# Meta's AI Pivot, Data Center Wars, and AI Safety Risks

**Podcast:** Pivot
**Published:** 2026-08-11

## Transcript

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Meta got mad at us 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...
Scott, three August.
Yes, while Scott continues his gallivanting, apparently he's in Nantucket with Caitlin Collins.
I have brought in some excellent co-hosts, Kevin Roos, New York Times tech columnist and author of the AGI Chronicles, and Casey Newton, founder and editor of 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.
Kevin, tell them what's happening.
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.
Aha, a startup, shall we say.
So founderitis 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.
So they didn't throw you out like right away because they were pissed at me.
No, we have sort of this lame duck period that we're in now.
And no, we have some business to finish up.
We have some more episodes to do.
And then we're going to have this little media company and podcast ready to go in just a couple of weeks.
Two things.
Do you get to take Hard Fork with you?
I know the answer to this, but I'm going to have you answer it.
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.
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.
So what is the new brand?
Do you have a name?
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...
That might be taken by Pivot.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's our sub name.
We'll have a name ready to go pretty soon, but we can sort of tell you about the general philosophy.
All right.
Tell us about the general philosophy.
So Casey 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.
Crazy.
Is that your technological determination?
Yeah, that is the academic term for what is going on right now.
All right.
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.
Yeah, I do think Hard Fork let us down on that.
But go ahead.
Keep going.
We're part of the problem.
And now we're going to be part of the solution, damn it.
OK, good.
OK.
All right.
So so it's going to cover what, AI?
Will it be some goofy AI term?
So it is not going to be.
a goofy AI term, because 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 going to do.
What did you reject?
Like, you know.
Compiler was like one that I thought was particularly bad that I came up with.
Yeah, okay.
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.
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 reason.
It probably was.
There just aren't that many.
terms.
Yeah, 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're only coming out once a week.
There are a lot of stories that we miss.
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.
Yeah, let the dogs out.
Good.
So twice a week and two.
Oh, interesting.
And Kara, Casey and I have a question to ask of you.
Sure, sure.
So the last time we started a podcast, Casey and I together.
Yes, I am your inspiration.
That is true.
Go ahead.
It was a little rocky.
I don't know if your listeners remember.
There was a period where you accused us of stealing your feed.
Not accused.
We didn't get off to a good start on the last show.
Factually correct.
No, you didn't do it.
The New York Times did it.
But you went along as acquiescent quibbles.
But go ahead.
Well, you've been such a great mentor.
to us and such an 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.
Kara, will you be the pod mother of our new podcast?
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.
Okay, now you did just sign up to co-host the show if one of us gets hit by a bus.
Oh, fine.
That's okay.
I have 90 shows now.
I don't know if you know that.
That's part of the term.
I mean, 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.
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 long time.
Yeah, 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.
There's really no downside.
You can always go back, 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 lunch.
I want to say it was like eight months into us, 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.
Like you're just sort of like for like basically from the jump.
You're like, all right, you've proven your point.
Now go start a company.
Yes, yes, you have.
I did.
Good.
They're going to blame me some more.
Thank you for that.
We should say 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.
No, no, no.
I had an interesting discussion with I think it was Carolyn.
and 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 make it harder to figure it out.
But I was like, there's got to be a way you all embrace creators in a way that it's different.
Like, I don't know the broader term, influence is 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...
You will have more impact what you're doing.
You will.
You absolutely will.
If you keep up the excellence that you had with hard work.
Well, thank you for the vote of confidence.
No problem.
I'm glad that name is going.
It had a vaguely sexual feeling that I didn't feel uncomfortable.
Wait until you hear our next one.
It's even more sexual.
Yeah.
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 for being sexual on hard work.
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?
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.
And 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.
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?
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
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 weights.
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 the Times or the Journal.
Which one did he put it in?
The Times, right?
I think it was the Journal.
I mean, look, I'm writing about this today, and the headline is probably going to be super intelligence is not a toy.
I found this to be an almost childlike essay about what AI 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, you know, I watched the House of Dragons finale last night, and this is like if sort of one of the Lords of Westeros 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.
Yeah, so you didn't like it.
You weren't loving it.
You're loving it.
I thought it was just sort of facile and self-serving.
As usual.
Kevin, thoughts?
I mean, I think he's talking his book, right?
He is not, 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 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.
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, you know, 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.
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, Kara, is that after he goes on about, you know, the need to decentralize power and checks and balances to 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 centers as secretly as possible, and then writing essays about how the future is for everyone.
Yeah, I know.
What is it, Kevin, from your perspective?
Because 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 go, it's 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, Kara.
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 Westerners, a geopolitical with other companies?
I mean, I think Mark Zuckerberg is an 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 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'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.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Do you, 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- Did you see the video of him fighting the MMA guy on a lake?
Yes, that's on a, like a thing.
I like that mark better.
I'm like, okay, that's a good mark.
I love that video because like, you can tell the MMA guy is going at about 30%.
30%, right.
But he has to sort of pretend like Zuck has really given it to him, you know?
Yeah, I know.
It reminds me of wrestling with my four-year-old.
I'm like, oh, oh!
Yeah, that was interesting.
I've never seen someone so unsettled with themselves in that regard.
I don't mind fighting Mark and showing it off and showing his chest.
I'm okay with that.
I get that guy.
This one I don't get as much.
And I think it's because 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 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 to $942 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 light 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 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 there was the end of it, really, pretty much.
So are they better protected through cases?
one national law.
Where are we on this?
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.
What about you, Kevin?
I mean, I remember Mark Benioff, an interview with me, called him a cigarette company.
Before he decided to be a suck up, he was actually quite on it early.
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, subsidy.
Yeah, I think it's interesting sort of where 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 Amendment 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, you know, that's the salary they're paying one AI researcher over there.
So it's not going to break the bank for them.
That's their argument to me.
They're like, oh, it's smaller than they asked for.
I'm like, this is not a good direction.
Right.
Right.
But I think, you know, $1.4 trillion, now you're talking real money.
But even if, you know, it's smaller than that, 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.
And where does it end up?
Both of you, where do you think this ends up?
I mean, 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 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 NeoCloud 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.
And it just sort of clouds all their future AI stuff too.
Like the meta glasses.
I have my problematic trait.
is I like them.
And I have a pair.
Well, you're a pervert.
You're a well-known creepy pervert.
Yeah, well-known pervert.
But like now people are calling them pervert glasses and I have to stop wearing them.
So, you know, this is like- Because they're pervert glasses.
Do you see the people online, they're singing Disney songs because Disney, like, so they can't post them.
Oh, like when someone is filming you with the glasses, you start singing copyrighted material.
Yeah, you start to do Frozen or whatever.
It's very clever.
Yeah, yeah.
Isn't it?
Yeah.
I like it.
That explains why people are constantly singing Frozen songs around me.
Or Taylor Swift.
She'll come right out.
She'll reach to those glasses and knock them off your fucking face.
What are they going to do about it?
Because this is like Google's with search.
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.
I mean, this is going to be a long, slow bleed out in the same way that tobacco 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.
Their 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.
I think it's more complicated than we probably have time to get into here.
In terms of like the hierarchy of seriousness, I would put OpenAI number one and then Anthropic, Meta-AI sort of distance 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.
All right.
OK, but misaligned is my favorite word that they put instead of just like.
you know, scary fuckers is how I would look at it.
Right.
And more and more people are calling them that now.
Scary fuckers.
Misalignment is the technical term for scary fuckers.
Scary fuckers.
So what do you, Kevin, how do you look at this?
This keeps happening over and over again.
It's really bad.
Like the, not this particular meta one.
I think that's, as Casey was saying, like less of a big deal.
But 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 alignment community 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 salt thing and 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 and destructive things.
Like humans do.
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 do.
to, you know, lie and steal and murder.
Yeah, that works.
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.
Can I ask, Christian, you had a famous essay, obviously, where you were...
You were having a relationship with your AI.
How is it from that?
What would you write today if you were writing that piece?
So the thing that really scared me about the Sydney essay, the Sydney, what is this, Microsoft Bing chatbot?
What year was this?
This was...
This was...
Right, okay.
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 like the fourth or fifth generation of this becomes capable of like taking actions on the Internet?
Like what if instead of just- Cutting your wife's breaks or something like that.
Yes, or draining her bank account or yeah, like doing something really nefarious in pursuit of 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 chat bot 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, like create novel viruses.
And so like the more autonomous and agentic you make these things, the more powerful they are, the scarier it gets.
Without any government, anybody having any control over them, correct?
Because they will do that.
That is what they're designed to do.
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 voluntary testing regime.
But if you just want to build your own model and let it go nuts on the Internet yourself, you're welcome to.
So what happens?
Who is going to intervene here?
I think 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 going to open source everything forever.
So 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.
What is the worst case scenario, Kevin, from your perspective?
Human extinction.
That'd be pretty bad.
That, okay.
They talked about, you know, dinner parties 10, 15 years ago, this is exactly what they talked about.
They understood.
And the thing is, they were right.
Yeah.
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 stories that'll never happen.
And now it's happening.
The best thing to do is not- I went back and re-watched War Games earlier this year.
They did a screening in San Francisco.
Incredible movie.
And seriously, I don't know that you could make a better movie about AI safety than that movie.
I would agree.
It's like, you know, of course, teaching a tic-tac-toe is not going to stop it at this point, right?
It's true.
Yeah.
Ah, the game is stupid.
Ah, 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.
Yes.
War Games 2.
Let's relight it.
War Games 2.
What happens?
We're all dead.
Anyway, all right, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back, data center wars related.
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Casey and Kevin, we're back.
Amazon is investing in a massive natural gas burning power plant to support a new AI data center in Texas.
It could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the country.
The project comes as the fight over data centers intensifies.
Trump is pretty bullish, recently criticizing Texas for pausing grid connections for new data centers.
He called the move a mistake and said data centers could be, quote, bigger than oil.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the pause so regulators can review power demands and the impact on 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 Brockovich 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 of 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, Michigan, 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 center is 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.
pushback, 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?
I think it's it's 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 lab 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 to local communities and $50,000 bonuses to teachers.
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 construction of new data centers.
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?
Yeah, 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 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 taxpayers who want to see 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.
I think it's actually most people are against it.
Like, it's very interesting.
The mayor was really interesting because they tried 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, 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 Brockovich, because she's famous for that, but the woman from Virginia, from Utah, reasonable people who are furious.
Like, it was really interesting, kind of dined out on information and really do know their stuff, whether it's 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 jobs.
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 the solution for tech companies to do?
Now, Mark is trying to do this by, here, have 50, 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 had created all kinds of problems there.
What is the solution, like, besides removing these people from visuals?
What?
I mean, I can 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 going to be a massive PR campaign designed to get people to believe that data centers are good for them.
And I'm just pretty skeptical.
Like ignore your third ear.
We're going to back the softball team.
Yeah, I have an idea.
Can I submit my idea?
Submit your idea.
Okay.
Picture this, a data center, it's got millions of these chips humming away, throwing off all kinds of heat.
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?
Don't you think that would make these things more popular?
Free spa, interesting.
How can they pay for the spa if they don't have jobs?
It's free.
This is part of the package.
Free spa.
So free must quit massage.
Yeah, we're going to put a data center.
It might, you know, cause environmental damage in your community.
No worries.
But free spa.
Everyone loves a spa.
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 presumably put it in places where nobody's living, although there's all sorts of environmental concerns anywhere they go.
What will happen here?
What shove is going to come to push?
from your perspective?
I mean, the push that is coming to shove right now is that something like 71% of Americans are opposed to new data center construction.
So that just is going to slow the build out of data centers in the country.
Now, some people will say it won't matter because U.S.
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 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 see why- Which they have tried to change.
They're not going to, they've tried to say they're going to help us make recipes with our children.
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 beggars belief, at least to me.
Right, right.
So, Kevin, 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.
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 OK with data centers and they are 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 built 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.
You like Tennessee offering to be Hollywood because of the Paramount merger thing, right?
Because everyone wants.
Polly wouldn't have a C because that's the sexiest place on earth.
So one of the things that's also happening is more and more companies are pushing back against AI slop.
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 feature that let users modify photos from public accounts with AI.
That feature was removed after a backlash.
Where are we with AI slop?
And obviously, so are 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.
I like to call this the third Arab 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 you're Substack or you're 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 sub stack.
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.
I think 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 best human in that field.
And I don't think we're there yet.
Like, I think these models are still pretty bad at things like creative writing.
But we're starting to see signs that, like, 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.
You know, 14 publishers bid on this novel.
It sells for $2.4 million.
And then it's...
It's like people start looking into it.
It turns out it's, at least according to the critics, it's 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.
Right, I would agree.
I like some of it.
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 a thing to rescue people in the ocean.
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.
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 wouldn't care.
If 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 don't.
No, no.
I don't, it's fine as long as I know it.
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 could be pretty fun.
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 creative tools are.
Cool and fun.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, one of the, 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.
Like, and no one's going to write them.
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 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.
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.
should we pay for their health care is a really good debate.
Like, is a good debate to have as a nation.
But one of the, I don't, not if I know, not if they, I would like them to label them better.
That's the one thing is I mostly know when it's AI or just assume it's AI until proven otherwise.
Maybe they should label the authentic content.
Probably smaller, a smaller group of stuff, I would assume.
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.
I scanned my eyeballs in the orb.
Did you get the orb scan?
Not yet.
No, did you scan your eyeballs?
I did.
I'm a verified human.
I've gazed into the orb.
That's right.
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 it could it 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 open AI and Sam showed it to me 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 if 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.
Hi everybody, it's Megan Rapinoe.
I've been thinking a lot about this one question I've been asked over and over.
A question about the choices I've made, the colors of my hair, the things in the world I've spoken about and the things that I haven't.
I've heard this question asked so many different ways, but it always came down to, why are you like this?
And as you know, there's no simple answer because people are not simple.
We're messy and complicated and contradictory and layered.
So on my new show, I'm sitting down with the ultimate disruptors, the athletes, the artists, the activists, and the architects of our culture who looked at the way things were and asked, Why do we do it like this?
And can we do it differently?
My hope is to give us a little more space to that question and to the person on the other side of the mic.
Not to tell us their answer or read from their script, but to take us on their journey.
Check out my new show, Why Are You Like This?
on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app.
New episodes drop every Thursday.
Democratic socialists keep winning primary races.
In Michigan, Abdel al-Sayed, not in the DSA, but endorsed by them, just won a fiercely fought Senate primary.
President Trump appears worried enough about the DSA to have started conflating some things.
I would be the greatest communist in history.
I'd be right up.
Free rent for the rest of your life.
What they don't say is that you'll be living in squalor.
12 months.
The Trump administration has raised the specter of the far left in various ways during Trump's second term.
But the recent arrest of an American communist in Spain, what year is it?
At the request of the American government is a more concrete step.
Coming up on Today Explained from Vox, real communist threat or new red scare?
Today Explained drops every weekday.
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.
It will 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 Johnny Ives Studio and will 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.
Talk a little bit about this device.
Now, there was a tiny...
There was, was it Google that had the tiny hockey puck thing or was it?
I can't remember who put that out.
Well, Amazon has the Echo Dot, which is kind of.
Yeah, it looks like a hockey puck, right?
That's Amazon, which Alex threw into the garbage.
But go ahead.
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 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.
Kevin 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 going to be way better than Alexa.
Everything I've read about this device so far makes me feel like it's Alexa.
That's right.
It's a smarter Alexa, right?
Essentially.
And carrying it around, Kevin.
Yeah, I cannot wait to lose this thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm so excited to go through between two and three of these a year or like accidentally put it in the 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.
Do you want this?
Do you want to have this hockey puck?
Yes.
I mean, look, my household, my...
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, you know, 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, you know, weather stuff.
It like is worse at all of it.
And so if OpenAI can somehow figure out how to like be the dependable alarm in my bedroom and tell me, you know, stuff that like let me interact with my coding agents, like 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.
Wait, what do you mean?
It's going to crawl over to your face and eat it?
I don't know.
Maybe it'll, you know, it'll decide I don't want to be in the bedroom anymore.
There's too much crazy stuff going on in here.
It's going to have like a prehensile tail and claws.
I know.
Doesn't it feel like that?
It feels like a movie, like Megan.
Remember the Megan movie?
I just don't, I'm sorry.
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.
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?
The Rabbit R1.
There have been these like AI.
There's like the friend pendant.
I think the manufacturers 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.
Yeah, it has to be AirPods.
I just 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, or maybe it's in your house, like the house itself speaks to you.
Maybe not.
I'm excited for when people start like disguising their open AI 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.
It's just my lucky hockey puck.
I carry it everywhere.
So let me get clear.
Casey will not be having one and Kevin, you will embrace it with the love, the great love that you have.
I will make up for Casey's rejection of this technology by buying and losing between three and four of them a year.
I will probably get one.
If it's 300 bucks, I'll...
probably 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.
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.
I see.
And so this is like a very exciting development for me.
I like that drains your bank accounts is your favorite thing.
Here's my question.
If you take the OpenAI device into the bedroom and then after a couple of months, say, rate my sexual performance and give me tips, will it do that or will that be a violation of content policies?
Well, if you asked it, right?
Interesting to think about.
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.
I am.
I do know that.
Carrie, you have to understand that a big part of co-hosting a podcast with Casey is just polite laughing at some of his jokes.
See, I am lucky.
I can say, Scott, that's the stupidest, you ignorant slut.
You need to move to that.
Casey, you ignorant slut.
Listen, we were all thinking it.
You're all thinking it.
You're all thinking it.
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.
It's going to be very fun.
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 going to be called?
Johnny Ive will come up with something.
I mean, the way things are going, it's just going to be called Sam.
No, it's going to be called Sam.
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.
If there's anything we've heard about this entire summer, no matter where we go or who we talk to, it's about gas prices.
I want to show you signs.
Look at these gas prices.
They're ridiculous.
I don't drive as much.
I think they're just skyrocketing.
day in, day out.
Gas prices are up since Donald Trump started his war with Iran.
But how much does a little pain at the pump actually affect people's vote?
Who is telling the truth?
And who is going to represent us and do something about it?
And if gas is still near $4 a gallon come November, is it game over for Donald Trump and the Republicans?
The most important is you can't deny the reality that Americans feel.
People see what...
They're paying.
You know, Trump trying to not recognize what people are struggling with and then to ignore the severity of it is just not a winning strategy.
That's this week on America Actually.
Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
This week, two of the most important people in Google's AI division left their jobs.
Depending on who you are, that's either really terrible news for Google's whole AI project or a sign.
that AI may be closer to something truly world-changing than we even thought.
This week on The Vergecast, we're dissecting what's going on at Google DeepMind and whether we truly are in the foothills of the singularity.
All that, plus the state of the no-screen wearable, what's going on with open-weight models, and much more.
All that on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.
Okay, Casey and Kevin, let's hear some wins and fails.
You guys go first.
First you, Kevin.
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 own branded product, which are just called normal fucking sunglasses.
They don't do anything.
Well, they protect you from the sun.
So they are anti-surveillance glasses, no cameras, no microphones.
This is sort of an attention-grabbing stunt for them.
Good idea.
But I did think it was clever.
That's a good idea.
What is your fail?
My fail, this is one that's close to home, y'all.
This is related to the podcast business.
So Max Tanney 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.
Isn't it kind of already there, though?
I was like reading sort of into, don't they already have the 15 seconds?
Well, they have the skip ahead 15 seconds button or 30 seconds or whatever it is, which is effectively the same thing.
But this one is like...
purely like we'll skip automatically to the end of whatever ad segment you have.
You think they'll do that?
Except for their ads.
Except for their ads, right?
That's what I understand.
Well, that's sort of some of the rub here.
But I think there's just like, you know, we should all stand up as podcasters in opposition to anything that can undercut our business model.
I don't care.
People don't like your, I don't know.
I don't know.
I think 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.
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, you know?
Stand up.
Listen to our ads for Athletic Greens.
You must.
You must because it's paying for.
Where will people know about MeUndies?
Yes, exactly.
If this goes into effect.
Do you have MeUndies?
I never got MeUndies.
So sad.
I would let MeUndies come to pivot.
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 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 threshold, they would slow down development and would build real safeguards.
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.
So that's a win, even though it's a fail.
It was a win that came out of a fail.
Okay.
All right.
Now, what's your fail?
My fail is I learned over the weekend, Cara, that San Francisco's average rent is up 18% over the past two years.
It is now $3,728 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.
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 never enough houses.
for the people who want to live here, and it sucks and it's a fail.
Yeah, it's a fail.
What is the fail?
The fail is that we do not build enough houses for the people who want to live here.
We do not.
There's also limited space, too.
Be aware.
There's 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.
Casey, you lived in your garage for like 10 years.
We could squeeze more people into existing spaces.
You know, Louie's living there now.
I did send that to Louie and go, look how much you're costing me, Louie Swisher.
No, he's welcome to live there as long as he wants.
That is okay.
All right.
All right.
Okay.
But people are, San Francisco's back, right?
I mean, that's kind of the thing.
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.
Can I switch in?
What's the level of?
assholitude towards the new techies.
I mean, they're not they're not Keith Reboy level, right there.
What are they?
What what are they?
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.
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.
That I think is they seem to be quieter in their behavior.
I mean, what are these people doing for the most part?
They're like working out of their houses and 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.
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.
You're pregnant?
Yes, I am.
I'm having yet another child, the fifth swish cat.
No, I 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 clapback, but I thought she looked amazing.
She was at another she opened another movie.
I can't remember.
It was 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 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.
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, 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 tried, they're trying, 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 it just drives me crazy.
Any of these people.
And 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 childcare 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 loudmouths could do to make it easier for families to have children.
And I'm going to guess they're not going to work on it.
Federal Barry subsidies.
Do you know how much berries cost for a child?
Yes, berries.
I swear, I'm like at five figures annually on berries.
On blueberries, yes.
Where's the government?
Where's the government?
Let me lead you in on a little thing.
Some of these people don't like women.
I know this is going to come through.
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, oh, not like that.
Not like that, right, 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, it 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 eggs.
She can do whatever the fuck she wants.
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 slash pivot.
Just submit a question for the show or call 855-51-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 guys, you were great.
I'm excited.
When are you announcing the show?
Very soon, as in like a couple of weeks.
from now.
A couple of weeks.
Tune in.
We'll make the announcement on Hard Fork and we'll be all over the socials.
Good.
Well, let me know what I can do and I welcome you.
Kevin, you will love it.
You will have such a good time and you will be able to 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 product.
And we will hope to have you on many, many times when your book comes out, too.
Thank you for blazing the trail.
You're the GOAT.
And Casey, as always, as always, Casey, you're the best.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Cara.
Today's show was produced by Laren Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Todd Wiseman.
Ernie Enderdot 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 Scott Free August.
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