I was looking around like Guy, do we have to call this guy hot Casey? That's true. Netflix could have titled that character marginally attractive. Kevin. Barely passable. Kevin Russe. I'm Kevin Russe, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Noon for Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, I go down to Meta Connect, and tell Kevin about all the news.
Then, writer and Googler Steven Johnson stops by to talk about the company's hit Notebook LM and how it's using A.I. to turn PDFs into podcasts. Finally, has the hat! It's time for HatGPT. Alright, Casey, yes. You just got back to the studio from a trip to Menlo Park to see some stuff that Meta was releasing. I'm coming in hot, Kevin.
I hot-footed it right out of that keynote to get here to the studio to tell you about all the latest advancements in the dynamic world of artificial intelligence and augmented reality glasses. Okay, so set the scene a little bit. What is it like down there? What's the vibe? Tell me what you saw. The scene at Meta's campus was truly chaos, and I think not in the way they anticipated. We've been to many of these events.
Typically, when you arrive, you're really only looking for two things, which is like, where does the ride share drop you off and how do you get into the actual venue? And usually the way they do that is they have a person standing there, and then they also have sides. Meta, for whatever reason, decided not to do this. So, people are just sort of wandering around like the duck in RU, my mother. And it took me quite a while to get into the venue.
And when I finally found what I was looking for, after by the way talking to several metta employees who, when I asked where Connect was, seemed to have no idea that it was happening that day, I got a text from a friend who said that they're just been an accident in the parking lot because they're shuttling in a car. So let's just say it got off to a little bit of rough start. Yeah. And my invite to Meta Connect must have gotten lost in the mail. Lost in the Metaverse.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they actually sent it as a Facebook message, but no one has checked those since 2018. No. So I am not their favorite journalist. I've been critical of the company. They don't invite me to stuff anymore. But you did get an invite and you hustled your way down there to see what they had to show off. I did. And tell me what you saw. Well, first of all, should we talk about Zuckerberg?
Yes. Yeah. Well, so this is the second time in the past month that I've seen Zuckerberg speak and in both times he has worn a shirt emblazoned with a classical language slogan. So he was at the acquired podcast a few weeks back and wore the shirt that said in Greek learning through suffering, which he said was sort of a family motto. And as we know, this is a person who is obsessed with the Roman Empire. That is just kind of something that we've known about Zuckerberg for a while.
So yes, he's very into conquest. Love's conquest. His favorite video game is civilization. Like this man loves to sort of scheme about winning. So Zuckerberg walks out on stage on Wednesday and he's wearing a shirt that says out, suck out, Nihil. And what this shirt apparently means Kevin, because I don't speak Latin. Do you speak Latin? I speak big. They say same here. So but it's not a big Latin shirt. Didn't say Zuckerberg saying. I didn't know he said. Okay. This is going on.
We're coming in hot. We're coming in hot. We're coming in hot. Okay. So this is going to apparently be translated a few ways. It is based on a motto which was out Caesar out, Nihil, which was typically translated as like either Caesar or nothing or all or nothing. But the basic idea seems to be either one that he's sort of putting it on the line, sort of when it all costs or sort of less generously. It's like me or nothing. Let's just say a crazy thing to put on a t-shirt.
Yeah. It's, well, it makes me think that one of his other motives here is since he's gotten rid of his Julius Caesar haircut, he needs to sort of keep some connection to Caesar and his legacy. If I were him, I would just make a nice Caesar salad. But I guess that wasn't part of his journey. So he comes out in the shirt and I thought that the slogan actually wound up being really apt in this regard.
He spoke for around 40 minutes and during that time he brought out two like creator types basically like one was an MMA fighter and one was a sort of more standard creator like makes cool fun videos. But that was it. He did not bring out anyone else from his team. He did not toss to any of the other people who work at the company on any of this stuff. He himself walked through all of the announcements in a way that really I feel like was trying to sell the message.
I run this company and I am the Willy Wonka of Metta. Yeah. And don't you forget it. Yeah, it's suck or nothing. Which I felt was like really aggressive and weird and defensive. Right. It's like it would be weird if Tim Cook did the entire Apple presentation. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Aside from the sort of semiotics of Mark Zuckerberg appearing in this the Caesar homage t-shirt and not letting anyone else on to the stage with him, what else did he actually announce?
What were the products and the these sort of updates that they released? Sure. So I'll sort of do these in a sending order of importance. Okay. So first of all, they have like they always say start with the most boring stuff when you're doing a podcast. Well, I feel like if we do the reverse then the episode gets more boring than the log where I go on. Do we want that? I trust your vision.
Okay. So I trust your vision, which is something that you shouldn't do if you're wearing a VR headset because you're being lied to. So the first thing they introduce is the Metta Quest 3S. This is an entry level headset and it sells for 300 bucks. Until this week Metta's original Quest 3 was selling for $650. So this is sort of a big step down. They want to get more people into VR. We'll see if that works.
They also put out a software update for their Rayban Metta smart glasses and they're able to do things like you can set a reminder or you can scan a QR code. And later this year they say you were going to be able to do real time language translation. So you could be speaking to me in pig Latin and then I would be able to understand it because I would sort of be getting a real time translation through the speakers in the arms of the glasses. At the ounce say interesting yay.
Yes. So if you were able to understand that you're probably living in the future because you have the new glasses update. So there were those things and then there was just like a bunch of AI stuff including most interestingly and I have to get your take on this. They're going to start putting fake AI slop into the feeds. Did you see this part?
No. Okay. I'm not going to test but as you browse through the Facebook feed and the Instagram feed in the coming months you're going to see stuff that is based on your interests or has your likeness. So if you live in Chicago and you've posted content about basketball you might see a picture of yourself in a Chicago bulls jersey and then you can swipe on it and you can see sort of additional like you plus Chicago bulls related content. And I'm dying to know what you think about that.
So well sorry are these ads for like Chicago bulls merchandise. These are just organic posts appearing in the feed starring you the user in something related to something that you've posted about or clicked on recently. Exactly. Exactly. So they're looking about what you're posting about or the sort of things that you typically view and they're saying can we make synthetic stuff out of that and show it to you and will that be more engaging to you than hearing from your actual family and friends.
Oh my God. I mean this is the creepiest thing that I can imagine them doing. Like people already believe erroneously that Facebook is listening to them through their phone and like tailoring targeted ads to them based on like conversations they've had in their house with this.
I mean imagine you are you're talking about fishing with your friend and you know all of a sudden because you've clicked on some fishing stuff you're just scrolling through your Instagram feed and you see a picture of yourself in a fishing outfit going fishing. You are going to throw your phone into the nearest body of water and you're never going to log on again.
I mean again and you know so I talked this afternoon with Chris Cox who's a sort of high ranking product executive at the company and he said basically like Casey like do not overstate this we're going to be very gentle about the way that we are rolling this out and yet
at the same time Kevin a year ago I wrote a post called the synthetic social network is coming and it was based on this idea that eventually they were going to realize they could probably show you something more engaging that they just made up than something from your actual family and friends and while I'm sure there will always be a mix of those two things in anything that they make we are arriving in this world where the app on your phone is just going to be showing you made up AI stuff.
Yeah I think this is a really good point because it marks a really big departure for meta you know this company has historically been about connecting you to people that you know in the real world whether it's your college classmates or you know people you work with like real friends and real family has always been the kind of lifeblood of these services and I think what we've seen over the past few years is that they are just not aiming for that at all.
I mean now you know I'm assuming some huge part of the usage of Instagram is just reals right. You know content from people you don't know from influencers from you know people outside your network who are posting stuff it seems like they have basically given up on the task of building a social network around your real friends and family maybe your real friends
and family don't post that much anymore and so instead all they have left to show you is kind of disconnected social content from influencers and people who you don't know but might make interesting things and this kind of AI generated slop.
Yeah and you know I'm sure people are going to have different experiences based on when they started using these products but for you and I who started using Facebook in particular near the beginning this world where we increasingly see nothing that friends and family are sharing because they're just mostly not doing that anymore and we're seeing sort of AI generated images and videos.
I just think Facebook is going to start to feel like an abandoned amusement park you know where it's like a little bit creepy you know you feel like they're about to put a spirit Halloween banner at the front of it like it there's just something that feels so strange
about this moment and while I take Chris Cox and his word that they are going to be careful about the way that they do is they're telling us where they're going and I have no reason to believe that they're not going to push very hard in that direction because for the longest time the biggest problem that social networks have is that they just kind of die by default.
They're novel and fun for a while and then people just kind of get tired of them and they move on and you know Facebook did an incredible job of keeping people entertained there for a very long time but if that is starting to weigh in particularly the United States
what better solution than to say you know what it doesn't matter that your friends and family are posting anymore because we can just make up infinite content to show you yeah Facebook and Instagram become apps that are just about whatever will keep you looking at them. All right what else did they show off yeah so this gets to the last big thing that they showed up and this really was the star of the show and it's called Orion.
Now last week snap showed off their version of this their latest spectacles these are augmented reality glasses and the basic idea is that inside a pair of glasses that you wear on your heads there are these miniature projectors called waveguides that will project
images in front of you that look like a computer operating system and you can then interact with that operating system using your voice or using hand gestures so you might use it to watch a video or play a game or make a video call so I saw the snap version of it last
week this week medicate forward and said here's what we've been working on and as far as I can tell not as much further along the snap is yeah when I saw snaps version I almost couldn't believe how ugly it was it looked like the sunglasses that they give you after you go to the eye doctor it's like the the blocky plastic sort of goggles.
That's what snaps goggles look like from the outside I haven't tried them on yet so I don't know what they look like when you put them on but did net as version of this their Orion glasses actually look better they are chunky and funky like the snap glasses
are I'll sort of leave it to the list or to decide which pair they think looks better but it seems like the technical capability in these glasses is stronger at least in talking to some of the people who have used them and reading some of the coverage today I'm hoping
to get my own demo soon but for example the field of view which is essentially the area in your vision that can display the the operating system or any sort of a digital elements that you might be interacting with the snap glasses have a field of view that is 46 degrees and
this to me was the worst thing about these glasses Kevin because every time I move my head the interface would disappear it was like I was playing peekaboo with an operating system right the meta field of view is 70 degrees and so most of the objects that you
would be interacting with just sort of stay in the frame for a long time now like what I'm envisioning something like the apple vision pro which does allow you to do things like pull up your desktop in your sort of headset or play a video or something like that so how
are these different from something like the apple vision pro so those technologies are similar in some ways right they are trying to get to the same destination but there is a belief within meta that glasses are a much better and more natural ultimate form factor
for the next generation of computing then a VR headset would be and the reason is that a VR headset is giant it's bulky it's distracting right you're sort of always aware that you're wearing it in my own personal experience whenever I put one of those things on my head within
a half an hour or so I want to tear it off and not put it on again for a long time glasses are different you're wearing glasses right now my my guess is you have not even thought about the fact that you're wearing glasses for the past half hour yeah well I am watching
a YouTube video while I'm talking with you in my glasses but these are very advanced how dare you how dare you so meta believes that the final destination here is glasses that there is good at everything that the vision pro does but in a sort of pair of lenses that
sit easily on your face are not bulky do not make you nauseous so that's that's where they're trying to get now can people go out and buy these these glasses that meta showing off these Orion augmented reality goggles no so meta is made about a thousand units and
says that they're going to be mostly using them internally but they are going to make some units available to external partners presumably app developers and other people who might want to try them out and see what they could do with them but you know Kevin if you want
to know why are they selling this directly to consumers Alex he has had some great reporting in the verge this week about how meta did initially want to put these things on sale but among other considerations they could not get the cost per unit below about ten thousand
dollars and Kevin I know what you're saying you're saying Casey why are they so expensive well these glasses are not truly standalone glasses which I should say the snap glasses are this prototype has what they call a neural wrist band which is a little loop that you
put over your wrist that helps the glasses to interpret your hand gestures so that you can control the operating system and there's an external puck that processes a lot of the computing because a hockey puck it's sort of more a tube like and oh the two puck
you know what you're actually making a great point and if I were them I would not have called the puck if you try to play hockey with this thing you're going to be sorry also a cost ten thousand dollars so please don't hit it so you can play so okay so they're
sort of offloading some of the because you know one thing that apple has talked about is just how hard it is to shrink down something like the apple vision pro smaller than it is because it requires a bunch of processors it requires a big battery so apple actually
made the battery pack sort of external so you have to carry that around and it requires cooling and all this other stuff so is this puck part of how meta is trying to shrink down the actual glasses by just giving you more things that you have to carry along with the
glasses yes so you're exactly right and it's again it's fascinating how a device that is being positioned as something that will be more convenient for you and will be this incredible assistant and so much more effortless than wearing a giant headset
comes with a wristband that presumably you've got to charge and a puck that you've got to charge right it's you know you have two peripherals for the pair of glasses on your face so you know I've just been reflecting recently Kevin about how this story that
we're discussing right now the hunt to build great AR glasses has been going on for more than a decade now in Silicon Valley and this week we saw the state of the art and the state of the art is it costs ten thousand dollars you have to have a peripheral to control
it and you have to do the computing on a separate device okay and that is after tens of billions of dollars that have been invested and you just compare that to something like artificial intelligence which we talk about so much on the show and you look at the leaps that they
have made in the past two or three years and I believe it has left us in a situation where what we've just been discussing the hunt to believe these air glasses is the hardest problem in consumer technology I mean to be fair the building and training of large
AI language models has also required tens of billions of dollars of investment and all of these GPUs from the video so in some sense like there was no sort of cheap and easy way to solve the problem of putting a high performance computer on your face right and and and that
gets into well you know why is it that these things have developed at such different rates and why is it Casey that these things have developed at such different rates I'm so glad you asked because AI is a pure software problem the the hardware problem of AR is just much
trickier because you're running up against the laws of physics and about unsolved problems in battery life and how do you dissipate heat and how do you shrink down microprocessors and optical stacks and everything else and so it is just a super hard problem and while
every year it seems like we get two or three percent of the way toward the goal at the same time again the state of the art is something that you will not be able to buy in stores and like frankly would just not be all that good if you could yeah so I understood when Apple
launched the Apple Vision Pro why they were making products in this area right they think they knew they could trick you in spending almost $4,000 on one yes well that no there are a hardware company right that that is where they make their their money you know they
know that smartphones are not going to be around forever the iPhone is not going to be the final evolution of personal computing and they see these head mounted displays as kind of the successor to maybe something like the laptop what's less clear to me is why meta
is investing tens of billions of dollars into developing the stuff right there's obviously one story that we've talked about before which is they're very sick of building things on Apple's platforms they don't like having to work within the constraints that iOS developers
have to work on so they want to own the next hardware platform but I guess I don't see it as being a natural evolution of their social media app product strategy so can you give any sense of why they feel like this is so important for them that they're going to spend
billions of dollars developing these glasses well the the ultimate reason is that they believe that if if they don't someone else will and this has always been Zuckerberg's approach to building products right he is deeply paranoid you know we and not in a sort
of conspiratorial way but just in a sort of very observant sense that when you look at the technology companies of the past 50 years you know the companies that were biggest 40 years ago many of them are no longer around or are nowhere near as dominant as they
want to work right so Zuckerberg knows there's always a way that is about to hit you and potentially from behind and the best way to avoid that happening is that you go out and you invent the future yourself you know you mentioned their feud with Apple and this
is it's deeply personal to him he mentions it more and more in his public appearances and you know you saw the shirt it's Zuck or nothing and a Zuck or nothing world does not have room for Apple in it and it is a world where Mark Zuckerberg himself controls all of the most important computing platforms so you know to find out how things are going we'll just have to see what slogan appears on his next t-shirt. Then we cut back a version of the notebook with a much happier ending.
Well Casey we talk a lot about AI tools and products on this show and I have one that I'm really excited to talk about today. Yeah I'm excited to talk about this too. This is a new product called notebook LM it is a tool from Google and you can think of it like a kind of personal research assistant it's a piece of software that allows you to upload documents PDFs word files even audio files websites whatever you want into these
things called notebooks and then use Gemini Google's AI model to basically chat with the documents to sort of have a conversation to ask questions to create study guides or summaries you can even use it to create a podcast about the material that you've uploaded.
Yeah and you know this was a product that was announced at Google IO it they called it Project Tailwind back then and from the moment I saw them talking about it on stage I thought I have got to get my hands on this thing and while it is true that you can use
other tools to chat with documents that is not unique to notebook LM they have really focused on making sure that you can cram as much material as possible into their system so that you can have conversations with not only one very long document but many very long documents and that has really been the difference for them but as you know they recently came out with something that is maybe even more impressive.
Yeah the AI audio overviews feature is really what has been sort of lighting up the internet over the past week or so like I'll just be honest we see a lot of AI products we get a lot of early access and demos of things and many times they show some potential but if you actually start digging in they are not all that useful or they hallucinate or they're just not reliable enough to be useful for people like you and me.
Notebook LM is I would say one of my favorite AI products that I have used this year because it is not trying to do everything for everyone it is a tool for research for writing it is really really capable at what it does and the audio feature in particular is just pretty stunning. So today we're going to bring in one of the key people who helped conceive of and build notebook LM Steven Johnson.
Steven's path to working at Google is pretty unusual his main career the thing that he's most known for is a writer he has written for many years for the New York Times and New York Times magazine and other places he's the author of more than a dozen books including
his latest the infernal machine a true story of dynamite terror and the rise of the modern detective and he's been one of my favorite writers about tech and the future and a few years ago Google approached him and basically said hey want to help us make a tool for writers.
Yeah and you know I got to know Steven a little bit as they were launching notebook LM and we met and he told me all about his note taking process and how he wanted to use AI to sort of improve his writing and we truly just became fast friends because we have the exact same view of this stuff which is give me the most technology to make that my job is easy as it possibly can be and unlike me he's now actually working inside this company trying to make something that does just that.
Yeah and why haven't you written 14 books for me? Well you know I've been busy lately Kevin that I'm going to get around to it one of these days. Let's bring it Stephen. Steven Johnson welcome to Hard fork. Guys it's great to be here.
Hey Stephen. So Steven I remember reading a piece you wrote for the New York Times magazine back in April of 2022 it was about six months before chat GPT came out and you had this big great piece about how AI was starting to get really good at language through these new things called
large language models and your sort of predictions about how that would have all kinds of profound effects on society but I remember that piece so vividly because it captured this feeling that I was having at the time which Casey now has started calling AI Vertigo basically this sort of head spinning sensation when things are just moving so quickly but I'm curious like what got you as a writer interested in AI to the point that you decided to sort of build AI products at Google.
You know I just spent all of my career as a writer always dabbling with tools to help me do the writing with all the latest software like Casey and I have this kind of shared obsession with note taking software. I know you know I don't know.
Don't ever get me started about script nerd all the different things that we can talk about but I always saw the computer and software as a kind of companion and a kind of brain storming partner like and I was always pushing the technology to do that in my own work and so the idea that I could just kind of say hey let's think out loud about this particular topic and it would understand on some level and respond with coherent sentences.
You know obviously there are hallucinations and there are all the things we know are problems which I also wrote about in that piece but it was clear that some new set of doors of possibility had just opened up for the first time and I just got really interested in walking through those doors. So how does Google first approach you and is the idea hey we want to make a tool for writers like you or was it something else.
Yeah it was a little bit like that so Google had just spun up right around this time a new division called Google Labs there was an old Google Labs this is kind of a new iteration of it and there was a guy running it named Clay Bevor who's since left and now Josh Woodward
is running it and Clay and Josh had this idea that Google Labs could be a space where you could do kind of product focused experimentation with new emerging technologies and they also have this idea that there would be co-creation would be built into the kind of ethos of labs
and so if you were making a music product you would have a musician in the room like as you were building it so it wasn't just about you know we're going to go out and do some user research with musicians we're actually going to have somebody through the life of
the product there and so they were just kind of cooking up these ideas and they had both read my books over the years they read that time's piece they read my sub stack and all that together caused them to think wonder if Stephen could be the first kind of guinea pig for this.
So you know Stephen you and I've had a chance to chat before and I truly aspire to be the note taker that you are because I have talked a big game on this podcast about how I'm trying to write down sort of every interesting like a quote idea that I come across and link those together and I made some strides there but like you showed me your system at one point and it is the real deal like you truly have been keeping track of every idea that you've come across for seemingly quite some time.
What was the moment that you said oh like this intersects with AI in a way that maybe this notebook LM can realize in a product. I want you to remember Kevin that every time you think that Casey is such a super nerd with his note taking like there are even more derailleur's people. You are the alpha nerd of the note taking community.
So yeah I can take exactly what it was so I have been collecting quotations from books that I've read initially by typing them up in the late 90s and then once you know ebooks came out you could save quotes and things like that is an amazing program that I think
you use called read wise that lets you organize all your quotes from if you read on the Kindle or any other ebook and so I have something like 8000 quotes from books it date back to the late 90s that I've collected and that is really the history of all the ideas that really shaped who I am right like my mental model the world is shaped by the other ideas that I've read from other people and so notebook now lets you have up to 25 million words in a single notebook.
So I've read that in terms of pages how many pages is that what would that be there would be like 40 books yeah right something in that order. And your 8000 quotes fit in one of these 25 million word. Yeah yeah there's only about three main words so I loaded them all in as you know a bunch of documents. So 30 years of collecting quotes fits easily into one of these things.
Yeah and what I'm slowly adding to that notebook is all the stuff that I've written to so it's kind of everything I've read that's important and literally every word I've published is eventually going to be in that one notebook. Kevin can't do that because it would poison the data set. I think it's going to work for you. The safety flags. Yeah. So it'll be going off and be terrible.
So when I was able to do that which was really I don't know about a year ago for the first time where I can get all that stuff in there I call that notebook my everything notebook and then I could sit down and just be like I'm thinking about writing a piece about X or here's a paragraph in the piece that I've just written what am I missing what am I forgetting.
Maybe an overview of all the stuff that I've read that is related to this particular topic and it would return particularly once we switched to Gemini like Gemini was the big on a paradigm shift here. I get this like incredibly nuanced response that is constantly reminding me of things that I've forgotten and now as of like three months ago we have inline citations in all the comments from the model and you can click on each citation and it takes you directly to the original quote.
Yes. I've been playing around with notebook LM and it is truly one of the best features about it is that it'll show you something you're talking to it about something you've read or something you've written and it just has that little sort of like citation you click on it it takes you right to the source material so you can see for yourself like this actually is an accurate representation of what was in the PDF I uploaded.
And you know like what an incredibly interesting like learning mode that is right like up until now if you wanted to have the conversation with the material in a book like you had to find the author or you had to find a tutor or expert who knew the material really well and those people are in scarce supply. But now you can actually like load in the book and navigate it through conversation and dialogue which is a form that people really obviously like to use.
So that is amazing and I think will probably be the primary way that people access it.
But because of the fact that you have taken these notes for 30 years you're able to use this in this different way which is essentially like take me through my own intellectual history and let me talk to the entire like course of learning that I've had over three decades remind me of things right or make new connections for me and that feels like the kind of augmentation that I truly have always wanted AI to give us right like that is the good stuff.
Right I'm glad you said that I mean that means a lot coming from you.
I think though I think there was an early tension in creating no book on which was the question of like how normal am I. You know we have this amazing college as a Martin who's the product manager who's been incredible is on it from the beginning and I think like you know she she was kind of like this has to work for people who don't collect 8000 quotations over 30 years of their lives right if it doesn't you know work for that.
So but I think one of the things that we've learned is you actually you know particularly in a digital age like you have you know you can import docs and slides. And so if you're a Google drive user the history of all the docs you have in there is actually a history of the last four or five years of things that you've been interested in and that you've been working on whatever your job is.
And so one of the things I often tell people with no book alarm is just the first thing to do is create a notebook if you are a drive user grab the last 20 docs in there and just don't even think about organizing just dump them all in even if they're for different
projects and just start having a conversation and the sense of oh this AI actually knows what I'm doing and understands what I've been working on and can piece together kind of you know insights from that is pretty is pretty amazing and by the way I should say you know when we do this we're not training the mom.
That was one of my questions is like I think a lot of people would say okay well if I upload a copy of my book or some documents that are personal to me is Google going to then be able to sort of see and train on that material. So what we are doing is not training the model that would take a long time to train a model on your data and it actually wouldn't for complicated reasons work as well as the way that we're doing it.
We're just taking the information you have and putting it in the model's context window which is kind of like the short term memory of the model it's the easiest way to understand it. The beauty of that is one the model is much more accurate with information in its context and so the hallucination rates drop down dramatically it can do things like citations that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise but it also means that the second you close
your session that information goes away and so there's no way for we're not learning from it we're not making the model smarter in the long run and there's no way for that information to kind of leak out into other users and that has been a fundamental principle of the product from the very beginning.
I hope you take this next thing that I'm about to say the right way because I do mean it as a compliment but notebook LM strikes me is an extremely ungoogly product right it is is probably not the kind of thing that's going to get a billion users which is how Google has historically decided what to build. I didn't have like a big splashy launch with ads running on the Olympics.
It's not sort of promoted on a bunch of other Google products as far as I can tell it has a discord server and the design of the actual tool just feels different than a lot of what Google has built in AI. It sort of feels to me like it might be this kind of isolated kind of semi autonomous region within Google that doesn't have that much contact with the rest of the company. Is that right? Well, that's an interesting question.
Some of that is right and some of that is a reflection of what labs set out to do right which is to like let's create a space where we can be more comfortable with being experimental and that enabled us to do some things like experiment with different types of interfaces that would not necessarily have the polish that you would expect from other Google official products. Discord is a great example.
We just wanted to build a community around it and I remember Riza coming to me and saying, I want to build a discord for this product and I said, what is a discord? I had no, my kids were a discord user, sorry, I had rang a bell but I had never been on discord before. Now I'm in there all the time and we have 45,000 people who are members of this community now and we just discover so many things from them.
No book is taking off with D&D players, like Dungeons and Dragons, like Dungeon Masters because they have, it's a very like literary genre of game, right? And you have these long campaigns with long. It's like rich lore. Yeah. It's anything with like fantasy novelists and sci-fi novelists where they have a backstory that's enormous and they can't keep track of it all. Like if George or Martin would adopt our product. We would have made it into our server. We would see the wins at winter.
Yes, maybe we can actually get a new book. I spent some time in the notebook LM discord. It's a very fun place because you get to sort of see how people are using it and sort of get ideas. I also love that there's one person in there who's just constantly posting about how they're using notebook LM to analyze a huge database of Sonic the Hedgehog fan fiction. Yeah. That's like, you know what? You're talking about it. They've been there for a while. It's really interesting.
They've found a lot of use cases for Sonic related work. And they're going to be on the show next week. But you know what? Kevin, I wanted to disagree with you about whether this is Google or not because I think this is like old school Google. And this is the Google I like. Like do you remember back in the day when the Googlers could just do anything they wanted in their 20% time? Yeah. It was a one day a week to be like hack around on something, right? Do something interesting.
To me, this is the sort of thing that would come out of 20% time where it's like, let's find some of the biggest, everyone at Google is a nerd, but let's find people who are nerdy about something really in particular that could be massively useful to maybe a narrow group of people. But maybe we find something in there that who knows does scale up to a billion people eventually. But maybe we should talk about the audio.
Yes, we have to talk about the audio feature because this is what really has put this tool on the map for a lot of people. This is an amazing feature. It was the first time I saw I did have a moment of AI vertigo and I think I emailed you and was like, oh my god, what is this thing? How is this feature so good? How does it work? What is it trained on? How did it learn? How to do podcast banter? Just tell us about this feature. Another great labs case study.
It was another team inside of labs that had basically developed a tool that would take any source material you wanted and generate an audio conversation that would sound it like to engage to entertaining people, having a conversation you may be familiar with this genre about whatever material you gave it. The two use cases that we were talking about in the early days was source material that no one would ever build a real podcast for.
Our Cain City Council meetings that no one, there's no economics in turning that into podcast or personalized learning where you're an auditory learner and you want to do a review of the week's assignment and you'd rather digest it in the form or you'd like to augment it with listening to a conversation because people remember better with conversations and they can do it on the go.
They had this incredible demo and the thing about it behind the scenes is that a lot of the breakthrough is actually the edit cycle. Behind the scenes it's basically running through stuff that we all do professionally all the time, which is it generates an outline. It kind of revises that outline. It generates a detailed version of the script and then it has a kind of critique phase and then it modifies it based on the critique.
It takes about four or five minutes to generate and this because it's going through all these different passes. You can call that like chain of thought reasoning or you could do, but when I saw it I was like no, no, that's an edit cycle. That's what you did a draft and then you revised it and then you got better over time. Are you taking notes? You could do this for your book. Go ahead, Stephen. And then at the end of it there's a stage where it adds my favorite new word which is disfluencies.
So it takes a kind of sterile script and turns, adds all the banter and the pauses and the likes, the followers. And that turns out to be crucial because you cannot listen to two robots talking to each other. No one, it would be just painful to listen to. I don't know. The Lex Freeman podcast is pretty popular, Stephen. Hey. Oh boy. So not even going to bring that up. Follow up on that. So that was crucial.
And then on top of that all there's some new voice technology which adds and really an incredible layer which is like figuring out without any coding in the script figuring out that this is a point that they are trying to emphasize. And so they are speaking more slowly or they're trying to imply that they're hesitating a little bit and so they're raising their intonation a little bit. All that stuff it does.
And having two people talking to each other like that, it just, it is one of those moments when I first heard it, I was like, this is incredible. And we were already, we were already, we'd rolled out these notebook guides that take your, all your documents and turn them into a briefing doc or an FAQ or a timeline which is incredibly useful for, you know, kind of writers. And so this was just like, oh, we can now do it in another form.
Like if maybe you want to take your sources and listen to a conversation about them. And so it just was a beautiful fit inside of notebook I'll am. And so we just have been scrambling all summer to get this out. And it's been really cool to see this. It's really awesome. I made a podcast about my new vacuum cleaner that I got by feeding it the user's manual PDF and how it pops this eight minute explanation of all the features of my new vacuum.
It's really cool. Okay. So I have a confession which is I am obsessed with this stuff and Stephen was very kind and gave me early access to this. But at the time I was getting ready for MetaConnect and some other things and I just did not have the time and attention to focus on it. But then when I found out when you were coming on the show, I thought, I am not going to listen to any of these until we're all in the room together. Oh my gosh.
And here's why because I've learned from YouTube that the most popular thing that you can do on YouTube is to hear something for the first time. So you know, I don't know if you've seen this, Kevin, but it's like, if you listen to Metallica for the first time on YouTube, you got a million views. Yeah. But I already listened to Metallica in high school. But then I'll do the next best thing and listen to the notebook LM audio. Okay. So all right.
So let's listen to a few examples of this audio feature. I have been playing around with this for a couple days now, having a lot of fun with it. So a lot of times in our work as journalists, we have to sort of make sense of a bunch of different documents, whether they're legal filings or what have you.
And so I was doing some research about Waymo and their self-driving cars and there have been a few studies that have come out recently about the safety data of these cars, of human drivers, sort of how how safe are Waymo's compared to human drivers. And it's got a really hot topic we've talked about on the show. Totally. Very controversial. But it's a little hard to understand. The data is a little mangled and they're just these papers are quite long.
And so this morning, I was going into the studio and I thought, I'm just going to dump a whole bunch of these PDFs of these studies into a notebook LM and generate a podcast that I can listen to on the way to the office and maybe get a sort of high level overview of what these studies have shown. So I want to play for you the first sort of 30 or so seconds of my Waymo data podcast. All right. I've ever seen one of those Waymo cars just cruising around with like no one behind the wheel.
I always wonder, is that thing safe? I mean, no offense to robots or anything. Right. Handing over the keys to a machine, it just feels different. Yeah. It does make you think about like trusting technology with our lives. Exactly. Especially when it's something as important as like driving, you know, totally. So that's what we're diving into today. The safety of those driverless Waymo's.
We've got a bunch of research lined up, including some really recent data to get past the headlines and figure out what's really going on. So that's amazing. That's one clip. That's amazing. It's really cool. Okay. Let's actually continue on for like minutes after that and sort of break down the data in these papers quite well from what I can tell. I also put in your latest platformer newsletter into this and had it generate a podcast about that.
So here's a clip from the platformer newsletter AI podcast. Speaking of risks, Newton's decision to leave sub stack. That was a risk, but it sounds like he's thinking long term. He is. He really is. Building a sustainable media business in this day and age. It's not easy. It takes more than just great content. You need smart business decisions too. It's a balancing act, right? You've got to stay true to your vision, but also make sure you can keep the lights on.
And Newton's been very open about platformers finances, about the challenges that come with going independent. Transparency builds trust. And these days, trust is invaluable. And let's be real, leaving a platform like sub stack. And one with its problems, it's going to come with some financial growing pains. For sure. It's like jumping off a cliff and hoping you can build your wings on the way down. I like these people. They're smart people. They know what they're talking about.
Yeah, they're big fans of you. The last clip I want to play, I was just sort of thinking like, how esoteric can I get here? Like, what can I make a podcast about using notebook LM? So I uploaded my most recent credit card statement to notebook LM and had it try to make an AI podcast about some of the things that I've been spending my money on. And so this is the most recent credit card statement that I got in podcast form. I love it. Okay, let's see. I'm noticing a pattern here.
Quite a few Uber rides between August 8th and September 9th. Yeah, and that's something to consider, right? Especially if you live in an area with readily available public transportation or bike for any routes, you're so much easier. For sure they do. I mean, for example, let's say an average Uber ride costs you $20 and you're taking four of those a week. Well, that's $320 a month. Think about it. That's money that could be going to other things, other financial goals. Yeah, absolutely.
Small changes can make a big difference. Yeah. It really told me to get my ass on the bus. It's like a financial advisor in your pocket. Truly. So this blew my mind. What's your reaction to this? It really is extraordinary. Again, I knew we were going to do this today. I wanted to wait until this moment to hear it. But in the meantime, I was seeing so many folks on social media saying you have to listen to this. It is so eerily good. My mind is already alive with a problem.
I have it, which is because we do a podcast. We often talk to the authors of books. And often we decide we want to talk to them a week before. And I got a PDF in my inbox, and now I have seven days to read it. And it's incredibly difficult. If I could listen to a podcast about it, I would love it. Now, I realize how painful that's going to be to hear for every author if you do exist. But if it makes information more accessible, I want to try it.
And probably people will make podcasts about a lot of the books that we talk about in the show. But no one's going to make a podcast about my credit card statement or the policies and my kids daycare or something like that. So it's a really interesting way to sort of transform these sort of more esoteric documents. I mean, once I heard about your profil at Uber spending, I do kind of want to do a podcast about your spending habits, but go on.
Well, I think actually that one was really interesting because one, it's ability to figure out a way to rationalize a podcast is amazing. We would give it kind of internal notebook, alarm documents. And they would be like, well, it's really exciting. You've gotten our hands on some internal documents from Google. And they just, they want to turn it into something that's interesting. But you could hear there is an interesting thing. They are generally instructed to be enthusiastic and engaged.
So one thing people are doing is putting their CVs and resumes in there. And they're like, John Smith, I mean, what an amazing career he's had. I mean, it's just advice president at the bank. That's impressive. But what happened there, apparently, because your Uber writing is so excessive, was an interesting suggested mode, which is critique. Right. So you can imagine a future version, which is like, I actually, I want some tough love here. Like, here's the thing I'm working on.
Like, talk me through like what the problems are. I want to hear that. And that could be something that really. And it's amazing because I didn't give it any prompt. Yeah. I didn't say criticize my spending on Uber. It was literally just make a podcast out of my credit cards. Yes. I uploaded the PDF. I pushed a button. I waited a couple minutes. I listened to this podcast and it had pulled out some details and spending patterns from my credit card statement. It's just incredible.
Are we seeing the seeds of our demise as podcasts? Or is it like in a segment? Well, that was the second thing I was going to say, which is that they're instructed to, and my mind is kind of changing on this as users are experimenting with it more. But they're instructed to be fun and engaging. And I listened to dozens and dozens and hundreds of these, you know, as it was in development over the summer. And they were always fun and engaging the banter and all that stuff.
I never once heard them be funny. I never once laughed. And I thought about, you know, since you've been saying so many nice things about me, I thought about hard fork, which I laughed at out loud all the time when I listened to you guys. And it occurred to me like, oh, the one thing interestingly that the models, they're so good at so many things, so almost, you know, superhuman and some of their abilities. But they can't yet be funny in this way. So, you know, who knows?
Obviously, being able to push it in directions and give it some guidance is something we're getting a lot of requests for. Yeah. I would expect you to see that. Yeah, you could also imagine being able to sort of pick like, do you want this to be a two person sort of hosted podcast? Or do you want it to be just one person? Do you want someone to, one of the hosts to be like super annoying? And like always interrupting. You could call that Casey mode if you wanted to. That's a free idea.
I think we should do Kevin's credit card statement, but as a true crime serial, you know. So do you do any kind of moderation on what people are uploading into notebook LM could someone upload, you know, a mine comp and make an AI podcast about it? So there's, there's basic safety low level safety that Google has that will block really offensive things from happening.
And basically what we've the kind of the latest version of it, when there is politically charged content from either left or the right, the hosts are instructed to take a neutral kind of reporting tone and to basically say, we're not taking sides in this. We're just reporting what is in these sources. And we feel like that's kind of the best way to do it. And so there's kind of an extra instruction for them to make that clear if it seems like it's politically charged in some kind of way.
Yeah, I did actually try making an AI podcast about mine comp that wasn't hypothetical. And what happened? It did it, but it was like, it was very judgmental at the top. It was like, we're going to talk today about mine comp a book about how Hitler became such a monster, which I actually thought was good. Which is like actually how we teach history, by the way. Yes. You know, people do read mine comp in history classes, but someone's up there telling them that it was bad.
Totally. But in Google's press release about this feature, there was a brief mention of some other features that might be on the horizon for notebook LM, including the ability to generate overviews podcasts in a language other than English. And the ability to actually take part in the conversation yourself to sort of interrupt the host of this AI generated podcast, maybe ask a follow up question about something they just said. How far away do you think those things are?
They're actively working on both of them. I would expect some version of them to be in the next few months. We actually just a week allowed you to input audio as a source to. So now you can go like this kind of classic format. In the student use case, you go record your lecture, take handwritten notes, just at the most important things.
And then you go back to notebook, upload the audio lecture, and then basically say, take my little high level summary and expand it based on the full text of the lecture. So I can really just write down the most important things and let the model fill in all the details based on the recording. And then take that and turn that into a podcast or I can review it at the gym like that. Sort of workflow like I would be thinkable. I would be so good at college if I went to college today.
I mean, truly, I truly think that I could be at the top of my class. And by being good at college, I mean, you would just be using AI or do all your work. I would be using AI to augment my natural human abilities, Kevin. Something I suggest you try. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, no, seriously, like we really see this as a tool for understanding things, right? Like you have word processors help you create a document and Photoshop helps you, you know, just pixels in an image.
This is a tool that helps you understand things. And like if you are trying in good faith to understand the material as a student or as a knowledge worker as a writer, whatever it is, like this is a tool that should really help you do that better. Yeah. What's next for you personally? Are you going to stick around at Google and build some more stuff? Are you yearning for the solitary life of a writer again? I am not yearning. I am really enjoying this. And there's so much to build.
And to be in the middle, you know, the most important technological change of my life, working with really interesting people on this thing that I've always wanted. Like I would kind of be an idiot to stop now. Yeah, also the snacks are way better at Google. We will go up here. All right. Stephen Johnson, thanks so much for coming up. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks guys. We're going to come back.
Well, I have been so focused on Meta Connect this week that I have not been keeping up with the tech headlines as well as I should have. And that made me feel like this would be the perfect time to play a game of Hatchy PT. Yes. Now, Hatchy PT, of course, is our game where we take headlines from the news. We riff on them a bit. And when one of us gets bored, we say to the other person, hey, stop generating. Yes. So shall we begin? Let's do it. Okay, Kevin, this is a big one.
Open AI CTO, Mira Murati, just announced that she's leaving the company. So as we stepped into the booth today, we saw this one come over the liars. Mira Murati, of course, the chief technology officer of Open AI announced that she was leaving after six and a half years. She posted a note online that said after much reflection, I made the difficult decision to leave Open AI, adding there's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes yet this moment feels right.
Now, Kevin, I always feel like in corporate teams, the phrase, there's never an ideal time to step away. I get into English means I know that I'm leaving at a terrible time. Do you feel that way? I thought it meant I got fired. Well, I am very confident that Mira Murati did not get fired. Yeah, I don't think she got fired either in part because she's not the only person who left this week.
A few hours after Mira made her announcement to other senior leaders at Open AI also announced they were leaving open AI's chief research officer Bob McGrew and a vice president of research Barrett Zoff like Mira, they both sort of gave vague explanations for why they were leaving, like wanting to explore new opportunities and take a break. So whatever is happening, it seems like a very big deal. Look, it is.
I mean, I have had people very close to the company inside Open AI who says, you know, when Sam Altman is out there being the AI diplomat to the entire world, traveling the globe, raising money for his chip projects and everything else. Mira is the one who is overseeing the company's roadmap and really handling all the day-to-day operations. So, you know, on one hand, this does feel pretty shocking. But on the other hand, I don't think we can say that we are surprised.
These are just the latest and a wave of people to leave. I would not be surprised if Mira started her own AI company. She says she's stepping away because quote, I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration and whatever that exploration turns out to be, I'm sure, Andrew Sinhora which will offer her $100 million for it.
Yeah, I mean, it's just really remarkable how much this company has changed in the past year to, there was a photo that sort of became semi-iconic of the sort of leadership of Open AI. I think sitting on a couch together and it was Sam Altman, Muramorati, Greg Brockman and Ilya Satskiver. That was sort of the highest ranking leadership of this company just a year ago. And now Ilya Satskiver has left the company, Muramorati has left the company. Greg Brockman is out on an extended leave.
So of that group of four, it is just Sam Altman who is there as of now. What do you think is happening here? What's the real story? Well, you know, I was, my boyfriend is reading a book about the history of Silicon Valley right now and he just shared this passage with me about the rise of the semi-conductor industry and one of the first big semi-conductor manufacturers was Fairchild. And it was a very similar situation to Open AI.
So many people left Fairchild and started their own Silicon companies that they were known as the Fair Children and the companies that they created are the reason that we wound up calling this Silicon Valley. So if you view the rise of AI as kind of a tectonic shift in the technology landscape, we might be seeing the same thing here where Open AI really was one of the biggest incubators for this technology and one by one, all of those co-founders said, you know what?
I bet I could do it a little bit better, do it a little more my way and make a little bit more money if I did it somewhere else. So you think this is about her wanting to do her own thing? I have some questions here. Obviously, we'll wait to hear more about if any more reporting comes out about why Muramorati has left the company.
But I also saw another story today about Open AI that made me think that it might be related, which is that they are reportedly working to transition to a traditional for-profit company. Right now, as we know, Open AI is governed by the board of a non-profit. So this transition would basically do away with that. The non-profit would be a separate entity and would only hold a minority stake in the sort of conventional for-profit company.
So I just wonder if part of this is just this is not the kind of project that these people signed up for back when Open AI was founded. Which gives them all the more reason to leave and start their own thing. Right? Like if those stories do, why do it being related? I feel very confident. Muramorati will be working on AI once again very soon. And as we know, Open AI has said that it no longer punishes whistleblowers by withholding their equity after they leave the company.
So Muramorati, your invitation to Hartford is wide open. We've got a spot for you next week. All right. Stop generating. This next story is a double back pedal. And there are two stories on this slip. One of them is about Elon Musk's ex backing down in Brazil after defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks. That way, when you say Elon Musk's ex backing down in Brazil, are you referring to Grimes? No, okay. X the company. Oh, yeah, that's normally known as Twitter.
Twitter defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks X has capitulated in a court filing last Friday. X's lawyers said that the company had complied with orders from the Brazilian Supreme Court in hopes that the court would lift a block on its site. That is a sharp reversal in its bent weeks, insisting that it would not back down and then it back down. Okay. That's story number one.
Story number two in the same vein is about Telegram, another company that we've talked about on the show very recently. Telegram CEO Darov says app to provide more data to governments. The story comes from Bloomberg. Basically, after insisting that it wouldn't do this, it wouldn't give out data to governments in response to legal requests. Paul Valdirov, the chief executive officer of Telegram, said that Telegram will now provide users IP addresses and phone numbers to relevant authorities.
Okay. See, what do you think about these two stories? Well, first of all, I think they're related. Second of all, the Telegram story has made me realize that Paul Valdirov and I have something in common, can we? What? Well, we both came to profound realizations while sitting in a French prison. Have you ever taken time out of a French prison? No. I stole a little for bread to feed my family. I think I saw a play about that. Yeah, it was a very good musical. But look, here's the deal.
What I think we've really learned here is that after a long period of countries trying to reign in tech platforms through passing laws and passing regulations, we're now moving in to what I like to call the prison phase where Supreme courts and law enforcement officers are going out there and they're saying, you are either going to listen to us and you're going to obey the sovereignty of our country or we're going to throw your executives in jail or we're just going to ban the whole platform.
So this is a real ratcheting up. And for all of the big talk that Paul Valdirov and Elon Musk have done over the past year about how they were in a fight for free speech. When push came to shove, they were not willing to spend the rest of their lives in jail. All right, stop generating. Kevin, meet the auto-cato and a robotic burrito bull maker at these Orange County Chipotle locations. Now, this story is very personal to me because I grew up in Orange County.
And according to the Los Angeles Times, robots that fully flesh out avocados and build burrito bulls are now making food for customers at two Chipotle Mexican grill restaurants in Southern California as automation and artificial intelligence continue to enter the fast food industry and raise feeders about the supplanting of workers and Kevin. I'm told the auto-cato can cut core and peel avocados in 26 seconds on average. How does that compare to your avocado technique?
Wow. I'm pretty fast with an avocado, but I will say I don't hate this because I recently learned that cutting avocados is the cause of many trips to the emergency room. Is that right? I think men is one of the leading reasons that people cut their hands in the kitchen because you know when people are cutting avocados, sometimes they hold the split the avocado in half, the hold a half, and then they'll cut it while it's in their other hand.
And many times my friend who had injured themselves this way was saying people will just cut through the skin of the avocado into their hand and have to go to the ER. Well, that means that's why there's that saying make guacamole cut a little holy. And that's how you're supposed to remember to be careful. So what do you think about the automatic robot nature of what's happening to Chipotle?
So obviously I would be worried if I was a Chipotle worker, but I think in some spiritual sense, like Chipotle is already kind of this like slurry that people just sort of shovel into their mouth, like their horses at a trough. It's a conveyor belt for beans and rice. Yes. So I don't mind this.
I will be interested to see if they can actually automate more parts of the Chipotle process because this is just one part of the assembly process, but I have to imagine that Chipotle and many other fast food chains are working on using robots for things like flipping burgers. Here's my here's my prediction. If you've ever vintage Chipotle, you know one thing and that is that guac is extra, right? You know this. You want to get guacamole on anything you're going to have to pay up.
I think in the future at Chipotle, humans are going to be extra, right? You can either go to the avocado and you can get it cheaper, but okay, you want that burrito made with you, the love of a human being. That's going to cost you about another two bucks. I'm not sure the burritos are made with the love of a human being today. All right. Stop shattering. Okay. Okay. Next up, oh, this one's a talker. This was all over my feeds yesterday.
Mark Hes Brownley says, I hear you after fans criticize his new wallpaper app. So this is from the verge. Casey, you'll remember former hard forecast. Mark Hes Brownley, aka MKBHD, the famous YouTube tech reviewer. He launched a wallpaper app called Panels this week as part of his iPhone 16 review. The app was criticized for its price. Subscription to this app costs $50 a year or $12 a month.
And people were very skeptical that any app for wallpaper for your iPhone could be worth that much money. And the app also asked to track user activity across other websites and location data. Mark Hes sort of backtracked a little bit. For example, he said they were going to fix the excessive data disclosures. So Casey, what did you make of this? This was a big deal. Well, it made me really worried about the upcoming launch of the first official hard fork product, which is a bag of rusty nails.
You know, like looking at how this app was received, I thought Kevin, we're going to be in for it. But you know, look, I really like Mark Hes. I have a lot of respect for him. I think he's like built something really incredible over there. But you know, two things come to mind. One is when you are a critic and when you are a tough critic, anybody you criticize is going to be out there waiting for you with long knives.
And I think Mark Hes arguably published the most critical reviews of his entire career this year. He he trashed the humane AI pin, the rabbit R1 AI gadget and also an electric car. And he really sort of built up a reputation for himself as somebody who was really hard at other people's products. So when you release your product, if it is not absolutely polished and dialed, you're going to hear it. The other thing I've been thinking about is just this is actually an indictment of YouTube, right?
Because even though, you know, YouTube does share a certain amount of revenue with creators, even the most popular creators there, none of them ever just are content with the money they make there. They feel like in order to be able to live their lives, they have to get into these brand deals. My friend, Neely Patel, over at the verge says at the end of the day, every YouTube creator has to turn themselves into a miniature advertising agency, right? And so it's pushing people like Marquez.
And it's not like this in other medium, right? Like Wolf Blitzer is not out there hawking ringtones. Right, right, right. He doesn't have to because he makes enough money from his day job. And I've got to think that if YouTube was giving people like Marquez who are among the most successful people on that platform, you know, enough ad revenue to support whatever their plans and ambitions are, they wouldn't have to go doing all these side projects.
Yeah. And I'll look, you know, maybe some of them would do it anyway. And you know, certainly I'm sure some individual creators are just sort of greedy. And I don't want to totally let creators off the hook who go out and, and, and you know, produce subpar products. And it does seem like this was a really subpar product. But, you know, to me, the more interesting story about this is like, what is the actual YouTube economy? And the truth is it's pretty bad.
You talk to particularly anybody who's running more than a one person operation on YouTube, how it's going. And pretty much the best thing that they'll tell you is that it's going about break even. But there are a lot of people losing money out there on YouTube. And so when I see something like this, I just think, yeah, this is really kind of a YouTube story too. It made me think about the other big sort of YouTube brand extension fiasco, which was the Mr. Beast Burger Empire.
Yeah. You know, I still have indigestion thinking about the Beast Burger right that one time. So Mr. Beast, for those of you who don't remember this, he launched a line of burger restaurants that were basically sort of ghost kitchens that would all sort of make these burgers and put Mr. Beast's branding on them and send them out. And many of them got very bad reviews. There was very poor quality control on these burgers. And it ended up being a pretty big stain on Mr. Beast's reputation.
No one thought that he was cooking the burgers himself. But I think this really is the flip side of the parasocial relationship. Is that a burger joke? Oh, that didn't mean it is one. But now that you mention it, I think the one thing that people really love about YouTube are these parasocial relationships that fans get to have with their creators where they trust them more than you would trust someone on the evening news telling you something because they seem authentic.
Maybe they're filming in their bedrooms or somewhere that's very personal. Maybe they're sharing more intimate details from their life. You end up sort of feeling like you know this person. You trust them. And so when someone on YouTube sort of leads you astray or recommends a product that maybe doesn't live up to your expectations, it really makes you sort of question them as a whole. And I think that's what Marquez has stepped into here.
And so I think he'll recover from this. He's obviously got a long body of work on YouTube. And I think he will, you know, he will make this right. But I think it just shows how fragile these parasocial relationships can be. We've probably already talked about this too long, but I do want to say one more thing about this app because as bad as it is, I do actually want to stand up for the idea of paying people for their art.
Right. And one thing that I think this app got right was at least they said that they were going to share the proceeds of the app 50, 50 with the artist. And if you are worried that AI is about to put every human artist out of work and app that comes along and says, we're going to share that money with artists. I think it's at least worth asking yourself whether some of those artists deserve a living wage, right?
And that at the end of the day, 50 bucks isn't that much to pay to, you know, keep somebody's lights on at their house. Yeah. Yeah. Are you a wallpaper guy to use wallpapers? Um, I, I change it like two or three times a year, but like, you know, is it just a photo of my face? Yeah. I'm going to get them someday. All right. Stop turning. He's produced by Rachel Kohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're Facts Jack by Caitlin Love.
Today's show was engineered by Daniel Ramirez, original music by Alicia McGee YouTube, Marion Luzano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galote. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard for it. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Quewing Tam, Dalia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardforth at nytimes.com.
Maybe take the transcript of this podcast and put it into a notebook at labmen. See what kind of podcast it makes. No, don't do that. What if it's better than us? We'll end this video later!