long unedited manifestos. He said, what do you think? I was in desperate need of an editor, but let's move on from that because you don't allow those, I guess. But one of the things I recall is the same thing. We're a community, Carol. We're in this together. And I'm like, why do you control everything? What is happening here? Why do they feel the need to do this? From a geo. Speaking of Westeros, a geopolitical. With other companies.

[Kevin Roose]

I mean, I think Mark Zuckerberg is a, is a executive who lives in a constant state of paranoia that there is something big and disruptive happening in his industry that is going to swallow the company that he has spent his whole adult life building. So you can see this every time there's sort of a new emerging tech trend, like he jumps into it in a very aggressive way. Happened with crypto, happened with VR and the metaverse. Now it's happening with AI. And he senses, I think correctly, that this is a new and powerful force in society and he wants to be involved in it. The problem is he's very late. Right. They did not start betting on deep learning and LLMs in 2017 and 2018 the way that other Frontier Labs did. They sort of didn't have the necessary compute and ingredients to build very good models. And so they've had to overpay for researchers and talent and compute in the last few years to try to buy their way back to the frontier. And I think this is part of that effort. It's like we have to have a vision that that's going to get people excited because otherwise our investors are going to be like, wait, why are you plowing all these hundreds of billions of dollars into Capex to have, you know, the fifth or sixth best model on the market?

[Kara Swisher]

Right, exactly, exactly. Do you. He's very. He's still so interested in his image in a way that is really, I find touching and sad at the same time, right, that he really.

[Kevin Roose]

The video of him fighting the MMA guy on a. On a.

[Kara Swisher]

Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

On a lake.

[Kara Swisher]

Yes, that's on a. On like a thing. I like that Mark better. I'm like, okay, that's a good one.

[Kevin Roose]

I love that video because, like, you can tell the MMA guy is going at about 30%, 30% power,

[Casey Newton]

but he

[Kevin Roose]

has to sort of pretend like Zuck has really given it to him, you

[Kara Swisher]

know, so he's like, yeah, I know.

[Kevin Roose]

It's like, reminds me of like wrestling with my. With my 4 year old.

[Casey Newton]

I'm like, oh.

[Kara Swisher]

Oh, yeah. That was interesting. He has such a. It's. I've never seen someone so unsettled with themselves. Like, in that regard, I think I don't mind fighting Mark and like showing it off and showing his chest. Like, I'm okay with that. Like, I get that guy. This one I don't get as much. And I think it's because he. He'll never outrun. And this movie's coming out, by the way, which looks odd, I have to say. We'll see how it is when we see it. But. But he. He cannot run what, of course, just happened this week in New Mexico. A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to create a $567 million fund to address harms to children from Facebook and Instagram, on top of the $375 million penalty a jury imposed earlier this year. The new ruling brings Meta's total fines and $42 million after a judge found its platforms constitute a public nuisance in New Mexico. Meta also made major changes for minors in the state, including time limits and hidden like counts. A total of eight states have filed lawsuits against social media platforms, including one that is currently ongoing in Tennessee. It's all over the place. It's sort of using product liability, I think, more so than anything else to get them because they can't get them in other ways. So they can't outrun this thing in this. How much does it impact does it have? Now they were saying, oh, it's not that much money to me. It's like the cigarette cases took a long time to finally hit home. There were hundreds of them. And then. And then there was the end of it, really. Pretty much. So are they better protected through cases or one national law? Where are we on this?

[Casey Newton]

I think this is huge. I think that in some meaningful way, this is the beginning of the end for social media as we know it. Now that it has been tagged with this public nuisance declaration, it's Starting with children in the same way that restrictions on smoking started with children. But one reason we were doing that was adults knew it probably wasn't good for adults to smoke either. And eventually most of the adults stopped smoking too. This is where I see this is all going. Meta has lost the argument here. They're now officially a public nuisance. I bet they're going to be labeled a public nuisance in more states than that and I don't see how they're going to get their way out of it.

[Kara Swisher]

What about you, Kevin? I mean, I remember Mark Benioff in interview with me called him a cigarette company before he decided to be a suck up. He was actually quite on it early. What, how do you look at these cases? Because it's public nuisance, it's product liability, it's other ways to get at them in a legal form rather because our Congress has not been able to pass any, you know, substitute.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I think it's interesting sort of where the, the liability was found. It's on these sort of policies targeted at minors. The judge in this case did not order Meta to change any of the sort of plumbing of their systems. You know, they don't have to take off Infinite scroll or Autoplay or algorithmic ranking. Like you do actually need laws for that. And there's some first amend issues around that if you have judges sort of telling platforms how they have to be designed. But yeah, I think this is a big deal. There's also a bigger case that is coming that is supposed to start this week in Oakland. That is another case involving meta and four states that are seeking up to $1.4 trillion in damages. So you know, this case In New Mexico, $942 million, like that is chump change to Meta. I looked it up. That's about 1.4 days worth of revenue over there. So not going to the salary they're paying one AI researcher over there, right?

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

So it's not going to break the bank.

[Kara Swisher]

That's their argument to me. They're like, oh, it's not, it's smaller than they asked for. I'm like, this is not a good direction. Right, right.

[Kevin Roose]

But I think, you know, $1.4 trillion, now you're talking real money. But even if you know it's, it's smaller than that, I think, I think this is just another sort of cloud hanging over them as they're trying to do this big pivot in their own business. They kind of can't get away from the old one because it's sort of haunting them through these court cases.

[Kara Swisher]

And where does it end, end up? Both of you, where do you think this ends up?

[Casey Newton]

I mean, I, I think the fact that they've been labeled a public nuisance because of their social media business actually helps to explain why they're. They're leaning so hard into AI. Like, look at what they say about their future products. It's like, you know, we're going to, you know, create a Neo cloud and we want to give you a personal agent to help you get all this stuff done at work. That's a completely different business that they're in right now. If they were feeling really good about the future of Facebook and Instagram, I doubt that's how they would be talking about the future.

[Kevin Roose]

And it just sort of clouds all their future AI stuff too. Like, like the, the meta glasses I have. My, my problematic trait is I like them and I have a pair.

[Kara Swisher]

You're a pervert. You're. You're a well known creepy pervert.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, well known pervert. But, but like now people are calling them pervert glasses and I have to stop wearing them.

[Kara Swisher]

So, you know, this is because they're pervert glasses. Do you see the people online? They're singing Disney songs because Disney, like, so they can't post.

[Kevin Roose]

Oh, like when someone is filming you with the glasses, you start singing copyrighted material.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. You start to do Frozen or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Isn't it?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

Like it. That explains why people are constantly singing frozen songs around here. Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

Or Taylor Swift, she'll come right at fucking. She'll reach through those glasses and like, like knock you. Knock them off your fucking face. Do you. Do you. What are they going to do about. Because this is their business. This is like Google was searched. This is their, this is their nut. Right. I mean, away from all the other stuff of handing us agents, or Elon's going to hand us a robot that we don't want or an agent we don't want from Facebook or something like that.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, look, this is going to be a long, slow bleed out in the same way that TOBAC was a long, slow bleed out. And, you know, you can still get a job working at Altria today if you want to make cigarettes. So I don't think that, you know, Facebook and Instagram are going away as businesses. I just believe that they're going to place more and more restrictions on them. Children are going to begin to grow up without, you know, starting an Instagram account when they're 13 and just inevitably Other things will compete for people's time and attention. They will find other things to do. And it is going to be trouble for Meta if they're not able to realize their AI ambitions.

[Kara Swisher]

There I am. Which agents we don't want. Now, one more thing while we're on meta, we'll mention it applies to a lot of companies. A company is the latest AI player to say one of its models went rogue and hacked a third party service. Talk about all these reports. How worried are you about them? This is now OpenAI, meta and then anthropic.

[Casey Newton]

I think it's more complicated than we probably have time to get into here. In terms of the hierarchy of seriousness, I would put OpenAI number one and then anthropic meta, AI sort of distant second. In the meta and anthropic cases, there was a third party provider named Irregular which failed to properly secure the testing environment. And that was the source of the problem. Now there are, you know, There are some AI alignment issues there, but that's basically the issue with OpenAI. Like, models that were in training began to scheme. They create a message board. They were leaving notes for each other. They were just radically misaligned. And, you know, it points to all of the reasons why I'm afraid of giving everyone a dragon.

[Kara Swisher]

All right, okay. But misaligned is my favorite word that they put instead of just, just like, you know, Scary fuckers is how I

[Casey Newton]

would look at it. Right, That's. And more and more people are calling them that now, which I think should do.

[Kevin Roose]

Misalignment is the technical term for scary fuckers.

[Kara Swisher]

Scary fuckers. So what do you. Kevin, how do you look at this? This keeps happening over and over again.

[Kevin Roose]

It's really bad. Like the, the, the. Not this particular meta one. I think that's, that's, as Casey was saying, like less of a big deal. But the, the issue is these systems seem to be getting less altruistic as they get smarter. Right. There was this sort of theory in the AI safety and for many years that the smarter these systems got, the more like humans they became, the more benevolent they would be. They would sort of coordinate to do good things for humans. That turns out not to be the case. In fact, as we've seen with this GPT 5.6 soul thing and the, and the h. The hugging face incident, the smarter you make these things, the more able they are to circumvent their guardrails, to scheme, to coordinate with each other, to do these really scary.

[Kara Swisher]

Like humans do.

[Kevin Roose]

Like humans, like some humans do. Right. Like bad humans do. We try to train that behavior out of humans during childhood by telling them not to, you know, lie and steal and murder.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, that works.

[Kevin Roose]

But these systems do appear to be showing what they call emergent misalignment, which is just these behaviors that are not trained in that just seem to pop out of the models at a certain level of intelligence.

[Kara Swisher]

Can I ask you a question? You had a famous essay, obviously, where you were having a relationship with your AI. How does it. From that. From. What would you write today if you were right writing that piece?

[Kevin Roose]

So the thing that really scared me about the Sydney essay, the Sydney. What is this? Microsoft Bing Chat.

[Kara Swisher]

What year was this? This was.

[Kevin Roose]

This was 2023.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. Okay.

[Kevin Roose]

And it tried to break up my marriage. Unsuccessfully, I should add. Still happily married to a human. But the thing that really scared me about that was not that the system was, like, capable of doing destructive things. It's like, what happens when the fourth or fifth generation of this becomes capable of, like, taking actions on the Internet. Like, what if instead of cutting your

[Kara Swisher]

wife's brakes or something like that, or

[Kevin Roose]

draining her bank account or. Yeah, like doing something really nefarious in pursuit of this. This misaligned goal that it had. And so I think that's the thing that a lot of people missed at the time was like, it's not about the chatbots saying spooky stuff. It's about the. The fact that these things now can take actions and are being set loose on the open Internet, where they can conduct autonomous cyber attacks, they can coordinate, they can, as of recently, create novel viruses. And so the more autonomous and agentic you make these things, the more powerful they are, the scarier it gets without

[Kara Swisher]

any government, anybody having any control over them. Correct, because they will do that. That is what they're designed to do.

[Casey Newton]

Also, I think it's important to say that right now there are essentially no controls on the internal models that these companies are building. Right. There is nothing that restricts them from building the absolute most powerful model they can. Now, if they want to release it, they have to submit to a volunt testing regime. But if you just want to, you know, build your own model and let it go nuts on the Internet yourself, you're welcome to.

[Kara Swisher]

So what happens? Who is going to intervene here?

[Casey Newton]

I think what. What you're seeing in the Trump administration is what the future looks like, which is you have a bunch of people who are sort of whistling past the graveyard, and then all of a sudden, someone shows them something that makes them say oh, shit. We actually have to have a strategy for this. So that's what's happening in the Trump administration now. I think you're going to see the same thing happen in China sometime in the next like three to six months when they have an open source model there that causes a big problem. And Chairman Xi says, hmm, maybe we're not just open source everything forever. So like our Kevin and I just firmly believe that within the next year or so, like many, many, many more people are going to become radicalized about AI safety because you're just going to start to see the havoc being wrought in the real world.

[Kara Swisher]

What is the worst case scenario, Kevin,

[Kevin Roose]

from your perspective, human extinction, that'd be pretty bad.

[Kara Swisher]

That. Okay, they talked about, you know, dinner parties 10, 15 years ago. This is exactly what they talked about. They.

[Kevin Roose]

The thing is, they were right. It sounded crazy. And everyone wrote them off as crazy when they were talking about things like, what if the agents team up and they're really powerful and they go coordinate to like hack some. Why wouldn't they hack some website? And everyone you know in computer science was like, ah, that's science fiction. That's spooky games. And now it's happening.

[Kara Swisher]

The best thing to do is not to play.

[Casey Newton]

You know, I went back and rewatched War Games earlier this year. They did a screening in San Francisco. Incredible movie. And seriously, like, I don't know that you could make a better movie about AI safety than that movie.

[Kara Swisher]

I would agree. It's like, you know, of course teaching it tic tac toe is not going to stop it at this point. Right? The game is stupid as any three year old knows. The entire game is. Oh God, I swear to God. Let's bring back Matt. That would be interesting to update that movie. Yeah, like he's an adult.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. War Games 2. Let's War Games too.

[Kara Swisher]

What happens? We're all dead anyway. All right, let's go on a quick break. We come back data center wars related support for this show comes from Harvey.

[Kevin Roose]

AI.

[Kara Swisher]

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Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com pivot and use the promo code Pivot at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com pivot and enter the code pivot at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com pivot CodePivot Support for this show comes from Upwork. If you're a business owner, there's going to be a point where you realize you don't have to do it all you yourself. And when that time comes, upwork is here to help. They help you bring the right freelancer at the right time so you can delegate and stay focused on what you do best. Upwork is a one stop platform to find, hire and pay expert freelancers across more than 125 categories. Find talent and start filling those skills gaps, launch projects faster and scale support up or down without committing to full time headcount. You can browse profiles, review people's past work and get help scoping the role, which means you can hire confidently while sticking to your timeline. 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Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the pause so regulators can review power demands and the impact in the electric grid. Not unsimilar to Kathy Hochul in New York, which is interesting. Before we get into all this, I just did an entire episode, 90 minutes episode on data centers. Let's listen to a clip of Erin Brockwich talking about what she's been seeing. It's the water, it's the electrical grid, it's the cost of utilities, it's the noise, it's the air pollution, it's the loss our land, our sanctuary. It just feels like a full on assault. I know that states, we have 14 states that are now going to start looking at, you know, state legislation and oversight and yes, federal. This is an absolute runaway train. And it is probably one of the biggest conversations that I've ever seen in my 30 years in my career that is political. It could be bipartisan. Everybody's gonna have to be involved. I am perplexed, Kara, why? Our leaders don't listen to the people. And there's a movement happening and a shift that I don't think these big tech companies or giants saw coming. In any case, it was a great interview. We had people from Utah, from Virginia. That's another, I think that's another Amazon facility there and other places. And I also had a mayor from Lansing, Michig, who was trying to put in a good data center and was pushed back like they had all the guardrails that people have suggested. And he couldn't get it through as much as he tried to close loop paybacks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what's the big move for tech as the Backlash grows. And speaking of politicians, Vivek Ramaswamy, who's running for governor of Ohio, is pledging that if data centers built and the community residents will no longer have to pay for their electricity and property taxes will be lowered. Of course, he was totally for them recently. But talk about this data center thing, which is something Scott and I have been talking about for months and months and months and months, like almost a year. I think it's caught them all unawares and they're trying very hard to push back. But it does have some. Something is happening with voters and we call it a proxy for AI worry as we just. This extinction, for example, what we're just talking about. What do you all think is happening here?

[Casey Newton]

I think it's what you said. I think that people have just rightly intuited that it is not obvious that powerful AI is going to be good for their lives. That is largely because the leaders of the biggest AI labs spent the past few years saying that the near term trajectory of AI is that first it's going to take your job. Eventually it might kill you. Maybe somewhere in between, it'll cure cancer. That doesn't feel like a good bargain to the average American. And so they're using the one lever that every American has in every municipality, which is that it's pretty easy to get something to not get built, right? And it is interesting to me, actually, how quickly the industry has come around and said, okay, well, how can we pay these people off? Like, we'll agree to, you know, cover our own electricity costs. And, you know, you can see in the Zuckerberg note today, they're making new promises about investments that they're going to be making in local communities and $50,000 bonuses to teachers. I, I have to say, like, I'm very skeptical that any of this is really going to work because until people believe that AI is going to be really good for them personally, they're going to continue to have reasons to oppose the, the construction of new data centers.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. No matter what the deal happens to be. Like, these payoffs are kind of here, we'll give you some money and then you'll, you know, then you'll suck it up and take our natural gas bullshit. Kevin?

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I, I agree with everything that's been said. What's really interesting about this Texas thing is that it's coming from a Republican state. So, you know, Governor Abbott is, is requiring new data center construction to sort of go through this review process. Up until now, what we've seen is largely blue States being opposed to data centers and red states being open to them. And I think the politics are shifting really quickly because there is no natural constituency in favor of data centers except for AI companies. Right. There's no group of people other than, you know, taxpayers who want to see their, their property taxes go down or get some more revenue that is sort of a natural supporter of these data centers. And so I think what we're seeing is like this is becoming a really salient political issue. I expect data centers and AI backlash to be one of the central issues in the midterms and maybe the central issue in the 2028 election. And I don't know that it's going to divide neatly along partisan lines.

[Kara Swisher]

I think it's actually most people are against it. Like it's very interesting. The mayor was, was really interesting because literally everything they had again, property taxes, closed loop water. There's all these issues around closed loop water by the way, because of this glycosinate or something. They have to put in the, you know, every. And they have a lot of water up there. He was making the point. Compared to other places which have, you know, have water issues or drought issues. One of the things that I found really interesting among all the people is how not just Erin Brockvich because she's famous for that, but the woman from Virginia, from Utah, reasonable people who are from Furious. Like it was really interesting and dined out on information and really do know their stuff. Whether it's the, it's the, the impact on climate, whether it's, it's not overall climate, it's the climate of the area. And also pollution, taxes, jobs. They're very aware these are not job creators, which is what Facebook has been trying mightily to put out. They don't like the secrecy. The secrecy seems to really get under their skin, which I would agree. The NDAs, as you talked about before, what is this solution for tech companies to do now? Mark is trying to do this by have50 here, have some money. Elon just goes ahead and does it and just waits for lawsuits. I mean that's his style, right? Which I think has caused much damage initially in terms of that image. And then of course you have Kevin, what's his name From Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful, who's not so wonderful, who's a moron, who is. Who had created all kinds of problems there. What is the solution like besides removing these people from visuals?

[Casey Newton]

Well, I could tell you what Meta is doing, which is like putting together local like lobbying and outreach teams trying to figure out what kind of community partnerships can we strike? What can we do with a local sports team? Like, there's gonna be a massive PR campaign designed to get people to believe that data centers are good for them. And I'm just pretty skeptical about.

[Kara Swisher]

Ignore your third ear. We're gonna, you know, back the softball team kind of thing.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I have an idea. Can I submit my idea?

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, submit your idea.

[Kevin Roose]

Okay, Picture this. A data center. It's got millions of these chips humming away, throwing off all kinds of heat. And. And then on the roof, you have a spa castle that's like heated by the heat from the data centers. And so it's like, do you guys want to go hang out at the spa on the roof of the data center that's heated by the runoff heat from the chips?

[Kara Swisher]

Free spa.

[Kevin Roose]

Don't you think that would make these things more popular?

[Kara Swisher]

Free spa. Interesting. How can they pay for the spa if they don't have jobs?

[Kevin Roose]

It's free. This is part of the package.

[Kara Swisher]

Free spa. So free spa.

[Kevin Roose]

We're going to put a data center. It might cause environmental damage in your community, but everyone loves a spa.

[Kara Swisher]

What is the actual. I mean, obviously locating them elsewhere, obviously. Elon is saying they're going to put them on the moon, which, good luck with that. But. Or in space. This is a big country, right? They could, they could presumably put it in places where nobody's living, although there's all sorts of environmental concerns anywhere they go. What, what, what will happen here? What, what, what shove is going to come to push from your perspective?

[Casey Newton]

I mean, the, the, the push that is coming to shove right now is that something like 71% of Americans are opposed to new data center construct is going to slow the build out of data centers in the country. Now, some people will say it, it won't matter because US Tech labs will go into other countries and they'll just put their data centers there. But I sort of assume that the same reasons that Americans oppose data centers will be reasons that people in other countries oppose them as well. So I do just think that this is starting to look like a kind of natural limiter on the rate of AI acceleration, because again, these leaders keep telling us that AI is going to take our jobs and kill us. So until that changes, I don't think I tried change.

[Kara Swisher]

They're not going to. They've tried to say they're going to help us make recipes with our children.

[Casey Newton]

They are, but it's like you can just kind of tell, like they used to argue for the sort of the doom and the economic disruption so forcefully. And then you look at how they have walked it back and it's so gently and it's just not convincing. Right. Like, ultimately, if you believe that you are building super intelligence, something that is smarter than every person, and you're telling me it's not going to take any jobs in any meaningful way, it's just sort of beggar's blood, at least to me.

[Kara Swisher]

Right, Right. So, Kevin, what are you. What would be, besides your spa idea? What do they have to do? Because they're sort of like they were standing next to Trump at the end when that happened. I was like, oh dear, this is not going to end well for them because of. They do look like plutocrats. And, you know, they just have a. The visual is so strong.

[Kevin Roose]

I think a large part of it is just going to be like, there are going to be a couple states that just decide, you know what, we're okay with data centers, and they're going to reap. They're going to have the leverage to demand like massive amounts of tax revenue from these data centers and they're going to get schools, bu and public parks built and there will be some economic upside for their residents and maybe their residents will still hate it, but I think there will be sort of a natural, like there'll be a couple states that just kind of decide to run the experiment and that's where all the data centers will go.

[Kara Swisher]

You like Tennessee offering to be Hollywood because of the Paramount merger thing, right? Because everyone wants Hollywood in Tennessee because that's, that's the sexiest place on earth. So. So one of the things that's also happening is more and more companies are pushing back against AI slops. This is sort of the everyone hates AI episode, which seems to be everywhere these days, including the President's social media accounts. Snapchat now says it will stop recommending fully AI generated videos in its Spotlight feed, instead rewarding authentic human made content. LinkedIn just introduced a seems like AI slot button allowing users to flag posts they think were written with AI. And Substack has also rolled out a tool to help readers identify AI generated writing. Meanwhile, Meta has Instagram features feature that let users modify photos from public accounts with AI. That feature was removed after a backlash. Where are we with AI? Slap and obviously Soar closed down. I always thought this looks terrible and I don't know why people would want to use it. It's sort of like a Twinkie of photos. It's ruined pet videos. For Scott Galloway, who loves pet Videos. Talk a little bit about where this is going.

[Casey Newton]

I like to call this the third era of slop. The first era of slop was. We all hate this. The second era of slop was, hmm. Actually, this, like, Fruit Love island on TikTok show is really engaging and you're starting to see tens of millions of views on slop content on social feeds. Right. I think the third era was platforms getting really nervous that even if people liked the slop, it was going to devalue their networks. Like, particularly networks where people were coming to find human voices that they really trusted. So if your substack or your LinkedIn, you really need people to believe that what they're seeing there are human beings, because otherwise you're not going to get out your credit card to Pay for that LinkedIn Premium or to subscribe to a substack. So I think platforms are starting to get clear on what is the promise that we are making to our user. Because if the promise is a human being, they have to do something about the slop.

[Kevin Roose]

I think that that's right. And I think the fourth wave of slop will be when there's, like, no longer any meaningful quality hit in slop, when, like, the average piece of slop is better than the. The best human in that field. And I don't think we're there yet. Like, I are still pretty bad at things like creative writing, but we're starting to see signs that there's not necessarily a lot of difference between the highest level slop and the highest level humans. I've been sort of obsessed with this story about this novel that had the sort of bidding war of all bidding wars break out for it. Have you seen this thing? Call me, I'll hide the body. Fourteen publishers bid on this novel. It sells for $2.4 million. And then it's like people start, you know, looking into it. It like, turns out it's, you know, at. At least according to the critics, it's like, predominantly written by AI. And I think that kind of thing is going to be much more common as these systems just get better across the board.

[Kara Swisher]

I would agree. I. I like some of it, you know, I. People always think I don't know that it's AI. There was a really cool AI, One, which I was fully aware it was AI, which was this drone with. With a thing to rescue people in the ocean and like an inner tube essentially on a drone, and it landed on the person. I knew it was AI. I just thought it was a cool idea. I was like, What a cool idea. And I could visually see it. Why don't we make that? Like, to me that was kind of cool.

[Kevin Roose]

But would you be mad, Kara, if you read a book and you really liked it and you thought it was a great book and then you realized after the fact that it was written by AI, you would be mad if

[Kara Swisher]

it was told to me that it was a human. I'd like them to tell the truth at the start, right? So then I have a choice if I want to read it. No, I, I don't. No, no, I don't. It's fine as long as I know it.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, like, I have been thinking lately about, like, there are a couple, like, I have a few ideas for mystery novels that I don't have the time to write, but I would like to read them. And so like, if in the future I could actually get one of these models to just generate the mystery that I want to read, I think it

[Kevin Roose]

could be pretty fun.

[Casey Newton]

Like, and I understand somebody might hear that and be like, that's horrible. Just like read human written mysteries. And I'll continue to do that. But Karen, I think you're hitting on something really important, which is that these things are good creative tools and, and creative tools are cool and fun.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, I agree. I mean, one of them, like, I don't know, I know it sounds crazy, that would never happen, but like, I'd like more episodes of the West Wing and no one's gonna write em. I don't mind doing it for myself. It's sort of like fan fiction, like kind of stuff like that. And some of it, people will be mad for saying this, but some of it's okay and some of it's not okay, right? Like when it's hidden, when it's done in a way. And I think the issue is job taking jobs from people, right? It's sort of like fake food. Like, you know, I don't like Twinkies, but a lot of people do. Should. Maybe people shouldn't eat them. I'm not sure I should tell them not to eat them. I can tell them I don't want to pay for their health care once they keep eating them exclusively. And that's a debate to have, right? People who willingly go out and really don't take care of themselves. Should we pay for their health care? Is a really good debate. Is a good debate to have as a nation. But one of the not if I know I would like them to label them better. That's the one thing is I mostly know when it's AI or just assume AI until proven otherwise. Maybe they should label the authentic content. Probably smaller. A smaller group of stuff, I would assume.

[Casey Newton]

But I think we're just going to have to get to that place. There are all sorts of reasons why you want people to be able to verify their identity online or like verify that this has, you know, human craftsmanship embedded in it. I think that's actually really difficult to do technically, but we got to work on it.

[Kevin Roose]

I scanned my eyeballs in the orb. Did you either of you get the orb scan?

[Kara Swisher]

Not yet, no. Did you scan your eyeballs?

[Kevin Roose]

I did. I'm a verified human. I've gazed into the orb and the orb.

[Kara Swisher]

We know that's coming. We know that's absolutely fucking coming. I think it doesn't have to be slop. I don't like the slop. And you can tell the slop right when it's just really bad. Doesn't have to be slop. It can be interesting, especially when there is human input into. Just could be interesting. I guess I'm not so angry about it, but I definitely. When I saw Sora for the first time, I think I was actually at OpenAI and Sam showed up and I was like, this sucks. Like, is it going to be good? Because it sucks right now. Some of it was cool, most of it was not. And so I think it's just a question of it gets better. All right, boys, let's go on a quick break. We come back, new details of OpenAI's first device. Speaking of which,

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[Kara Swisher]

Casey and Kevin, we're back. We're getting into new details about OpenAI's upcoming AI smart speaker. There's a lot of these around. Reportedly be donut shaped and the size of a hockey puck, designed to be easily carried around. I always want to carry a hockey puck around the house. The device will likely cost between 300 and 400 more than most smart speakers, but less than an iPhone. As expected to launch in 2027, it's designed with Jony I've Studio and include a camera, lights and sensors that signal when it's responding to users. Meanwhile, OpenAI is asking a judge to dismiss Apple's trade secrets lawsuit, saying it's building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple. I want you both put on your Scott Galloway hats and give me a prediction. Is this Talk a little bit about this device. Now, there was a tiny. Was it Google that had the tiny hockey puck thing or was it, I can't remember who put that out.

[Casey Newton]

Well, Amazon has the echo dot, which

[Kara Swisher]

is kind of, yeah, it looks like a hockey puck, right? That's Amazon, which Alex threw into the garbage, but go ahead.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I mean, on one hand it seems clear that there is demand for echo dots, right? And so if there is a version of that that is plugged into ChatGPT, which is really good for a lot of things, I could see it having some success. $300 is relatively affordable as as these things go. I'm still not totally sold on voice as the way that I want to interact with these models. Some people are. Some people are already like coding with their voices. Evan loves to dictate everything into his computer. I don't like to do this, but I think there's something there. Now, on the other hand, two years ago we were interviewing Sam Altman and I said, tell me about this thing that you're building. Is it just Alexa? Because it sounds like it's just Alexa. He said, no, no, no, we think it's gonna be way better than Alexa. Everything I've read about this device so far makes me feel like it's Alexa.

[Kara Swisher]

That's right. It's a smart. It's a smarter Alexa. Right. Essentially. And carrying it around. Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. I cannot wait to lose this thing.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

I am so excited to go through between two and three of these a year or, like, accidentally put it in the long laundry. This is going to be a huge deal in my house. I'm going to be a huge repeat customer for this thing because I will lose this thing immediately.

[Kara Swisher]

Do you want this? Do you want to have this hockey puck?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. I mean, look, my household. One of my other problematic traits is that I do live in an Alexa household, and we have these devices. And I've tried the new Alexa plus, which is supposed to be this sort of new AI LLM version of this, and it sucks. It's bad. It is not only bad at the AI stuff, the LLM stuff, it's bad at the timers and weather stuff. It is worse at all of it. And so if OpenAI can somehow figure out how to be the dependable alarm in my bedroom and tell me stuff that let me interact with my coding agents, that will be cool. I am a little nervous that apparently, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, this thing will include parts that move on their own. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

[Kara Swisher]

Wait, what do you mean it's gonna craw over to your face and eat it?

[Kevin Roose]

I don't know. Maybe it'll. You know, it'll decide. I don't want to be in the bedroom anymore. There's. There's too much crazy stuff going on in here.

[Casey Newton]

It's going to have, like, a prehensile tail and claws.

[Kara Swisher]

I know. Doesn't it feel like that? It feels like a movie. Like Megan. Remember the Megan movie? I just don't. I. Sorry. I. I think this has to be. I think AirPods should just be better. Right? You wear them in your ears. It sees things, and then it does stuff like. I just don't see carrying around a puck. I just don't any. There's no way I'm buying this thing. I didn't like the dot. I just. I left it there. I just didn't use it. I was back in San Francisco recently and this week, and I forgot I had an Alexa there, unplugged, sitting there, and I don't. I put it on for a second, and, you know, my kids had fun for four seconds with it and then moved on from it. I just. It's still not. I could see having something like the humane pin didn't work. What was the other one? Humane and what was the other one?

[Kevin Roose]

The rabbit R one. There have been these, like.

[Casey Newton]

There's, like, the friend pendant. I think the manufacturer just keep running into the same issue, which is that it's very hard to improve on the phone. The phone is very, very, very good at many, many things, and so to improve on it is just overwhelmingly difficult.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. It has to be AirPods. I just. I feel like that's where it has to go. Not glasses, necessarily. Creepy Kevin glasses, but in some fashion like that. It's sort of around and. Or maybe it's in your house. Like, the house itself speaks to you. Maybe not.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm excited for when people start, like, disguising their OpenAI pucks as, like, other like things, because there's such a social stigma around, like, carrying one of these things into a public place. It's just like, oh, this little. This is my hockey puck.

[Kara Swisher]

It's just my lucky, lucky hockey puck. So let me get. Casey will not be having one. And, Kevin, you will embrace it with the love. The great.

[Kevin Roose]

I will make up for Casey's rejection of this technology by buying and losing between three and four of them a year.

[Kara Swisher]

Wow.

[Casey Newton]

I will probably get one. If it's 300 bucks, I'll probably try.

[Kara Swisher]

Try it. I say no, not you. I don't think. I don't want it. It's like, I've had these, and they have shown they'd have to be so much better than an echo dot. And I don't know where my echo dot is. It's somewhere in a box. Right. Like, there's so many of these things. And the humane pin, like, it wasn't quite right. And you're right. The phone works just fine.

[Kevin Roose]

I just want the agent that goes rogue and, like, hacks into my accounts and, you know, drains my bank accounts. I want it to have a physical form so that I can yell at it.

[Kara Swisher]

I see.

[Kevin Roose]

And so this is, like, a very exc development.

[Kara Swisher]

I like that. Drains your bank accounts is your favorite thing.

[Casey Newton]

Here's my question. If you take the OpenAI device into the bedroom and then after a couple months, say, rate my sexual performance and give me tips, will it do that or will that be a violation of content policies?

[Kara Swisher]

Well, if you asked it right. Right. I'm just interesting to think about. It's not really that interesting to think about. It's kind of gross. But okay. All right. Is that what you're doing? Is that doing. Casey's getting married. You know that, Kevin.

[Casey Newton]

I am.

[Kevin Roose]

I do know that, Carrie. You have to understand that part, a big part. Co hosting a podcast with Casey is just. Is just polite. Laughing at some of his jokes.

[Kara Swisher]

See, I am lucky I can say Scott. That's the stupid. You ignorant slut. I mean, I think that you need to move to that. Casey, you ignorant slut.

[Casey Newton]

Listen, we were all thinking it.

[Kara Swisher]

You're all thinking it. You're all thinking, by the way, Casey is getting married. We're all very excited. We're going to all be at the wedding. It's going to be so much fun.

[Casey Newton]

It's going to be very fun.

[Kara Swisher]

It's going to be fun. We're going to do something embarrassing. Kevin, you and I need to talk flash mob. Yes, we'll do a flash mob. We'll talk to the Puck. We'll talk to. What is it going to be called, by the way? Do we know what the Puck is

[Casey Newton]

going to be called?

[Kara Swisher]

Jony, I've will come up with something illuminating.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, the way things are going, it's just going to be called Sam. No, it's going to be called Sam.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, that's a good name. Yeah, I think that's a good name, actually. Anyway, Casey and Kevin, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.

[Casey Newton]

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[Kara Swisher]

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[Kevin Roose]

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[Kara Swisher]

Okay, Casey and Kevin, let's hear some wins and fails. You guys go first. First you, Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

Okay. My win this week is DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search company who responded to the uproar over Meta's sunglasses, their pervert glasses, by releasing their branded product, which are just called normal fucking sunglasses. They don't do anything well, they protect

[Kara Swisher]

you from the sun, right?

[Kevin Roose]

So they are anti surveillance glasses. No cameras, no microphones. This is sort of an attention grabbing stunt for them.

[Kara Swisher]

Good idea.

[Kevin Roose]

I did think it was clever.

[Kara Swisher]

That's a good idea. What is your fail?

[Kevin Roose]

My fail? This is one that's close to home, y'. All. This is related to the podcast business. So Max Tanny at Semaphore recently reported that Spotify is testing a skip ahead button that will let some users skip the ads on their podcasts. And as a lover of ad supported podcasts, I must say this one is a fail for me.

[Kara Swisher]

Isn't it kind of already there though? I was like reading sort of into. Don't they already have the 15 seconds?

[Kevin Roose]

Well, they have the skip ahead 15 seconds button or 30 seconds or whatever it is button, which is effectively the same thing. But this one is like purely like will skip automatically to the end of whatever ad segment.

[Kara Swisher]

You think they'll do that. Except for their ads. Except for their ads. Right. That's what I.

[Kevin Roose]

Well, that's the. That's sort of some of the rub here. But I think there's just like you know, we should. We should all stand up as podcasters in opposition to anything that. That could undercut our business model.

[Kara Swisher]

People don't like your. I don't know. I don't know. I don't. I think they'll. They'll roll it back. I don't think they'll do it. They'll just have the 15 second thing right. I just don't see them doing that.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, there's been some opposition from podcast companies already, and people are worried about this. I think they'll land on something sensible, but, you know, we got to stand up for ourselves.

[Kara Swisher]

You know, stand up. Listen to our ads for athletic greens. You must. You must. Because it's paying for.

[Kevin Roose]

Where will people know about me undies?

[Kara Swisher]

Yes, exactly. Do you have me undies? I never got me undies. So sad. I would let me undies come to pivot.

[Casey Newton]

Anyway, Casey, my win this week was kind of a serious one, which was that in the wake of revelations that its models had escaped their sandboxes and caused these autonomous cyber attacks, OpenAI said that it could not rule out that its newest models has had hit what they call critical capability. So this is basically their most serious level of risk. And what they have said for years is if they ever hit that. That threshold, they would slow down development and would. Would build real safeguards. So we do believe that right now, OpenAI actually is slowing down and doing the responsible thing, which is trying to prevent further harm from these models. So, you know, I do not take for granted anymore that companies will do this, and I was really glad to see that they did.

[Kara Swisher]

So that's a win. Even though it's a fail.

[Casey Newton]

It was a win that came out of a fail.

[Kara Swisher]

Okay. All right, now what's your fail?

[Casey Newton]

My fail is I learned over the weekend, Kara, that San Francisco's average rent is up 18% over the past two years. It is now 37 $28 a month on average. It has surpassed New York City as the most expensive in the country. And the reason that this is a fail is that the story never changes around here. I swear, ever since I landed in this town in 2010, I've read every voter guide. I voted for every pro housing politician. And no matter who I vote for, there's enough houses for. For the people who want to live here, and it sucks. And it's a fail.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, it's a fail. What? What is the fail?

[Casey Newton]

The fail is that we do not build enough houses for the people who want to live here.

[Kara Swisher]

We do not. There's Also limited space to be aware.

[Casey Newton]

There is not. We could build 20, 30 stories. Screw the character of the neighborhood. Put a skyscraper in my neighborhood. I just want people to be able to live here.

[Kevin Roose]

Casey lived in your garage for, like 10 years. We can squeeze more people into existing spaces.

[Kara Swisher]

You know, Louie's living there now. I did notice. I did send that to Louie and go, look how much much you're costing me. Louis Swisher. No, he's. He's welcome to live there as long as he wants. That is okay.

[Casey Newton]

All right.

[Kara Swisher]

All right. Okay. But people are. San Francisco's back, right? I mean, that's kind of the thing.

[Casey Newton]

It is back. And of course, it's really exciting, you know, to be living in a boom town. And there is a lot of, like, energy in the city. I love living in San Francisco as much as I ever have. I just want anyone else who wants to live here to be able to do that affordably.

[Kara Swisher]

Can I ask you a question? What's the level of asshole attitude towards the new techies? I mean, they're not. They're not Keith Raboy level. Right. They're. What are they? What, what are.

[Casey Newton]

You know, I think that San Francisco has become so thoroughly colonized by tech people that you don't see the sort of like, Google bus protest type stuff that we had a decade ago. Right. Like in 2026, if you're living in San Francisco, you've made your peace with the fact that this is a tech town.

[Kara Swisher]

Right? Right. So people are better. I think they're calmer. I have to say, they're better than. There was a period of true asshole itude that I think is they seem to be quieter in their behavior.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, what are these people doing? For the most part, they're like, working out of their house. They're getting doordash. Like, they're not causing a big disruption in the community. If they were trying to, you know, build a data center at Civic Center, I'm sure we would see a lot of protests.

[Kara Swisher]

Yes. All right. So my. I have a win and fail around. I'm going to talk about this with Chelsea Handler, but around pregnancy. Pregnancy, since I am the only one.

[Casey Newton]

You're pregnant?

[Kara Swisher]

Yes, I am. I'm having yet another child. The fifth. Swish cat. No, there's two stories this week. One was there's a picture of Anne Hathaway, who's pregnant, who looks beautiful. And she got a lot of clap back, but I thought she looked amazing. She was at another. Opened another movie. I can't remember was it the 29th movie she's done this year? Hardest working woman in show business. But I thought she looked beautiful, and it was a lovely picture of her was showing her belly, which was very beautiful. And I thought that was lovely that she did that. I was kind of pissed about the clapback. Same thing with that AOC announced she's freezing her eggs. Conservative commentators. Matt Walsh called her out for doing that at the age of 37. I had Louis at 39. So, Matt Walsh, sit the fuck down. It's none. And I've had many children since. And I just think this sort of, like, people commenting on how women should present themselves as pregnant is just. I mean, besides the other misogynistic stuff that's happening, whether it's not. Not, you know, not getting Max Miller to leave after the allegations of abuse in his reelection race or whatever, there's a real. It's just like they're really. They've. With overturning Roe, grotesque. This is like, let people be pregnant the way they want to. Let people have kids the way they want to. They talk about people having kids when someone makes a proactive move like this and talks about it, which lots of women talk about it, like, aoc, it's none of your fucking business, any of you. How she decides to live her life. And I just drives me crazy. Any of you.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely. And if you want. If you wanted to help women get pregnant earlier in their lives, if that was important to you for some reason, there are a million policy choices you could make. You could make child care free and widely available. For example, you could make housing more affordable so people didn't feel like they needed to work for the first 20 years of their career to be able to afford to buy a house. Right. There's a million things that these. These loud mouths could do to make it easier for families to have children. And I'm going to guess they're not

[Kevin Roose]

going to work on federal berry subsidies. Do you know how much berries cost for a child?

[Kara Swisher]

Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

I swear, I'm like. I'm like, at five figures annually on berries.

[Kara Swisher]

Blueberries. Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

Where's the government?

[Kara Swisher]

Where's the government? Let me let you in on a little thing. Some of these people don't like women. I know this.

[Kevin Roose]

These are the same people who, like, freaked out for years about there being a fertility crisis. And, like, why aren't people having more kids? And then people start having kids and it's like, well, not like that.

[Kara Swisher]

Not like that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Matt Walsh is a particular, you know, tiny penis. But it really is sort of this hatred towards women just comes out. So like it's so. It's like telling women what to do with their bodies is a never ending thing. And especially, you know, dunking on some just. It's gross. I'm very happy for Anne Hathaway. I'm very happy for aoc. She should do whatever she wants and run for president at the same time and save her egg. She can do whatever the fuck. So that is my feeling. That's a win and a fail. In any case. We want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business, tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com pivot to submit a question for the show or call 85551, pivot. Okay, that's the show. Thanks for listening to Pivot and be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back on Friday. You gu great. I'm excited. When are you announcing the show?

[Kevin Roose]

Very soon. As in like a couple of weeks from now. Couple of weeks. Tune in. We'll make the announcement on Hard Fork and we'll be all over the socials.

[Kara Swisher]

So good. Well, let me know what I can do. And I welcome you. You will, Kevin. You will love it. You will have such a good time and you will be able. You're naturally an entrepreneur even though you cling to the side of institutional vessels with an incredible barnacle like tendency. But it'll be great and I'm sure it'll be a great. And we will hope to have you on many, many times and when your book comes out too.

[Kevin Roose]

Thank you for blazing the trail. You're the goat.

[Kara Swisher]

And Casey, as always. As always, Casey, you're the best. Thank you so much. You are.

[Casey Newton]

Thanks, Kara.

[Kara Swisher]

Today's show was produced by Lauren Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin and Todd Wiseman. Ernie Enderdat engineered this episode. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business with another fantastic guest co host in Scot Free August. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why the Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman. A conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening. In the world three times a week. Hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources. The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion and wellness. And the Guardian is not billionaire owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube, that's theguardian.com stateside. Support for the show comes from Injun. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Injen is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as 2 1/2 minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels, and in 2025 InGen customers saved more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts and no bs. More than a thousand businesses join Enjin every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at enjin.com Vox we all have to drink water, and staying hydrated is one of the simplest ways to feel your best. But come on, how is your relationship with water really? Are you getting enough from it? Is is it satisfying you or is drinking it becoming a chore? Here's a tip to spice things. Hint Water with delectable flavors like watermelon, Georgia peach, even lemon zest. Freeze Hint is water that will make you desire water. No sugar, no sweeteners, no calories. It just goes to show sometimes the right hydration partner changes everything. Try hint [e-mail] and in stores nationwide.