Australia Kicks Kids Off Social Media + Is the A.I. Water Issue Fake? + Hard Fork Wrapped

The other day, my friend Kyle was out in the suburbs here in the Bay Area, and he was in a parking lot. He saw a car—it happened to be a Tesla—and noticed the license plate. Do you know what the license plate said?

What did it say?

The license plate was “Hard Fork.”

No.

Kyle listens to the show and, for whatever reason, assumed that this must have been your car. So he walked up to the passenger-side window, which was down, and said to the man behind the wheel, “Oh, hey, do you know Casey?” because he assumed this was you.

The man looked at him and said, “No.” Kyle, of course, became embarrassed and explained, “Well, there’s a podcast, and it’s my friend who hosts it.” And the man looked at him and said, “Ugh, this is the second time this has happened.”

Wait, that’s amazing.

Yeah, so whoever is out there driving the Tesla with the “Hard Fork” license plate, we’re sorry that you’re going to be accosted pretty much every time you park your vehicle.

You know how people put those bumper stickers on their Teslas that say, “I bought this before Elon went crazy”?

Mm-hmm.

That guy should buy a bumper sticker that says, “I bought this before there was a Hard Fork podcast.”

Yeah. It would solve all his problems.

I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

I’m Casey Newton from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork.

This week, the drama down under as Australia bans children under 16 from social networks. Will the rest of the world follow? Then, blogger Andy Maisey joins us to separate fact from fiction on AI’s environmental impact. And finally, it’s our first-ever Hard Fork Wrapped.

Wrap it up, Kevin. Well, Casey, I miss you. I know you’re in San Francisco this week. I’m back in my hometown in Ohio, visiting some family. It’s cold here.

Yeah, and let me just explain this. Sometimes podcasters get in a huge fight, and they don’t really want to be in the same room for a little bit. One of them will go home to their family and just cool off. So, Kevin, thank you for taking a step back, and hopefully cooler heads will prevail here.

Yeah, you’re welcome, and I hate you.

No, actually, Kevin went home for the holiday, and it’s very sweet, going there to be with your family.

It is weird to be on someone else’s Zoom setup, though.

Okay, say more.

You know? It feels very personal. It feels like you’re sleeping in their bed or something. Things aren’t where they were. My windows are everywhere. I’ve got one monitor over here and one monitor over here.

Well, with that in mind, maybe we should zoom in to what’s happening in Australia.

Great transition.

Thank you.

Love that segue.

Thank you.

1. Australia Bans Children Under Sixteen

But yes, this is the big tech news this week. On Wednesday, the children of Australia lost access to their social media accounts, many of them, as a new nationwide law went into effect that bars anyone under 16 from having an account on the most popular social media sites.

That’s right, Kevin. I think this is really big news because, for more than a decade now, countries have been reckoning over what to do about social media. It seems to have a lot of secondary effects on their people and their countries that they don’t like, and yet what to do about it has remained an open question. People have tried to pass little regulations here and there.

This is the biggest step we have seen a democracy take yet to simply say, “Hey, if you aren’t 16 years old, you actually can’t use this at all.” I think this is the first domino to fall in a move that could reshape how we all use the internet.

Yeah, it’s a big deal. If I were to summarize the reaction to this law going into effect in Australia in a way that Australians might appreciate, I might say that some people are mad as a cut snake. They think the government has made a dog’s breakfast of this policy, which they think has Buckley’s of working. But others reckon it’s fair dinkum, and that while improving teenage mental health may be hard yakka, you can’t just spit the dummy and do nothing.

Wow.

Am I right?

Wow, I didn’t really get one word of that, but I’m going to trust that Gemini has not led you astray and that those are all actually Australian phrases.

It was Gemini. Thank you.

Gemini.

Yeah.

Did you at least try to slip in one fake Australian phrase just to irritate our Australian listeners?

We have Australian listeners? They’re going to be so mad about this segment.

No, they’re going to love it. We’re shining a spotlight on what is happening in their country, Kevin.

That’s true. That’s true. So, yeah, let’s talk about this because I know you have been writing about it. I have been watching it play out a little bit, and I’ve been reading a little bit about it, but you know much more about this than I do. Why don’t you give me the capsule-summary history of this new Australian law that went into effect this week?

2. The Ban Targets Ten Apps

Yeah, the law says that if you are under 16, you cannot use the following 10 apps: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Reddit, or Kik. You add all of those up, and that is where Australian teens, just like teens all over the world, are spending the bulk of their time online.

If you want to try to have an account there, you’re going to need to try to verify your age in some way. The most popular way tends to be this age-estimation video selfie that you see people do. Of course, this can famously be tricked by video game characters sometimes, but it also works a lot of the time. So that’s the move.

It all came about, Kevin, after the wife of the premier of Australia’s second-smallest state read The Anxious Generation, a book by past Hard Fork guest Jonathan Haidt, and said, “Well, this seems really bad. We ought to do something about it.”

Hmm.

That got some legislation going. Less than a year later—this was last November—Australia passed a law. The platforms have now had a year to consider this and figure out how they’re going to implement it, and this week it finally went into effect.

Interesting, the power of books in this day and age. We can write them, and sometimes people read them and pass laws based on them.

Absolutely.

Questions about this. One is: Does every platform have to do some kind of proactive age estimation, or are they allowed to just say, “Here’s a drop-down menu. Put in your birthday, and we’ll tell you whether you can use the site or not”?

You cannot do the drop-down menu. These sorts of fake age-verification measures that have existed since the dawn of the internet are no longer going to cut it. That does mean that, yes, if you are an adult and you’re just signing up for your first Snapchat account, you are going to have to verify your age via one of these means.

Got it. You listed off a bunch of apps. Two that I didn’t hear mentioned: One was Roblox, which we have recently talked about on this show. The other was Discord. Are there other apps that are popular with teens in Australia that are not included under this provision?

Sure. It only applies to the 10 that I mentioned. Some folks that I talked to at the platforms are irritated that Minecraft isn’t on this list, as well as Steam, which is a popular way for kids to play PC games. But it’s really Roblox and Discord that are generating the most eye rolls from the platforms that were targeted, because folks there believe that this is an example of, as I’ve been told, the government picking winners and losers and effectively saying, “Hey, we’re going to make it really hard for you, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, but Roblox, for whatever reason, is going to get a pass.”

Julie Inman Grant, who is the eSafety Commissioner of Australia and who is overseeing this effort, when asked about the Roblox omission, basically said, “Yeah, we were concerned about them, and we went to them, and then they rolled out a bunch of new features, including age-estimation technology. So we feel like they’re okay for now, but it is possible that in the future they could get added to the list as well.”

Got it. And what about YouTube? How are they handling that? There are lots of ways to watch YouTube videos that don’t involve signing up for a YouTube account.

Yeah, so this is a really interesting one. As you just mentioned, Kevin, you can watch YouTube without logging in, although, of course, YouTube will constantly prod you to log in because they can make more money off of you that way.

But it is possible to watch in what they call the logged-out state. Interestingly, you can actually still personalize a feed even in that logged-out state, right? Just by seeing what kind of videos you're watching, taking other cues—what browser are you using, where are you located—they can show you things that they think you might like.

This is another criticism that has been leveled at the law, which is that if you're Meta and you make Instagram, Instagram doesn't have that logged-out experience, right? Folks at Meta may feel like this is a giveaway to YouTube because they're going to have a way to continue to get engagement from their younger viewers. Of course, what I think is likely to happen is Meta is simply going to introduce a logged-out experience for Instagram, Threads, and Facebook.

Yeah. So, speaking of how these companies may try to get around this or push back on it, what are the companies doing? I imagine they've been lobbying against this law, but what have they been doing in anticipation of this thing going into effect?

Basically just frowning and stamping their feet. YouTube has said that they feel like it's very rushed, because, of course, we've only had 20 years of seeing what the internet does to young people's brains.

Hmm. Interesting. What about kids in Australia? Do we know how they're reacting to this?

Yeah, kids are doing a number of things. Some smarties—and I have a feeling that you would be one of these kids, Kevin—they've had a year to prepare for this, so they created backup accounts where they set their ages to 19 or 26, and they're planning on using those. They're also downloading apps that aren't covered by the ban, right? Another pretty predictable response.

That includes a bunch of apps that I'm not super familiar with, including CoverStar, Yope, and Lemonade. Do you have a huge following on any of those platforms?

Yeah, I met my wife on Coverstar.

Okay, interesting, interesting.

Yeah, that's a Casey Newton joke for those keeping score at home.

So they're doing that, but Kevin, I was most interested by this thing that these kids in Australia are doing. They've gone back to using this ancient technology that I didn't know if we'd ever see again in my lifetime, but I'm told that Australian teens, in preparation for this ban, have been exchanging phone numbers with each other.

Come on. That's unrealistic.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah. What happens is, each of these kids has a 7-digit—or maybe it's 10-digit; I don't know how many digits it is in Australia—but you have a unique code that belongs to your phone, and you can give that to another person. If they put that in their phone, you can then send them messages and maybe even do a video call. This is apparently seeing a huge surge of interest in Australia right now.

That's incredible. I love that. I'm so curious what the second- and third-order effects of this will be. Right now, it seems like the primary people who would be benefiting from this would be parents and maybe the teenagers, but I can imagine some fears about long-term competitiveness if everywhere else teenagers are using social media and the internet, and using that not only to amuse themselves but to learn things.

Do you end up in a situation where your kids and teens are behind in some ways, or do they race ahead because they're the only country where the teens aren't glued to their Instagram feeds all day?

3. Australia Runs A Natural Experiment

Well, and you're getting at what I think is maybe one of the most interesting aspects of this whole thing, Kevin, which is that we are now setting up a really interesting natural experiment in what happens when you take social media away from children. For the past decade now, I have been covering this endless debate about to what degree can we hold social networks responsible for some of the mental health challenges that the younger generation has. Those challenges, by the way, are enormous. We've talked about it on the show many times.

But we have not had an island where everyone under 16 is being prevented from using these technologies. I think it's worth asking, and I'm actually curious to get a prediction from you on how big of an effect this will have. I was talking with somebody at one of the platforms the other day who was basically saying, “Look, if you think that this ban is going to go into effect and all the kids are going to put their phones down and go play in the park, you've got another thing coming,” right?

These kids have already grown up in a world where they are used to being online all the time, and we're not going to throw back the clock to the 1980s in one fell swoop. On the other hand, if these kids don't have a million push notifications bothering them at all hours of the day and night while they're sitting in class, making them anxious about their physical appearance, sending them down eating-disorder rabbit holes, I can't imagine these kids actually coming out on the other side of that better off. So it's a really interesting natural experiment, and I should add that Australia is actually going to study this.

Mm.

They're putting together a panel of academic researchers that is going to essentially track what is happening to these kids once they're banned from these social networks, and they're going to publish that research. So we should actually, within a couple of years, have some really interesting data here.

But what do your instincts tell you? What do you think is going to happen to the children of Australia? Which, by the way, I'd love for somebody to clip that and just take that quote out of context and put it online somewhere. What do you think is going to happen to the children of Australia?

I don't know. I think the first couple of years we may not see huge short-term effects. I think that part of the dream is probably unrealistic. But I can very well imagine that 5 or 10 years from now, when a whole generation or a microgeneration has had time to go through childhood with this rule in effect, there could be some pretty steep differences between them and the generation just before them who had this stuff all along.

I think I've been radicalized a little bit by the debates around school phone bans here in the U.S.

Mm.

This is a topic that we've talked about a lot, and we heard these same sorts of arguments on both sides in the months and years leading up to those phone bans going into effect. “How are kids going to communicate with each other? They're going to feel so left out. The parents aren't going to be able to get in touch with them if there's an emergency.”

Then these bans went into effect and, from what I can tell, they have been universally successful.

Mm.

I'm sure there are some districts where people are unhappy about it, but everything that I've seen, every teacher or parent that I've talked to, has said, “This has been a great thing for our schools.”

So I am very skeptical of these worrywarts who say, “If we take social media away from children, it's going to have all these bad knock-on effects,” because I think what we've seen so far is that sometimes this stuff just works. Sometimes it just produces a positive net result. But I don't know—how are you feeling about this Australian law?

Well, I have talked on the show before about some of my concerns around implementing these sorts of bans, right? If you're a 13-, 14-, or 15-year-old creator who has been building a business and you're now going to lose that business, that sucks for you. If you're 14 and you're LGBT and you have an unsupportive family, and you're about to be cut off from some online resources that made you feel less alone in the world, that sucks.

I do think that there is some number of kids who can safely use Instagram and TikTok, and their lives are basically fine. They use it for entertainment, and they're still able to become self-actualized humans and everything else. But to use the public-health analogy, it's also true that a lot of people can smoke and drink without it ruining their lives, and we still made the choice that we wanted to restrict access to alcohol and tobacco until those kids were a little more grown up.

Over time, that resulted in fewer people drinking and smoking, and I think most countries are better off for that choice. So while I'm concerned about what some of these kids are going to be losing at the margins, I just keep coming back to the argument that I never hear anyone make. You know what that argument is?

What's that?

Looking at Instagram is really good for your kid.

Yes.

Do you know what I mean?

Yes.

Nobody is ever like, “Hey, you've got to get your 14-year-old looking at TikTok. If he's not looking at TikTok, he's really going to be missing out.” You never hear people say that.

That's true.

At most, this is a tolerated distraction, and at worst, it does cause immense harm. So I think particularly for the under-13s, it's just a no-brainer to get kids off of this stuff. They weren't supposed to be there in the first place, but we know that they were there, and the platforms took very few steps to get them off.

I think it's slightly trickier for the 13- to 15-year-olds, but ultimately not tricky enough that I am unwilling to let Australia run this experiment and see what we learn.

Totally. So, Casey, let's wrap this up by making a prediction. Do you think this law will succeed, and what would success look like to you?

Well, I think what Australia is hoping to see is decreased rates of mental health issues among teenagers in Australia, maybe higher test scores, right? Some sense that the mental health of teenagers in Australia is improving. And I have to say, if I had to guess today, my guess is that this would have some positive marginal effect on the teens of Australia.

Again, I don't know that it's going to get them off of their phones. I'm sure that some of them are going to find their way into very dark corners online that are unregulated, and they're going to have issues similar to the ones that they're now having on Instagram and the other apps. But on balance, I do think that we should expect to see at least some positive benefits from this. What do you think?

Yeah, I think so. I think the relevant time horizon is probably longer than people want. Here, I don't think you can do a study 12 months in and say, “Have the mental health outcomes improved?” and have that be an indicator of whether the law is working or not.

So I think this is going to be more like a 5- or 10-year project. But I think it'll be really interesting, and I actually don't think that other states or other nations are going to wait 5 or 10 years before they decide if this is something that they want to do. In fact, I think probably a year or two in, if there is no indication that Australia's teenage cohort is falling apart as a result of this law, a lot of other democracies are going to do something very similar.

Absolutely. You're already starting to see it. Denmark is pursuing a ban for under-15s. Norway is also now pursuing a ban for under-15s. Malaysia has said it intends to copy the Australian law.

So this is really striking for me, Kevin, because you and I both covered social media for a long time. I think particularly in the United States after 2016, we got this big backlash against those social networks, and yet, in America in particular, it felt as if there were no consequences for these companies, right?

Their brand value plummeted because these companies are widely disliked, but they continued to grow and make more money than ever. This is the moment where I was like, “Oh, all the bad choices that they made over the past decade have actually caught up with them.”

They have lost this argument. A growing number of countries are now simply saying, “We don't believe you anymore. We ran your experiment to see what would happen when we let anyone use your platforms. We didn't like the result, and so now no one under 16 can use your platform.” That is what it looks like to lose an argument.

Yeah, I agree. So while some people in Australia may be carrying on like a pork chop, I think this one's a ripper.

You know, Kevin, sometimes I worry that your Australia jokes are going to boomerang back against you. You'll be in real trouble.

When we come back, is the AI water use narrative fake? We'll talk with press critic Andy Maslen about what we know and don't know about AI's water footprint.

4. AI Water Use Faces Scrutiny

Well, Kevin, you can lead a horse to water, but will there be enough in the trough to run one ChatGPT query? That is what some people have asked over the past year, as questions about the water usage of AI systems have come to the forefront of many online discussions.

Yeah, this is something that I've wanted to talk about on the show for a long time now, in particular because I've been observing that after anything happens with AI—any big scandal or drama, or some piece of viral slop goes viral—the responses to that will inevitably talk about water, right?

It'll say, “Why are we drying out the lakes and the oceans to create this technology?” And so I just think it's been a very fraught, emotionally charged issue for a lot of people. There are a lot of people out there who see AI and all the infrastructure that we're building to support it and just think, “This cannot possibly be good for the environment.” And so today we're going to have a conversation about that.

Yeah, and I'm glad we are because this is just something that I see all the time in memes on social media. The other day I saw one that was like, “Hey, can you get out of the shower? I need the water for ChatGPT,” and it got many, many likes and reposts.

That is, I think, the default understanding on social media of the relationship between water and AI, which is basically you can only have one or the other. And this has found its way into a lot of mainstream coverage, and there is basically one blogger out there who got a bee in his bonnet about it and launched a one-person crusade to try to change that conversation.

Yeah. So today our guest is Andy Maisl. Andy is not an environmental scientist. He is not an AI scientist. He's, by his own admission, just a guy on the internet. He is the director of the Effective Altruism DC organization, and before that, he was a high school physics teacher.

But I really took note of his work on his Substack, which is called The Weird Turn Pro. He has been incessantly responding to what he says is this made-up narrative about AI and water use. He has been unusually persistent in debunking and explaining these specific claims and statistics, and his blog is just full of these extremely long explainer posts about how he believes the AI water issue is essentially fake, that we are working ourselves into a lather about something that is not a problem on the individual level.

He has written about putting the AI water use numbers in the context of things we do every day, like watching YouTube videos, eating meat, or relying on a car to get us around. His work has been really helpful for me in trying to figure out where to place my own concern within the many things that you could be concerned about with AI.

Yeah, and as you'll hear in the conversation, Andy is not here to give a permanent free pass on environmental issues to AI companies. In fact, he says that as AI becomes a larger and larger part of the economy, there are areas where we do want to pay more attention.

But in his view, if we continue to focus on the water issue, we may miss the bigger picture and the real issues to focus on. So I thought that was a perspective that is worth airing out because it does fly in the face of the way that AI is often talked about online.

So let's get into it with our guest, Andy Maisl. Andy Maisl, welcome to Hard Fork.

Longtime listener, first-time caller. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you.

So you have been spending the better part of 2025 fighting with people on the internet about this issue of AI and its environmental impact, and specifically within that, the water-use issue. I wonder if we could start by getting into why you decided to pick this particular fight. What made you interested in writing and talking and thinking about this topic?

The main way I started writing about this was that I was just bumping into a lot of people at parties and stuff. I think we've all had similar experiences where we talk about using chatbots or ChatGPT, and someone will be like, “How can you do that if you claim to care about the environment?” Or whatever.

People would bring up the now-defunct statistic that a chatbot uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search. And my first reaction to that at the time was, “That's not very much energy,” you know? If I said I had done 1,000 Google searches in a day, that on its own wouldn't really stand out.

You know? You wouldn't think, “Oh, Andy doesn't care about the environment so much.” So basically, I had started to dig into how this was being covered, finding that I was disagreeing with a lot of it and going a little bit crazy. I started to go down more and more rabbit holes, and now I've ended up here as one of the main commentators on the issue, despite being basically just some guy who's doing this as a hobby.

I'd love to situate you in the landscape a little bit for our listeners who may not be readers of your Substack. You are not employed by any of the AI companies.

Yeah.

You consider yourself an environmentalist. Am I correct in that?

Yeah. I'm receiving no financial incentive to do this outside of my loyal Substack subscribers. Basically, I'm motivated to do this mostly by bumping into a lot of what I think are pretty simple misconceptions. Honestly, as a longtime environmentalist and physics teacher of 7 years, I'm pretty worried that a lot of people just have these wildly incorrect misconceptions that are distracting them from what I think of as more serious issues.

One story that happened recently: a friend was in a pizza place, and he'd overheard this conversation where someone had said, “Oh, this person uses ChatGPT, and so she can't consider herself to be an environmentalist,” and then immediately afterward went and ordered a meat lovers pizza. Even just there, I'm like, “Oh, this person just really doesn't understand the different trade-offs involved in different things.” One is just so much worse than the other.

Part of this is also motivated by worrying that a lot of the environmental conversation about this stuff is a little bit off base, and people are losing track of the big picture and where the actual bad guys are.

Got it. Well, maybe we should just dive into one of the claims that you made, Andy, that you say you're very, very confident about, which is that an individual prompt of a chatbot like ChatGPT just does not have much impact on somebody's overall water usage. Make that case for us.

Yeah. A lot to say. Most importantly, there's this common wisdom floating around that I think is pretty conclusively wrong, which is the idea that an individual chatbot prompt uses an entire bottle of water. This is based on a misreading of a Washington Post article, which itself I thought was pretty strange. The article implied that writing a single email with ChatGPT uses a whole bottle of water, and for that to be true, the article seems to assume, among other things, that you're sending 10 to 20 ChatGPT prompts to write this 100-word email. I'm a power user of chatbots myself, but I don't use them that much.

It's also assuming a lot. A lot of the water that it considers is actually in off-site lakes dammed by hydroelectric plants, and it's considering the water evaporated on those lakes by the sun. Even there, after that, it's also assuming that these models are not any more efficient than they were in 2020 specifically. So I would really like that talking point to go away. Basically, that's just a horrible misreading of a kind of inconclusive article.

Our best current data on this, I think, comes from Google, which seems to imply that the on-site, in-a-data-center water cost of a chatbot prompt is about 0.26 milliliters. If you add the off-site cost—the water cost of generating the electricity—that might rise to 2 milliliters or something. Obviously, there's a range of uncertainty, and different prompts use different amounts, but I want to be able to at least start by saying, “Well, let's look at the median prompt.”

Putting that number in context, if you look at 2 milliliters and ask, “How much does this contribute to my daily water footprint?” my best understanding is that the average American's total daily water footprint is something like 1,600 liters altogether. What this means is that this is about 800,000 times as much water as a prompt uses. To raise your total daily water footprint by even 1%, you would have to send something like 8,000 median prompts.

If you're spending your entire day doing that, constantly poking and sending these prompts, it's very likely that you're not doing a lot of other things that also use a lot of water. So it's actually very likely that using AI, on net, might significantly reduce your total water footprint over the course of the day.

The numbers are just so small that it's very comical. If you don't buy one additional pair of jeans, that's 2 million prompts, which is probably more than I'll do in my lifetime, you know? I think people especially have a lot of wild misconceptions about how this is impacting their water footprint. And Kevin actually hasn't bought a new pair of pants in a year, so that probably is going to give him a lot more ChatGPT credits than the average person.

5. The Data Center Water Question

So that's the micro argument here. More often these days—and I still do see these statistics about each ChatGPT prompt using a bottle of water; I still see those floating around—but more often what I see is the industrial, macro view of this. Look, we're building all these AI data centers, and they're using a lot of water.

Using is a broad term. It can include, as I have learned from your writing and other writing, some of this water just gets recycled back into the water source after it's used to cool the data centers. But some of it is evaporated or does get taken out of the water ecosystem. So there are lots of different kinds of water usage going on.

What do you think about the argument that the scale of these data centers, and the scale of the water needs of these data centers, is something that people should be paying attention to relative to other ways that we use water?

Yeah, first I just want to flag that I'm very happy that the conversation has shifted in this direction. I think that whenever we're talking about climate, it's almost always a distraction to focus too much on your personal footprint. We should be talking about the big, systemic things in society and what impacts they can have.

There's a lot to say about the total industrial use of water by AI and data centers more broadly. It's definitely a lot by the standards of an individual. You can read about millions of gallons used every day and think, “Oh, I don't use that much. That's crazy.” I think the first thing I want to get across to people is that literally all industrial use of water in society sounds crazy from the perspective of an individual.

If you report something as using millions of gallons per day, this could apply to AI, it could apply to berries that we grow, or it could apply to the U.S. steel industry and things like that. There are so many different ways that these huge numbers can pop up when we're talking about this stuff. Instead of talking about big general numbers, or the number of gallons of water that AI uses, I try to contextualize it by using either the total amount that America uses altogether or by comparing it to other things.

Another complicating factor here is that the last year we have really good data on is 2023, and obviously AI has grown a lot since then. I can start with a 2023 background and say my best guess for data center water use—how much water data centers were using in America specifically in 2023—was something like 8 times the water that my hometown used.

I'm from a town of about 15,000 people, so AI altogether was effectively like building 8 new towns like that across the country. Obviously, that's not nothing. That's a lot from the perspective of an individual, but it's something that I would expect the water system to be able to absorb and manage pretty well.

Andy, tell us where that 2023 number comes from and maybe why we don't have more updated numbers.

Yeah. The reason we don't have more updated numbers is that AI is just very fast-moving, and it's hard to understand exactly how much water AI companies are using because they're not always totally transparent.

This number comes from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They have a really great general report on data center energy and water usage. I think that's probably the best single document if you want to start doing deep dives on this yourself. They're broadly respected, and this is the most comprehensive general report that we have, so a lot of my writing has been based on that.

Because 2023 is the last year we have good data and there's a lot that's changed since then, I'm starting with that while flagging that obviously a lot has grown since then. But we also need to make some reasonable guesses about how much that growth has been.

Got it. And that 2023 data that you have—I wonder if you could put it in the context of another industry. How does the AI industry compare to other industries that we have in America when it comes to their water use?

Yeah, it's a great question. By 2030, it could be as much as about 250 square miles of irrigated corn, which is about 1% of America's corn.

So again, I’m trying to frame this as: We should be about as worried about this as America’s irrigated corn growing by about 1% or something. And again, this really isn’t nothing. That’s a huge amount of water.

But the reason I’m comparing this to other industries, like agriculture and other things, too—even just household leaks use a lot more—is to say: Should we expect the current water system to be able to absorb this, and where should we expect to actually see problems? Based on how much water we use in most other contexts, I don’t think we should actually expect this to be a huge, disruptive disaster for water use.

There could be problems in the way that there are problems with other large industries, but I kind of expect this to be one of many normal industrial uses of water going forward. So I’ve come away thinking this really isn’t as much of an issue as people think.

6. Power Becomes The Bigger Problem

Hmm. Yeah, but obviously there are issues with the AI infrastructure build-out.

Yeah.

We’ve talked about some of them on the show. One of them is that there’s just not enough power to power these data centers. And because it’s very hard and time-consuming to build new renewable sources for these data centers—solar and wind farms and things like that, and nuclear—companies have been doing things like fracking or relying on older, less energy-efficient, less environmentally friendly forms of power generation to power these data centers.

So are you worried about those things, or are you saying it’s all overblown and we shouldn’t be worried about any of the environmental impacts of AI?

Definitely not saying that is overblown, especially. I basically think the water case seems open and shut to me right now, whereas the power case is a huge question mark. One way to think about this that I think is useful is that, as a proportion of our total system, the increase in electricity going to AI will be an order of magnitude more. From what I can tell, it’s going to rise from 0.5% to 5% by 2030 of our national electric grid.

Whereas for water, it might only rise to about 0.5%. So there’s an order-of-magnitude difference there, and there’s just a lot to think about. There have already been pretty bad effects on the environment from data centers. There have been a lot of instances of coal plants staying open, and this is the main thing that I’m really quite worried about.

I think the answer to this is going to involve a lot of different things. It might involve, in some cases, data centers not getting built. I’m definitely not coming in saying, “Data centers should always be built everywhere,” or whatever. It’s just that I do want the full number of trade-offs to be considered.

There are also potentially a lot of positives about the build-out for the energy system. A lot of AI companies are committing to buy more renewable energy, as a proportion of their total energy, than a lot of other industries and stuff like that. So that could at least lead to economies of scale in renewable energy, and that might not cancel out the negative effects either. I kind of just want people to be aware of the full picture here.

I have to admit, I’m really agnostic about the future of AI and energy stuff. This is a place where there are just so many unknown unknowns that it feels really hard to say anything concretely. My ask isn’t that we assume it’s fine. I just ask that we weigh the pros and cons and consider the trade-offs, rather than saying, “Any new energy usage is bad,” or, “If AI causes any new emissions, it must be bad,” because ultimately any new industry is going to come with some additional emissions.

That is a very intellectually honest and principled crusade. It has also been my observation that your arguments are beloved by the AI accelerationists. David Sacks, the White House AI czar, just reposted you on X.

And I think, frankly, a lot of people, when they read your stuff, think, “Gosh, this is great. I can finally relax about the environmental impact of AI, and I can maybe ignore some of the other stories that I was seeing.” I know that your intention is just to give people the facts about water in particular, and now you’re also sharing some information with us about data centers.

But I wonder how you feel about the ways in which your work is being used, maybe by people who actually don’t care about the environment at all.

Not great, to be clear. The general weird thing is that I’m diving into this huge, contentious debate about one of the largest new industrial build-outs ever, period. Definitely in my lifetime, personally. Some weird allies are going to pop up.

I’m not especially excited when people use this as a cudgel against environmentalists. I definitely identify very strongly as an environmentalist. I do really worry about anybody who’s concerned about climate and the environment worrying at all about these really tiny levels of emissions in their day-to-day lives. It makes me really sad, honestly.

Back when I was in college, there was just a much stronger consensus that personal emissions are okay to worry about, but the main thing to worry about is the green energy build-out. I feel like if I could take myself forward in time to the present and see that now everyone is litigating, equivalently, whether they watch YouTube for a few extra seconds a day or something, that would just kind of depress me.

So I do think that, from an environmentalist standpoint, I do kind of want to snap people out of this incredibly tiny concern in parts of their lives. If I make some allies with people who hate environmentalists, that’s unfortunate, but I do want to get the message out there.

More broadly, though, I’m becoming more and more convinced that bad arguments and bad arguments against AI are mostly just drowning out the good ones. I think there are a ton of reasons to be worried, even for non-weird sci-fi scenarios, that AI as it currently exists can be harming people a lot.

To get a full sense of what’s going on, the average person should probably at least poke around a chatbot a little bit and have some general idea of what these models can do. You don’t have to use them in your life ever. I’m not saying you’re obligated to use AI. But I would at least like people to understand that these are very different from a roulette wheel that just lands on random words and can’t possibly produce any value.

A lot of people still seem to be motivated by this, and they seem to be motivated in part not to use them by these environmental arguments. I have worried about this a lot. I’m like, “I’m worried that I’m coming off on one strong side of this and just helping the pro-AI side,” which I don’t really want to do.

But I have to admit, for the most part, the general understanding of this stuff is so bad, and I would like my side to at least be armed with a correct understanding of the world. This just feels like, honestly, shooting fish in a barrel. So many misunderstandings are still floating around everywhere that this all leads me in the direction of thinking, “Okay, I’d like people to actually understand that this one thing is incorrect. Let’s focus on the more serious stuff instead,” including things that I think a lot of AI critics would otherwise agree with me on.

Yeah, I think if I try to steel-man the argument that you may face, or put myself in the shoes of someone who’s very worried about AI water use, I would just say: Look, whatever the actual statistics are, however much water AI does or doesn’t use, the issue is that we didn’t sign up for this as a society.

We didn’t ask these giant Silicon Valley tech companies to start putting up data centers all over the country, straining the electrical grid, or diverting a huge percentage of the economy into building out these powerful AI systems. This all happened very suddenly and without any real democratic participation. It just feels bad to see this transformation of our society into something that seems designed to support this technology that I don’t like, that doesn’t seem that useful to me, and that I was never consulted about.

So what’s your response to that version of the argument?

A lot of things to say. I guess I want to respond to it with a lot of respect, first of all, because I’m trying to write for an audience where it doesn’t matter whether you love or hate AI. I’m very worried about AI overall, but I’m also a very big fan of AI tools as they currently exist. I use chatbots pretty regularly.

This does bias my writing to an extent, where I do think I have a lot of positive impressions of AI as it currently exists, and I want to try to reach people who don’t, basically. If you think AI is bad, then obviously you should also generally oppose it using water, for the same reason that you should oppose anything else bad that’s using water.

But that opposition should also come with a sense of proportion about where the actual water issues are in the country. There are a lot of other things I think are bad that use a lot of water, specifically animal agriculture. And there, I do actually feel a little bit more justified in focusing on that a lot, just because it’s using such a huge amount of the nation’s water.

Something like a quarter of your total dietary footprint for water comes from the food that is grown to eventually feed animals and stuff like that. In thinking about this, I do want people not to be upset if they don't like AI, but I do want them to at least prioritize, “Okay, if I care about water, will it actually make much of a dent at all if we shut down all AI data centers tomorrow? How much will that actually help America's water problems?”

My basic claim is that it's not really going to make much of a dent compared to a lot of other issues. The final thing is that I do worry that in these debates, a lot of the potential positive aspects of data centers for local communities are getting drowned out. Obviously, there are a lot of trade-offs. There are a lot of negatives, too.

But data centers also just often add a ton of tax revenue for sometimes very poor communities. They can provide a lot of utility revenue for utilities to upgrade aging infrastructure. And in a lot of places in America, the main water access issue isn't necessarily the raw amount of fresh water. It's aging infrastructure that might have dangerous amounts of lead or just make it more expensive to deliver the water in other ways.

A new, very large buyer can actually help water access here. Again, I don't want to say that makes data centers good all the time, but I do want to say that we need to at least consider these trade-offs and not just potentially steamroll something that might, in very specific instances, help communities rather than hurt them.

Mm.

Hank Green, a past Hard Fork guest, made a YouTube video the other day about this AI water-use issue.

Yeah.

One of the points I thought he made that was interesting to me was that there's just bad data and misdirection happening on both sides of this argument.

Basically, there are some AI critics out there who are using bad data to make unsupported claims about water use, but the AI companies themselves are also guilty of making their environmental footprints look smaller than they are by doing fancy footwork with the data. They do things like telling us how much a single prompt uses when most of the environmental cost of these AI models happens during training, not inference, and ignoring the fact that a lot of these AI models now have these long reasoning chains that output a bunch more tokens than a standard chatbot query. They're not giving us those numbers for the most part.

Mm-hmm.

What were your thoughts on his argument, and are there any places you disagreed with it?

I loved the video, personally. I think I've been going a little bit crazy reading a lot of what I thought of as very bad coverage of the issue that left people less informed. Hank's video was just phenomenal. Throughout it, I was nodding along, thinking, “Man, this is actually just going to give people such a better understanding of water in America and where AI fits into this.”

It's weird for me to defend AI companies here. I will say that for a while there was a lot of demand from a lot of different places for AI companies to release data on the per-prompt cost of chatbots, and we're not being told the full picture here. Now that they do that, people will be like, “Oh, well, this distracts from the industrial use and the total use.” And I'm like, well, I would rather have this information about the individual prompts. We can look separately at the total amounts, but we kind of have to hold them to account for one thing at a time, and here I think they've done an okay job, basically.

And then, yeah, there are a lot of invisible costs, like the cost of training, which is a little bit nebulous, and then the off-site cost and things like that. When Hank says things like that, or when other people say things like, “We're not being given the full picture here,” I usually want to clarify that if you actually dig into that full picture and try to draw error bars around what is the absolute most water this thing could be using, it still just never comes up to a point where I would personally worry about this adding to my personal water footprint at all.

I did find one place I disagreed with Hank. It was more in his tone, where he was hedging a ton and being like, “Oh, there are all these different complexities.” I usually want to push people when they're doing that to say, “Yeah, the complexities are real, but I still want to acknowledge that we have this reasonable range of uncertainty.” Within that range, I'm just not finding a place where this is a serious concern on the individual level.

Now, Andy, I know you said that in general we shouldn't focus on our individual impact on the environment, but I wonder how you think we should think about the fact that Kevin flies a private plane from Oakland to San Francisco every week for our tapings.

That's unchill.

Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit unchill. At the extremes, I think this is actually a good lead into: if you are going to focus on your individual impact, there are just some things that use hundreds of thousands of times as much energy and water as other stuff. There are such crazy, easy wins everywhere, so definitely consider that. But just hold in your heart that the main challenge here, the main fight that matters, is helping with the green-energy transition.

So, Andy, as you think about the year to come, how are you expecting to blog? Are you going to continue shooting fish in a barrel, as you say, and find more instances in the mainstream media of people making these arguments about water? Or do you feel like you've concluded that debate and you're moving on?

I don't know that there's too much else to say. It would be exciting to write about that elsewhere. But I think for my blog itself, my main pieces on this are pretty comprehensive, so I would definitely recommend them if people want to see my full argument.

I'm honestly just very personally tired of the topic. Every time I type “data centers and water” now, I just feel myself getting tired. There's a lot of other stuff to say. I would definitely like to cover the electricity stuff going forward. I think that's just the most interesting, complicated question here, with a lot of unknown unknowns in both directions.

It's really cool. It incorporates a lot of climate ethics and questions about the grid, which I've been really excited about since I was a teenager, honestly. Learning about the grid is really cool. Eventually, I would also like to write more about other AI-related stuff.

I do worry that I've pigeonholed myself a little bit by writing so much about how the environmental stuff is really overblown. I think people are sometimes missing that I'm quite worried about this for all these other reasons. I would definitely like to write more about what the effects on labor will be, how this will enable government surveillance and stuff like that, and what the X-risk case is. I would definitely like to pivot to that more over the next year.

Andy, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, it was a blast. Thank you, guys.

7. Hard Fork Wrapped Takes Stock

Well, Kevin, the end of the year is upon us, and that means it is time for Hard Fork Wrapped.

Yes, and what is Hard Fork Wrapped?

Well, as you may know, since 2015, Spotify has been giving users a recap of their music and listening habits for the year. And so this year we thought, why don't we just steal that idea, and we will tell listeners a little bit about what they've been listening to all year.

And beyond just giving you a few stats, we can also give you a few updates on some of our most talked-about topics and segments of the year.

Yes, we can do that, but first, can I just say what my favorite piece of the Spotify Wrapped discourse has been this year?

Please say it.

This year, people started noticing that some of their Spotify Wrapped was made by AI.

Mm-hmm.

And people started posting about it online, very unhappy that Spotify was using AI to do their Wrapped. And the backlash was like, “You thought they were just doing this by hand?” You thought there was a guy in Spotify’s headquarters just scribbling down your own personal thing? Anyway, I derive pleasure from that.

Yeah, I thought it was that AI DJ. I thought he was the one who was taking all the notes on my listening.

Yeah, he’s the author.

With that, Kevin, I think we should start by sharing a few stats with listeners about the year that we’ve had here on the Hard Fork show.

What a year it’s been. So, Casey, so far in 2025, we have done a collective 3,524 minutes of Hard Fork. That’s about 59 hours, or about 2.5 days.

2.5 days we spent talking to each other this year?

Yeah.

Actually, that’s an undercount because we only run about a third of what we record.

Yes. And according to our analytics on Spotify, which we get as creators, we saw that we had collectively 1.4 million hours of people listening to Hard Fork on Spotify, which, I’ll say, is too much.

No.

That’s 160 years of continuous listening that you did this year.

No, you’re thinking about this—

On Spotify.

The wrong way, Kevin. That’s 1.4 million hours of going on a run, of doing those dishes, of folding that laundry. Every single minute you spent listening to Hard Fork and doing something else was a minute that you also spent doing something else, and I salute you.

Yes. I would love the breakdown in the Spotify Wrapped of actual time that people were listening and, if there’s some way to use AI to determine whether you were just tuned out, or just left it on in the kitchen and forgot about it. I want to know that too.

Just a few more fun facts. We’ve done 52 episodes this year. I think we’re planning on 56 by the time the end of the year is over. You will probably guess our listeners’ top artist, a pretty famous pop star by the name of Taylor Swift.

Oh, yeah?

So, yeah. And you may also have guessed our listeners’ top audiobook, Abundance by Ezra Klein—

Really?

And Derek Thompson.

Wow.

One final set of stats about the year that was, Kevin. Our producer asked NotebookLM, which we have been training on a transcript of every episode of the show, what it thinks our audience’s listening age was. This was a new Spotify Wrapped feature this year. It tells you how old it thinks you are based on the music you listen to. It told me that my listening age was 86. That is not a joke. Here’s the good news for—

Wait, really? That’s incredible.

Yeah.

Wait, I have to say, what in your listening history made it think that you were 86 years old?

I listen to The Beatles, and I’m not even joking. But that’s the problem: I like The Beatles, and they were like, “Uh, are you 100?” I was like, “No, I like pop music.” Unbelievable.

Wait, that’s amazing. Mine was only 18.

Wow. Well, good news.

Yeah.

You can still listen to Spotify in Australia then.

I think it’s because my kids’ Blippi music got—

Mm.

Mixed up with mine, so it took the average.

I see. Well, here’s the good news for Hard Fork listeners. Your listening age is estimated to be 35 to 45, and we actually got some demographic data back recently that says that is exactly right. Statistically, you are between 35 and 45 if you listen to the show. But we also have a lot of younger listeners as well, and even some older ones. So, Hard Fork, a show for the whole family.

Whole family.

8. AI Regulation Faces Federal Pushback

But what we really wanted to do, Kevin, with this Wrapped segment is to put a bow, if you will, on some of the most discussed topics and stories of the year so far. And so we came up with a couple of cute categories, not unlike Spotify. And first up, in a year that has been dominated by our discussion of artificial intelligence, we have an update that we’re calling the AI regulation regulation of the year.

Okay, I’m listening.

Now, as you know, states including California and Colorado have started to pass laws regulating AI. California, for example, passed a law requiring that AI labs publish transparency reports about new risks that their models create and how they plan to handle catastrophes. And the accelerationists in the Trump administration hate this because they say it’s going to make life too difficult for the AI labs, and it’s going to make us less competitive against China.

And so this week, President Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he will sign an executive order to try to curb these state laws from being passed. At the time of this recording, we don’t have the final language, but in a draft executive order that circulated last month, Trump directs the US attorney to sue states to overturn AI laws, particularly if they think they can prove that they infringe on interstate commerce. And they also plan to tell federal regulators to withhold broadband funds and other funding from states that pass these AI laws. So, Kevin, what do you make of our AI regulation regulation of the year?

This is the most enraging part of the AI regulation debate: There is this whole group of people, mostly in the White House and around the White House, who have just sort of bet the house on what they call federal preemption, right? This is the notion that instead of having a bunch of different state laws governing AI, the federal government should step in and make its own plan, which on its face I think would be a good idea. The problem is, when people ask, “Okay, so what’s your federal plan, and how are you going to get it through Congress?” they basically just start hemming and hawing and try to change the topic.

Yeah. I think this one is going to face a lot of trouble in the courts. You have to remember there was an early effort to pass a moratorium on state AI regulations. The Senate voted against it 99 to 1, right? So this is an idea that both Democrats and Republicans really, really don’t like.

That was only one of the attempts. They also tried—

Yeah.

To attach it to the defense spending authorization bill, and that failed as well. So, after trying to sneak this thing in through several different means, they have now decided, “Well, we’re just going to do it by executive order.”

Yeah. And based on the reading I’ve done, that does not seem particularly legal, although, of course, what will the Supreme Court decide if it gets there? Who knows? But this remains one to watch because, as you say, Kevin, if states are truly forbidden from passing any AI regulations over the next year, it just completely changes the landscape of what these labs are and aren’t allowed to do in ways that I think might be bad.

Totally. All right, what’s next on our Hard Fork Wrapped?

9. China Enters The AI Race

Next up, you know, Kevin, we talk about many different nations on Hard Fork over the course of the year, but when it comes time to do Wrapped, there’s really only one country that qualifies in the category of other country of the year.

Is it Australia?

You know what? It came very close. It was a very close race this year. But for 2025, according to Hard Fork Wrapped, our other country of the year is China.

China.

China is our other country of the year for many reasons. I think it starts way back when DeepSeek’s R1 model came out and we saw this temporary freak-out over whether China was on the verge of overtaking the United States in AI development. That idea has since loomed over all efforts to regulate AI here in the United States.

And while DeepSeek, I think, hasn’t lasted in the public imagination in quite the way that we thought it was going to, it has continued to release some new updates, and maybe those are actually worth talking about for a minute.

Yeah. First of all, I can’t believe that was this year.

Mm-hmm.

If you’d asked me what year the DeepSeek thing happened, I would’ve guessed 2023.

Mm-hmm. Totally.

But yes, that was earlier this year, when the stock market reeled from the news that this Chinese AI company appeared to have trained a model that was competitive with our state-of-the-art American models for much less than American companies were spending. I think that was always a little bit questionable as a narrative. I never really bought the figures that were thrown around.

But I think this was a big moment in terms of people realizing that China was not actually that far behind the state of the art, and I think they’ve continued to show that. They released some new models recently that show that maybe they’re not right at the frontier, but they’re a couple steps behind.

Yeah. It is a good model. DeepSeek makes good models. There has been reporting that the number of free, open-source Chinese models used by American companies has been on the rise all year, and that now a significant percentage of U.S. companies that are building with these models are using Chinese options. DeepSeek is a big part of that story, even if they are not as good as, I would say, the leading 3 frontier labs.

What else went on in China recently, Kevin, that gives it the designation of our other country of the year?

So the big story this week has been whether NVIDIA can sell these chips, these H200 chips, to China. These are some of the most advanced chips on the market, and for obvious reasons, NVIDIA wants to be able to sell them to companies in China. Jensen Huang, the CEO, has been lobbying hard for this. Currently, they are limited in which chips they can sell to Chinese tech companies.

A lot of people in the U.S. national security establishment and at the frontier AI companies have been very worried about this. They have basically been saying, “Look, China is our biggest strategic adversary. We know that AI is a huge priority for them. Why would we allow them to have these very powerful chips and erode the lead that we have over them when it comes to creating these frontier models?” So a lot of folks have concerns about this, but in the Trump administration, they have basically said, “We don’t think this is going to be a strategic advantage for China.”

Trump said this week that NVIDIA can now sell these more powerful H200 chips to China, and the government will take a 25% cut of these sales. The one interesting wrinkle here is that it’s not at all clear yet whether the Chinese government is actually going to let Chinese companies use these chips. They have been building their own chips domestically. Companies like Huawei have been developing their own chips. But I think it’s fair to say that they will find some use for these advanced chips if they are allowed to buy them.

Well, here’s my case that this gives China a competitive advantage, Kevin. There was a story in The Information this week that said that DeepSeek is developing its new AI model using several thousand NVIDIA Blackwell chips, which are NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line chips, which remain banned for export to China. Apparently, DeepSeek was able to smuggle those chips into China via third-party countries, essentially having some other country, like Malaysia, make the purchase happen there and get it into China.

If DeepSeek thinks it’s worth running a smuggling operation to get these top-of-the-line chips, my guess is that China is actually going to find it useful to get these H200s into China.

Yeah, this to me just feels like a complete victory for the NVIDIA lobbying machine—

Yes.

—which has been pushing hard for the relaxation of these regulations for some time. I don’t understand why anyone in the Trump administration thinks this is a good idea. I’ve heard their arguments about how the entire world’s AI stack needs to be American. But I think that allowing your biggest geopolitical adversary to have access to the key ingredient in building powerful AI systems at a time when American companies are racing to stay at the frontier—I just can’t see any good reason for that other than we got worked by NVIDIA’s lobbyists.

Mm-hmm. Well, Kevin, that brings us to the final item in this year’s Hard Fork Wrapped, and that is the Most Podcasted About Podcast. This year, our Most Podcasted About Podcast was our interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki.

Yes, this was a wild one. We haven’t actually gotten the chance to catch up about this because it aired on the show a few weeks ago, and then we immediately went into another episode that we had been planning, followed by the holiday break. But Casey, this was by far the most response that we got to an episode all year. If you have not listened to that episode, you should definitely go back and listen to it. What feedback did you get, Casey?

I think we honestly just got a lot of really nice notes from listeners. I think listeners like us get very frustrated with the world of tech. As journalists, we get the rare opportunity to actually sit across the table from people who run these companies and try to ask them the questions that are on the minds of a lot of their listeners, like, “Why did you let strangers contact children on your platform for 20 years before you thought to do something about it?”

I think the response really shows that people are craving some kind of accountability for the decisions that these platform executives are making. What kind of feedback did you get?

Yeah, people were really upset about how Dave Baszucki answered our questions. There were some other podcasts, as you mentioned, that either followed up or covered this in some way. Some YouTube creators took it upon themselves to make videos about the situation. There were lots of articles in gaming publications. This became a news story.

Mm-hmm.

I was surprised—not by the reaction. I think in the room with Dave, it felt very tense and confrontational, and like it had some explosive potential. But I was just surprised because I don’t think of us as a podcast that brings on CEOs and ambushes them with hard-hitting gotcha questions.

Obviously, we’re journalists, and we feel a responsibility to ask tough questions of powerful and important people. Leaders at these companies certainly are powerful and important. But I was not ready for a fight when we went into that interview.

I think he was just so defensive and so taken aback by our line of questioning in a way that was frankly wild to me because his team had been fully aware that we planned to talk about child safety, and yet he seemed totally unprepared for those questions. So I was surprised, and I guess I was encouraged by the feedback.

We had lots of parents writing in, saying, “This sort of changed the way I think about Roblox,” or, “I’m not going to let my kid use this now.” To me, that just suggests that doing journalism has consequences, and I feel good about what we did and how we showed up that day.

Yeah. We also just got a lot of emails from people whose kids or family members had had terrible experiences on Roblox, and that was actually quite eye-opening for me. As someone who doesn’t cover Roblox that much, I just had not been aware of how many kids were having trouble on this platform.

I’ll say, Kevin, setting aside the tougher questions that we had planned to ask him because they had been very much in the news and seemed like they deserved answers, at the end of the day, I think the answer that he gave that surprised me the most was when he said, essentially, that yes, he did think that we should consider putting prediction markets into these games for children—essentially onboarding them into the vibrant and dynamic world of gambling.

That was the moment, sitting here in the studio, when I was just like, “I can’t believe we’re talking about this.” That one really surprised me, and I think it may stay with me as long as anything else that happened during that interview.

Yeah. So one theory that I heard in the days after that episode, which I wanted to ask your opinion of, is that there’s this universe now of podcasts and shows where CEOs can go to get softball questions from friendly interviewers. Someone I know was saying that this has basically left these CEOs unprepared for encounters with real journalists, like taking your dog and expecting it to live in the wild after it’s been domesticated.

These CEOs have spent so much time going on these friendly, non-confrontational podcasts and doing these interviews with creators that they have forgotten what it is like to be interviewed by a real journalist. Do you buy that at all?

I do think you can observe, over the past 5 years, that CEOs in general have been spending less time going on podcasts hosted by journalists and more time going on podcasts hosted by creators. I think there’s a lot of stuff that happens in that world that is undisclosed and frankly kind of shady. I’m aware of podcasters who are accepting $25,000 to agree to interview somebody. There’s a lot of pay-for-play going on out there, and that is, I think, maybe dulling some of the senses of these CEOs.

At the end of the day, these are people—literal billionaires, right? Dave Bazooki is a billionaire. These people have profited massively from the success of their platforms, and they should just be able to answer basic questions about safety and not feel like that is a vicious attack on their character.

Maybe that is part of the dynamic here. Or maybe, Kevin, it’s just that ultimately the CEOs of these social platforms in particular have never wanted to talk about this stuff yet. I feel like that’s how it’s been with a lot of the CEOs that I cover. They’ve always hated talking about the safety and policy questions, the stuff that involves difficult trade-offs, like cases where there were harms on their platform.

They have really always shied away from talking about it. The more that you shy away from talking about something, probably the worse you're going to be at talking about it. So I think there's a lesson there.

Totally. All right, Casey, that is Hard Fork wrapped for 2025. What have we learned about our show and the topics that we cover?

I think, based on what we just covered, what I've learned is that Hard Fork is one of the most interesting shows in the entire world. I want to give credit to you and the entire team for a great 52 episodes. We will continue to be making fresh Hard Fork episodes for you through the very end of 2025, and that's the Hard Fork promise.

We never rest, just like Santa. Actually, he does rest.

We're 996, baby.

Yeah. At least Santa gets the summer off, you know?

Santa is asleep at the wheel, and we're grinding.

Before we go, let's make our AI disclosures. I work at The New York Times Company, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright violations.

And my boyfriend works at Anthropic.