Is Google Breaking Up? + Seasteading Is Back + Tool Time

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Casey, I miss you.

You're in New York this week.

I'm in New York.

I thought it was time to finally come back to the offices of the New York Times and see what I could find out about your performance review.

Our studio in San Francisco feels very empty without you.

What are you up to there?

It's so empty, you can actually fully extend your legs while standing inside the studio, which is not always true when there's two hosts present.

So I saw Titanique last night.

Have you seen the show or heard of it?

It's pronounced Titanic.

It's Titanique.

Okay.

It is a sort of fever dream retelling of the Titanic story by an actress playing Celine Dion.

And it's kind of like a Celine Dion jukebox musical set in the world of Titanic.

It's absolutely hilarious.

I just thought, as a theater kid, you would love it because this is like an off-Broadway show.

And I swear to God, the singers were like the best singers I've ever seen live.

One of them was the understudy.

These people are incredible.

Yes, the talent density of singers in New York is unbelievable.

I realized this when I was 22 and moved to New York and entered a karaoke contest at a local bar.

I was not making much money and they had a $500 cash prize.

And I was like, I sing.

I'm an okay singer.

I might be able to like win this thing.

So I show up to the bar and the karaoke contest is about to start.

And I just hear these voices like doing warm-ups

in the hallway and they are the best singing voices I've ever heard.

These are professional singers.

I'm sure they were like, you know, Broadway actors and actresses, you know, ready to sort of, you know, sweep in and win this contest.

And I just decided, yeah, I'm not going to enter the karaoke contest again.

Yeah, I don't want to go up against Patty Lupone tonight.

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork.

This week, is Google on the brink of a breakup?

We'll tell you about their recent losses at antitrust trials.

Then, journalist Mark Yahm joins us to discuss the return of seasteadders, techno-utopians who want to colonize the ocean.

And finally, it's dual time.

We'll tell you about our latest experiments with new AI software.

Well, Casey, we announced last week on the show that we are doing our first ever live event.

Hard Fork Live is coming to San Francisco on June 24th.

And the response from listeners has been great.

It really has.

We're so excited for everyone who's bought a ticket so far.

Yes.

So we should say tickets are selling quickly.

So if you've been thinking about coming, please go snap up your tickets now.

You can get them at nytimes.com slash events slash hard fork live.

We also heard from some listeners that they were having issues with buying multiple tickets.

Apparently, the system that the New York Times ticketing process uses was limiting them to one per person, but that has been fixed now.

So bring your friend, bring your partner.

If you're in a thrupple or polycule, bring the whole gang.

So just to remind you, those tickets are at nytimes.com/slash events slash hard fork live.

Get them all.

They're hot.

Well, Casey, the big news we have to start by talking about this week is what the heck is going on with Google, which I understand has had a very busy week in antitrust land.

Yeah, so this was a huge week for Google.

In fact, I think looking back, we might even come to see it as one of the most important weeks in the company's history because, on one hand, you had another antitrust loss where a judge has said that the company has an illegal monopoly, this time in ads.

And across town in Washington, D.C., another judge is in the middle of a remedies trial trying to figure out what to do about the company's illegal monopoly in search.

Yes.

And I have found this whole thing very complicated and hard to follow, partially because Google's ad business and the various mechanisms that it uses for these online ad auctions is very complicated, but also because there is like this very strange naming thing that is happening because the judge in one of Google's antitrust cases is named Judge Meta, M-E-H-T-A.

And so every time someone talks about how Meta is doing at its antitrust trial, I just have no idea whether they are talking about Meta the corporation or Meta the judge.

Anyway, and it's made even more confusing, Kevin, by the fact that the judge in the Meta case is named Judge Google.

And so there's, it's really,

you just can't win.

You can't win.

Yeah.

So the last time we talked about Google's antitrust woes on the show, we brought up the fact that there are two distinct cases against Google that the federal government is bringing.

One of them is over this issue of bundling, whether Google is allowed to make these business deals that involve paying billions of dollars to companies like Apple in order to bundle their search products with Apple's iPhones and make it the default on Safari and things like that.

There's the other trial.

that I understand has something to do with Google's search ad business and its auction process and various Byzantine structures within that.

So, maybe let's start with the one that I understand more about, the bundling case that is about these exclusivity deals.

What is going on with that case?

Great.

So, it was last August, Kevin, that Google lost that case.

That is the case that's being presided over by Judge Meta.

And he ruled just what you said, that Google has maintained an illegal monopoly in search engines.

And a primary way that it has done that is by investing billions and billions of dollars every year to make sure that Google is the default on your iPhone, also on a lot of Samsung phones and various other, what they call OEMs or device manufacturers, right?

So in August, Kevin, Judge Meta says, hey, that's illegal.

A few months later, the government unveils their proposal for what they think ought to be done about it.

And this week, Kevin, Google is back at trial and all of this is now being litigated where the government is saying, here's what we think you should do.

And Google is trying to fight very hard against that and say, we think that you should actually do much less.

And how is that going for people who haven't been following that part of this antitrust trial?

Well, it's difficult to say, of course, because we're not inside the head of Judge Meta.

You know, this is a sort of interesting aspect of our legal system is that this will be decided by one person, Judge Meta, who's heard this whole case.

It will sort of be up to him.

What we typically do in those situations is we listen very closely to the questions that the judge is asking and we try to guess like, does he seem really skeptical about this?

Does he seem more interested in that?

Maybe we should start, Kevin, by just sort of laying out what the government has said should happen.

Yes.

So we've discussed this on the show before.

Kevin, I would say there's two big pieces of what the government wants.

One is that it wants Google to spin out the Chrome browser.

So Chrome, of course, the web browser that is the most popular browser in the world.

Google built it in-house.

The government is saying, we want you to give this up.

The government also wants Google to expose its proprietary data in some really interesting ways.

It wants the company to license its search index.

So the index that it is made of the entire internet, maybe even offer up some sort of API that would let the company's rivals like DuckDuckGo peek under the hood and see what is everyone searching for on Google right now.

And at trial this week, there was a witness from OpenAI, former hard fork guest Nick Turley, who said, you know what?

We would actually love to buy Chrome and we would love to get a look at Google's search index because that would make it much easier for us to build our own search engine and compete with them in the market.

So those are the two biggest ideas that are being bandied about at the trial.

That's really interesting.

I have so many questions about what OpenAI would do with Chrome and how they would sort of use that as a way to bootstrap some improvements in their AI models.

But we can save those for a later episode or when Nick Turley returns from testifying in court and comes back on to tell us.

But what is Google trying to do to push back on this proposed remedy?

Because presumably they don't want to give up Chrome at all.

That's a very big popular product for them and a big way to funnel people toward their search engine.

That's right.

They have said that that is a really extreme measure and would sort of place a chill on innovation if the government could just sort of step in and start tearing parts of Google out just because Google happened to make a very successful browser.

But what Google is really saying at the trial is essentially the government should do.

as close to nothing as Google can convince them of, right?

So for example, Kevin, the third big thing that the government is asking for is we want to place an end to these default placement deals.

So that was how this whole trial started was, you know, the government was noticing, wow, Google's spending $20 billion a year just to be the default on iOS.

Maybe we should stop them from doing that.

And that would sort of introduce some oxygen into the search market.

Google has come along and this week they're saying, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't do that.

Let us make these deals, but just make them non-exclusive.

So, you know, maybe we pay Apple to, you know, be one of the search choices, but Microsoft also gives Apple a bunch of money.

And then Bing can be a choice as well.

Right.

Apple's free to see other search engines.

Yes.

And of course, I think this is a really flimsy approach.

Like I've asked a Google representative this week directly, how is this actually going to eliminate the monopoly?

Like the government has ruled that there is a monopoly in this case.

If you just let other search engines like bid to be on these devices, do you really think you'll lose any market share whatsoever?

And, you know, the person I was talking to sort of waved their hands and said, well, look, you know, the government hasn't even really given us a target to like go for.

So we don't even know, you know, what the market is supposed to look at after all this is done, which I sort of regarded as hand-waving.

You know, what the government wants is obvious.

They want there to be a search engine that doesn't have 90% share of the search market.

And one way of doing that would be to get rid of these deals.

Yeah, I mean, it sort of begs the question of like, if they did enforce this remedy and break up Chrome and Google and force it to sell to someone else and they come back in a year or two and Google still has 90 plus percent of the search market, would they have considered that a failure?

Because for what it's worth, I think that is the very likely outcome here.

I don't think it is just lock-in and these exclusive arrangement deals.

I think Google search is actually better than other search engines.

And so, I think, even if you give people the choice or stop these sort of bundling arrangements, I think many, many people are just so ingrained and used to going to Google when they have a question that they'll just continue doing that.

So, I think that up until maybe a year ago, I would have agreed with you completely and said maybe it's pointless to even try something like this, Kevin.

But then along comes AI search, along comes ChatGPT, along comes perplexity, along comes all of these other chat bots that start to build a product that is not a one-for-one replacement for Google search, but for many early adopters, it becomes much better than Google and lots of things, as we have discussed frequently on this show, right?

You and I are both now using Google less because we're using AI products more.

And that's what I found so interesting about Nick Turley's testimony this week.

What he was saying was like, look, you know, we're not here to compete with Google one-on-one.

We want to build our own search product.

Like we think search is a sort of key pillar of what we're trying to build, but we can't build it in the way that we want to because there is a giant monopolist out there who won't work with us.

Something else interesting he said this week is that OpenAI went to Google last year and said, hey, can we make some sort of partnership with you, maybe get access to some of your search index?

And Google said, no, you can't.

So what could happen in this case, Kevin?

Well, maybe the government says, actually, Google, you have to go play nice with OpenAI.

You have to go play nice with DuckDuckGo and Perplexity.

You have to expose some data to them.

And we can't say for certain that those companies are going to make perfect use out of that data and make incredible products that are instantly used by billions of people, but it would give them a fighting chance.

And I do think that at least around the margins, it probably would continue to sort of corrode Google's market share, particularly with Chat GPT, right?

right?

Because we've already seen it doing that even before that company has access to any of the data that I'm talking about.

Yes.

Okay, so I have some thoughts about that, but first I want to hear about the status of the other Google antitrust case, or as you could call it, Google Togle.

That's not a good joke.

No, that's a great joke.

We're keeping that.

Producers, make sure everyone heard Kevin say Google Togal.

So over in what they call Google Togal, that, of course, is the second lawsuit that has been filed.

This one has to do with the online advertising market.

And I think the reason that people know less about this case, Kevin, is that this market is incredibly arcane and difficult to understand.

And that is on purpose, because I think if more people knew how this market worked, they would have said, well, obviously, that's hugely anti-competitive.

And that is actually what a judge found last week.

So Judge Leone Brinkama ruled in a 115-page ruling that Google has maintained a monopoly in two out of the three parts of the online ad market, which would be tools for online publishers.

So, you know, newspapers, other people making web pages and trying to make money from them, and the software that publishers use to try to make money on their web pages.

And that's a really big deal because that is the money engine at the heart of Google.

That is the source of its wealth.

And a judge came in and said, this is a monopoly.

So this second case, Google Togo, is now going to proceed to the remedy phase that the first case is already in.

What do we think will happen there?

What stands to change about Google's ad business as a result of this judge's ruling?

Yeah, well, so the issue here is that Google just kind of owns every side of this market.

And according to the judge, it has illegally tied those together.

So in order to use one, you have to use the other.

That is considered a classical antitrust violation by many competition scholars.

And so, the thinking here, Kevin, is that the government is going to come in and say, well, first of all, you have to stop tying these two things together.

And maybe you're actually going to have to unwind part of this operation.

Maybe you're not allowed to own every side of this market.

You're going to have to spin that out.

And so, were that to happen, and were the government to also be successful in the web search case, all of a sudden you're looking at a Google that has way fewer searches, right?

A Google that is sharing data with competitors that is helping them grow, and it has less money because the core of its advertising engine has been disrupted.

So are we at least a couple of years away from some of that stuff starting to happen?

Probably.

But if it does, Kevin, that would be the biggest change to the economics of the web in, I would argue, more than a decade, maybe two.

Yeah, I think it's potentially a really big deal.

And I've been convinced by you and others that this this is actually something that I need to pay attention to because it actually might result in some major changes to the way Google operates.

For me, the question I'm thinking about is whether the biggest effect of all of this antitrust litigation for Google will just be that it is distracted.

I mean, what we saw during the last big government antitrust case against a tech company, Microsoft, was that the actual penalties and the remedies were not what ended up making things hard for Microsoft.

It was just that it was so all-consuming and distracting for the company to be embroiled in this very high-profile litigation, to have all these lawyers sort of peering over everyone's shoulders all the time, to have all these reviews that had to go in before anything that could really get shipped.

If you talk to people who are at Microsoft at the time, they'll just tell you that the net effect was that Microsoft just sort of became this like sclerotic, slow-moving organization.

And I wonder if what we're seeing at Google is some version of that.

I mean, we've talked many, many times on this show about how Google's AI efforts just have not been nearly as fast and robust as you would expect from a company with Google's resources and talent.

And I wonder if what's happening is that they're just kind of taking their eye off the ball of like the new game that they are involved in while they're trying to litigate the old one.

So here's the thing.

I don't actually think this is happening at Google.

And here is why.

So something else that came out at trial this week, Kevin, is that Google has been seeking default placement deals for Gemini, which is its AI chatbot app.

Gemini, if you looked at one way, is the sort of sequel to the Google app, right?

This is the app that is the chatbot.

This is Google's chat GPT competitor.

And Google has looked at the market and they said, you know, what would be great for us is if instead of people just going out and downloading ChatGPT, they buy a Samsung phone and Gemini is already on it.

And they showed some slides in court this week that suggested that before the ruling in one of these antitrust cases, Google was actually thinking about trying to make these deals exclusive, right?

Essentially doing the same thing with the Gemini app that

they were just going to be caught doing with the core Google app, the core search engine.

But because the government came in and said, no, no, no, no, no, they went out and they made non-exclusive deals so that Samsung, you know, maybe will get paid a lot of money to put the Gemini app on a Samsung phone, you know, without you having to install it.

But Samsung can make that same deal with other people.

Why is all this interesting?

Google knows that it is at risk of being distracted and losing out on the next generation of search.

And it went out and it was trying to do the exact same thing it had done with search, which was to lock up the market by investing its monopoly profits in creating these default placement deals.

So they know, they know what is about to happen to them and they are using their money to try to prevent it from happening.

That's a really good point.

And it does like, it just seems like the sort of the corporate version of like a guy who like, you know, can't stop kiting checks or something.

Like he's on, he's, he's like, you know, on trial for check fraud and he just like pays the bailiff, you know, with a, with a fraudulent check because he just like can't stop himself.

Like they are literally being investigated for these bundling deals.

And what do they do?

They make more bundling deals or they attempt to make more bundling deals during the trial.

Absolutely.

They are being dragged into change, kicking and screaming.

Yeah.

So, okay, Casey, NetNet, do you think Google is in a different position this week than it was a week ago?

Yes.

If you had asked me whether five years ago, I was confident that Google would lose two antitrust cases related to web search and ads, I would have said no.

I did think that they were going to lose the ad case.

That one to to me just looked like an absolute no-prainer.

The web search case I thought was a little bit shakier, but Google has now lost both of those.

It is going to have to face remedy decisions in both of those.

And while I'm sure the appeals will go all the way up to the Supreme Court, we have to remember that the current administration and the Supreme Court has not been particularly friendly to Google across many dimensions.

So I think this is a case where Google has used up a lot of its goodwill and it does not have a lot of friends in high places who can get them out of this jam.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the Trump factor and all this because that's something that's been on my mind as I'm hearing you talk about this case or these cases.

We know that many people in Washington from both parties dislike big tech and want to see companies like Google broken up.

But Trump and his allies seem to have a particular animus against Google.

They really, really do not like this company.

Can you help me understand why that is and why I think it's probably unlikely that Trump or any of his folks will step in and try to save Google here.

Yeah, I mean, it's been a range of things.

I think there has been criticism from conservatives about the way that search results are displayed, accusations of shadow banning, showing results critical of this Republican congressman, but not showing results positive to them.

So that's been an aspect of it.

They made sort of James DeMoore a cause celeb.

This was this former Google employee who raised a ruckus, you know, essentially saying that the company was too woke.

Damore wound up getting fired.

He wound up, you know, becoming, again, sort of a cause celeb for conservatives.

And then when their AI systems came out, they had those embarrassing moments where like if you asked the chatbot to create the founding fathers, it would generate a sort of racially diverse crew and would not always depict them as white.

So these are some of the things that conservatives have tried to string together to paint a picture of a company that is essentially anti-conservative, and it has wanted to kind of try to work the refs into turning Google into a company that they see as more favorable to themselves.

Right.

And we know that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have been furiously, you know, bootlicking various folks in the Trump administration, trying to get on their good side in hopes of sort of making some of their antitrust concerns go away.

Has Google or Sundar Pichai been doing anything similar?

Well, Sundar Pichai was, you know, on the dais at the inauguration behind Trump.

I think that the company has made some steps to try to curry favor with the Trump administration, but I think it looks half-hearted compared to the complete surrender that we've seen at Meta, for example.

Like, you know, you and I have speculated over the past few months about whether Sundar Pachai will be able to keep his job through this, whether Larry and Sergei, who still run Google, will think, you know, know, we need to bring in a new CEO that, and we can sort of convince the Trump administration that we're making a clean break with the past and we want to get on better terms with that.

You know, we haven't seen any moves in that direction so far, but I don't think it's out of the question.

Now, Casey, I want to ask a macro question about all of this, which is that like, I have just become very jaded and cynical about these antitrust trials and cases actually resulting in real meaningful changes to these companies.

You know, we hear all the time about these proposed remedies, these breakups, these split offs, and then like very few things ever actually end up happening.

And so I guess my overarching question about this is like, is Google actually going to be broken up or forced to divest a key asset?

Or is this all going to get tied up in appeals and they're just going to kind of run out the clock?

Well, the clock has been running for five years and we're closer than we have ever been to some sort of meaningful action.

So look, I'm like you as well.

I also get cynical about these antitrust actions.

They take so long.

They get strung out forever on appeal.

But look, two judges have now said that Google has a monopoly.

There are now very real remedies that are being proposed.

Google is fighting back against them.

But remember, the people who decide the remedies have already decided that Google has a monopoly.

So they're going to do something.

Now, it may be that Google eventually wins on appeal, but unless that happens, you can believe that the judges will require Google to take some sort of action that it absolutely does not want to take to try to address these these monopolies.

When we come back, we'll talk with writer Mark Yarm about his new article on techno-utopian seasteaders.

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Well, Casey, typically we call the second segment of our show the B segment, but but today it's more of a C segment, S-E-A.

That's a pun.

That's very good, Kevin.

I actually have done notes on that.

That's exactly how I probably would have started the segment if it had been my turn.

So there was this piece in the New York Times magazine recently that caught my attention.

It was called The Techno-Utopians Who Want to Colonize the Sea.

And it was by Mark Yarm, who's an executive editor at PC Magazine.

And basically, it was about this group of people who want to build these pods out in the water and go live there.

Yeah.

And we saw this and we thought, is seasteading back?

Yeah.

So seasteading is something that we've both been interested in for a long time.

This was this movement that kind of grew out of Silicon Valley maybe 15 or so years ago that was funded by Peter Thiel initially, that was sort of part of this libertarian movement of people who were so fed up with regulations and big government and not being able to do what they wanted here on land that they were starting to hatch plans to build their own floating cities out in international waters where they wouldn't have to obey any of our land-based rules.

Yes, and they were ridiculed at the time and didn't seem to be making a lot of progress.

But, Kevin, as the years have gone on, we have repeatedly seen among the wealthiest members of our society, this urge to leave the world behind, whether it is going up to Mars, going into space.

There is just a lot of energy around removing yourself from society.

And so when we heard that there were maybe some folks looking to do this once again on the sea, we thought, we need to learn more about this.

Yeah, I mean, what makes this story so interesting to me is not just the people who want to leave it all behind and go out onto the ocean and live there, which I think is a pretty small number of people.

But I think there is this desire among a lot of tech people

right now

for this kind of self-determination, this ability to sort of break away from the existing strictures of society and start their own things.

I think a lot of people, especially with these sort of more engineering brains, look at the world as it exists today and think, I could do better than that.

Or me and my friends, we could set up our own thing that would have all these advantages.

Yeah.

Or the one one thing holding me back from achieving my dreams is being in a society.

Right.

And so I think we're starting to see not just the obsession with seasteading or Mars or are there these other sort of more experimental formats taking off, but we're starting to see more experimentation with actual systems of governance.

We've had these things called charter cities, these special economic zones.

We've talked about the people trying to build a new city for tech people in Solano County, California.

And I think what a lot of these projects share is sort of a dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to use technology as a way to maybe build something new and different.

That's right, Kevin.

So I think it's fair to say that with his story, Mark really whet our appetites to learn more.

And so to find out what's going on, I think we should bring him in.

Let's bring in Mark Yarm.

Mark Yarm, welcome to Hard Fork.

Thanks for having me.

So, Mark, you just wrote this fascinating piece in the New York Times magazine, and the piece opens on this guy named Rudiger Koch, who you describe as a German aerospace engineer and long-term Bitcoin investor.

And when you met him, he was 36 feet underwater trying to break the Guinness World Record for the longest time living in an underwater fixed habitat here.

So, what's going on here?

Uh, what's this guy's story?

Well, basically, this was somewhat of a publicity stunt for Ocean Builders, which is the company that Rudy is one of the founders of.

Ocean Builders has constructed three

what they call sea pods in and around the bay in northern Panama.

And I visited him on, I think, about day 118, a couple like 46 hours before he emerged.

And it's a real experience to go down there.

Like everything is a bluish, greenish tint, schools of fish moving, you know, swimming by the portals.

It's a very confined space, but it wasn't super arduous because, you know, he had somebody came down to clean, somebody provided the food from the marina.

It wasn't like it was all self-contained and obviously he could get visitors like me.

You mentioned that this was a sort of publicity stunt for his company, Ocean Builders.

They make these sea pods and is there idea that they are going to mass produce these and eventually lots of people will be doing what Mr.

Coke is doing and just be spending many, many days 36 feet below the sea?

Well, I mean, the actual sea pods are mostly for above water living, living on the water.

This was kind of unusual.

I don't think many people would voluntarily live in the below water chamber of this particular model.

Maybe we should just describe what these things look like.

Because for listeners who may be wondering what a sea pod is, there's a picture in your story that makes this sort of look like kind of like if you took a dumbbell and like turned it on its side.

It's like it has two chambers.

One of the chambers is above water.

And then there's like a little sort of rod that goes down into the water.

And there's, I guess, a spiral staircase inside that rod.

And then you get to the lower below water chamber, and that's where Mr.

Koch was, correct?

Correct.

For all intents and purposes, they are, I mean, in Panama, they are registered as houseboats.

Ocean Builders stresses that they are not in the seasteading movement.

This is more of a lifestyle brand.

I mean, the company has its roots in seasteading.

About six years ago, Chad and his now wife, Nadia, had a seastead about a very primitive model of what we're talking about, about 14 miles off the coast of Thailand.

And Chad is Chad Elwartowski, one of the co-founders of this company with Rudiger.

With Rudy and Grant, yes.

Okay.

And he's another Bitcoin guy, is that right?

Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah.

One fascinating detail in your story, Mark, is that the people who are involved with these sea pods, they are very adamant that despite the fact that these things cost like $6 million a piece to build, this is not just like a hobbyist project for the rich.

Like one of them actually says to you at one point, like, this is not Elysium, which is the movie where, you know, people are sort of orbiting the Earth, the 1%, sort of orbit the ruined Earth in a spacecraft.

Despite the fact that these are all very wealthy Bitcoin and other tech people who are doing this thing, you think there's a sort of a more innocent explanation that does not have to do with just wanting to like escape the tyrannical governments that we all live under and build their own thing?

Grant Ramont, the CEO of the company,

told me that,

I mean,

this hasn't come to the United States yet, but

he did tell me that, you know, many people in the Bay Area, of course, are interested in this concept of having a seat pod.

And

while I was there at the blue carpet ceremony they had for Rudy emerging from his underwater chamber, they announced this project with the Maldives, which is obviously threatened by climate change and rising sea levels.

And they are going to have some sea pods surrounding.

It's a very Venice-like looking technical

city that they're scheduled to build in the Maldives.

So, I mean, that's a very practical thing, I think.

If a nation's going to disappear.

But so the idea, Mark, is that there will be clusters of these pods, and then you'll just be able to sort of zip down in your sea-do and sort of seedoo over to your neighbor's sea pod for game night.

Is that right?

I mean, that is one vision of it.

I mean,

what's currently going on in Panama, you know, there's those two sea pods and then there's a third one, which is a prototype, not really used.

So, I mean, Grant, the CEO, lives on one of them pretty much full time and will,

you know, just he said that going out to shore was in his words ghetto.

So,

which, by the way, I think is a very revealing quote about how he feels about the rest of humanity.

I mean, up for interpretation, I suppose.

I mean,

he seemed like a perfectly sociable guy.

And,

but, I mean, I think there was some sort of allure to being by himself on the water in this sort of very high-tech, smart home.

Yeah.

Now, Mark, I have to ask you about Rudy, the kind of central character of your story.

Because on one level, you know, he seems like he shares some qualities with some tech billionaires and other, you know, big thinkers in the world that we cover.

On the other hand, he seems kind of crazy.

Like there was this big piece in the FT in 2023 that described him as paranoid and vengeful.

There were some allegations that he had hired a hitman to take care of some past wrongs that he says were done to him by the Thai government, which sort of broke up his previous seasteading attempt.

So, give me the kind of rundown on Rudy and what we know about him.

I was nervous asking him about this because obviously it was reported in the press, but he denied it, as you can see in the story.

And, you know, we got both sides of the story.

I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but um, you know, he's, he did admit to having a certain level of paranoia because he was involved in that original Thai seastead, and they definitely did fear for their lives at one point.

So, um, I don't know what the truth of the matter is, but um,

he was a very pleasant guy, though.

And it was, uh, I did have a good time talking to him down in the underwater chamber.

But you have to say that because otherwise, he'll hire a hitman.

Um,

I, yes,

you cannot see the gun to my head on the so Mark, you know, the I to me, the so much of the appeal of your story is like look at these fascinating strange people who have decided for some reason to you know cast out on their own and try to build these small communities at sea but there is also this sort of commercial imperative there they want to sort of other people to join them in this lifestyle how is that going is this idea getting much pickup right now

i mean as i said there were uh you know in the maldives that they have picked up on this idea, people, I mean, that they're taking pre-orders in a very Tesla-like move.

You know, I think, I mean, I think it's a limited market, but those who really want it

would definitely seek it out, I think.

Yeah, I mean, I spent some time with some seasetters maybe a decade ago.

I was working on a TV project that never went anywhere, and I was doing some research for that.

You were on a bit of a fishing expedition.

Exactly.

And to me, there was just something about this movement that just seemed so spiritually empty and sad.

And I know that sounds harsh.

And some of the people involved in seasetting that I met when I was doing this research were quite kind, but there was something so like

empty about a world in which you become so dissatisfied with the place you live, the community around you, the government that sort of makes the rules that you follow, that instead of just trying to like change the system or work within the system or reform the system, you just kind of hit the eject button and go take your ball and try to start over in this place, the middle of the ocean that is very inhospitable to you being there.

And I don't know, I just, I guess I kind of want to get both your takes on that.

Like, is there something sad and lonely about all of these tech people who want to go live on these floating cities or in these pods in in the middle of the ocean.

To me, it would seem a little isolating to you guys, perhaps.

But I don't know if, I mean, there are quite, as you know, from doing that documentary, there are lots of people who are into the idea.

So, you know, Kevin, like you, I also poked around the seasteading movement a decade or so ago when it first kind of came into the fore.

It was a really novel idea.

And I was interested to learn more.

And I remember some of the folks at the time saying the reason to do this is that there has actually just been not enough innovation in government.

That you look at the forms of government that we have in the world, there aren't that many of them.

And maybe if we want human progress to advance more quickly, we should just try more things.

And we happen to have this legal loophole, which is that if you move out into international waters, you can create these semi-autonomous communities and maybe do a little bit of innovation.

And I have to say, like part of me was with them on that point.

You know, I personally didn't want to move out to the colony in the middle of the sea, but if some people wanted to try it and come back with some new ideas,

I didn't necessarily have any issue with it.

What I think is really interesting about Mark's reporting is that.

10 years later, we don't really seem that much closer to building communities.

We still have kind of the same loners who are ensconcing themselves in underground chambers and trying to sell the rest of us on the idea.

And I don't think it's working.

And I think it does actually seem way lonelier and way less ambitious, frankly, than it did a decade ago.

Well, Casey, I want to offer an alternative explanation here that I see in the failure of Seasteading to really catch on beyond a small niche group, which is that the people who are influential and have a lot of money and resources in tech have just realized that they don't have to start their own civilizations because they can buy the ones that already exist.

I mean, the biggest one, the biggest change in our political climate over the past 10 years, one of them has been that the people who run Silicon Valley have decided to invest in trying to, you know, sway the government of the United States to make friendlier regulations, to loosen up on some of the restrictions on their activities.

If you are Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or someone else who wants to build your own civilization, you might actually just have more luck trying to swing the existing system in your direction.

And so that's one idea that I have about why ceasteading and movements like it have not taken off.

Is there just that there turns out to be a much more direct route to seizing power and becoming sort of semi-autonomous.

What do you think about that?

I mean, arguably, Elon Musk obviously has seized a great deal of power, yet still

proclaims to want to go to Mars.

You know, a lot of the people I spoke to for this piece talked about

how we're, you know, we're going to get to colonize the oceans before Mars, that the oceans are as inhospitable as they may be or much more realistic than Mars, which is perhaps, you know, perhaps beyond our technical capabilities, even if others would like us to believe that it is within our grasp.

Yeah.

I have to tell you both this anecdote that's just coming back to me from the time that I was reporting and researching seasteading a decade ago, which is that I was at Burning Man

and I went to an event that some seasteaders were holding at Burning Man.

They love Burning Man.

And they were sort of discussing various aspects of what their life on the seastead would be like.

You know, when they did manage to build these floating cities in international waters, they were sort of dreaming about how things would go, and it was all men.

And they were sort of like talking amongst themselves about how they were going to convince women to come out to the seastead.

And they just, I will never forget these guys at Burning Man just saying, like, well, we could just like helicopter them in for like a week or two at a time, and then they could go back to land.

And I just remember thinking,

These people are insane.

What is with the gender difference?

Because

there is a woman in your story, Mark, who

lives on a sea pod, but I believe there's only one.

It does seem like wanting to live by yourself in the ocean is an extremely male-coated activity.

I mean, I think the,

I mean, Nadia, who now lives in like suburban Indianapolis, she was seastending with Chad, her now husband.

Yeah, it does tend to be pretty dude heavy.

Yeah.

But I do want to take this idea of sovereignty and the tech world sort of waking up to its own power more seriously, because I think there is a common thread running through your story, Mark, and a lot of the stories that we've seen about things like billionaires wanting to do space travel, about the emergence of the tech right, about these charter cities and special economic zones.

I think we are at a moment right now where there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle sort of realizing that things have gotten kind of broken in the world around them.

And some people's instinct in a situation like that

is to try to reform systems from within or try to buy them or bend them to their will.

And some people's instinct is just to sort of say, I'm out of here.

I want to do my own thing.

And so I do think that that is a split within the tech community on how best to engage with the world around them or whether to engage at all and i just think that's something we should keep tabs on

yeah we should definitely uh i mean obviously again as climate change gets worse and the land becomes or more inhospitable we're going to be looking i mean a lot of people are i'm i mean i would never go to mars i don't know show of hands who else would but um

you know it's a fantasy of many people i i mean you know i think you said mark that the the founders keep saying this is not an ideological project, right?

I think there just is something inescapably ideological about living by yourself out onto the ocean, right?

If you're like a community builder or like somebody who likes like creating coalitions, you're probably not going to do it from your sea pod, right?

So they really do seem to be optimizing for people that just want to remove themselves from society rather than people who want to rebuild it.

I mean, in theory, you could have a cluster of sea pods and visit your neighbors and Casey, I'll visit you on your sea pod.

Okay,

after I after I get canceled, and that's the only place that'll have me

and I'm

trying to escape from the Thai Navy.

You can come pay me a visit.

I'll see you there.

Well, Mark, thanks so much for your fascinating reporting here, and thank you for going where few reporters have dared to go before onto the sea pods.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

I appreciate it.

Well, Casey, I'm underwater in email.

When we come back, we'll do our dual time segment and talk about all the stuff we're using to try to become more productive.

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Well, Kevin, I just checked my watch, and it's tool time.

Tool time!

Tool time, of course, is our segment where we run down the latest AI and other software products we've been using to improve our lives at work and at home.

And this week, we've got three different products that we've both started using in recent weeks.

And as we so often do when we discuss AI tools on the show, we like to begin with a couple of disclosures.

Yes.

So now I wouldn't call your boyfriend a tool, but that's on you.

Well,

wow, did I come close to saying something I regret?

But here's something you should know.

Speaking of my boyfriend, Kevin, he does work at Anthropic.

Yeah, your Manthropic works at Anthropic.

Also, I recently learned that people at Anthropic are starting to call him Manthropic around the office because of our podcast.

And I would just like to say to those Anthropic employees, cut it out.

Be nice.

Leave the boyfriend alone.

Yes.

He's very sweet.

He's very sweet.

He is.

Now, do you have a disclosure, Kevin?

Oh, the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, of course.

All right.

Well, now that those disclosures are through, Kevin, let's get to the first tool we want to talk about today.

And that one goes by the name O3.

Yes.

So 03 is OpenAI's newly available model.

It became available through ChatGPT last week.

And it made a big splash.

People were sort of very excited by some of its new capabilities.

Tyler Cowan, the economist, said that he thought that O3 was AGI, that essentially it was as smart as we could expect AGI to be.

Lots of people disagree with that.

People have been sort of finding things that it's not all that good at compared to past systems.

But Casey, give us the rundown of O3 and then tell me how you are using this thing.

Sure.

So O3, as you say, is OpenAI's latest and perhaps most powerful model.

It is what they call a reasoning model.

So it gives a little bit of extra time after you enter your query so that it can do a bunch of cool tricks.

And most interestingly, Kevin, it is the first reasoning model to be able to combine every tool available to chat GPT within one.

So you enter a query and before it gives you the answer, it can search the web.

It can analyze your uploaded files.

It can analyze data with Python.

It can do reasoning on visual input.

So like if you upload a couple of images as well, and it can generate images.

So you're like, you know how right now we live in this nightmare world where you have to like go to a dropdown menu and choose which of the 16 models you should use to like do whatever your thing is.

O3 is a step towards saying, Hey, forget about that.

Just tell us what you want to do, and we will give you the best possible answer.

It is the Omni model.

Yes.

And is this available to all ChatGPT users, or do you have to pay for it?

You got to pay for it.

And the more you pay OpenAI, the more queries you will get per week.

But I imagine that before too long, this sort of thing is going to come down to the free tier, at least for, you know, a handful of queries a week.

Yeah.

So there are all kinds of benchmarks out there and people will talk about, you know, oh, O3 did this much better on this benchmark than this previous model.

But I want your sort of vibe-based evaluation of O3, Casey.

What does this thing do for you and why is it better than other systems you've tried?

Yeah, well, the fact that it can do web searches and document analysis before it gives you an answer just does mean that you can perform some super helpful tasks more quickly than you could if you were maybe doing those in separate steps.

So for example, when these 115 page rulings come out of the Google antitrust trial, my first step is to upload it into O3 and then I can just chat with the document.

So for example, maybe I'm trying to understand, you know, well, why does the government think that this is the case and O3 will just go pull out the quotes.

Now you may be wondering, do I then go back and make sure that those quotes are real and we're not hallucinated by O3?

Yes, I absolutely do, but so far, I have not found a case of it making up a fake citation.

I will continue to check its work, but that has been super helpful to me, Kevin.

I've also just been using it for like business ideation.

So I have a couple of things I'm thinking about doing with platformer.

And I basically one Saturday morning just kind of sat down and said, hey, here's what I'm thinking about.

How might you go about this?

And it's just...

And what did it tell you about starting an OnlyFans?

Yeah, that's right.

Who's ready to see these feet?

The thing is, it's actually really good at this, right?

And, you know, my favorite way to use these AI models tends to be stuff where I'm not asking it for critical life or death information that I then have to worry it is hallucinated.

It is instead to say, hey, get me the first 10 or 20% of the way through a project.

And so as I think about doing these more creative tasks, I found that O3 is a really smart partner.

It does have good ideas.

Of course, it has terrible ideas as well.

But sometimes what you need to get unstuck on a project is for somebody to give you a terrible idea and you think, oh, no, no, that sucks, but it does actually spark something for how I could do it better.

So that's kind of how I've been using O3 so far.

And I would say I've been a pretty happy customer.

Yeah, so I've been playing around with it too.

And I've been using O3 sometimes for interior design.

I used it to help pick out a rug for my office this week at my house.

I used it to help me figure out what was going on with a car seat that was broken.

One of the most fun uses I've seen for O3 is people basically using it to play GeoGuesser.

Have you seen this?

I have seen this.

So GeoGuesser is this game where you like basically are given a photo and you have to kind of guess where in the world it was taken using various like visual clues and you know landmarks and vegetation.

And like there are these people who are super good at this and do this competitively.

There's this guy Rainbolt who is like the king of GeoGuesser.

And at least according to some of my friends, O3 is now quite good at at doing this kind of visual analysis where you can feed it a photo and say, where was this taken?

And it will sort of like inspect various pieces and kind of do that for you.

Now, I did try this on a few of my own photos.

It did not get the right answers.

But some people are reporting that this thing is just like incredible at that.

So take that for what you will.

And let's say that that is very fun.

If you are playing a benign game of GeoGuesser, you can also imagine the worrisome privacy implications if now all of a sudden people can upload any photo of you ever taken and say, oh, I know exactly where this person is at this moment.

Totally.

Okay.

So Casey, who would you recommend O3 to at this point and for what?

Well, look, I think that I would still place it in the category of like something that is cool and novel and fun for an early adopter.

Like if you really want to be on the bleeding edge, like sure, you know, spend 20 bucks a month to use ChatGPT, play around with this, see what it's useful for.

And if you find it super useful, you know, maybe you want to go up to a higher tier plan and use it even more.

For, you know, if you're just like a student or somebody who's casually dabbling with this stuff, I don't think there's anything about O3 that means you need to like go out and upgrade immediately.

But I think for folks like us, we're very interested in the state of the art.

This was a moment where both of us said, aha, okay, we can see the frontier moving up quickly here.

Yeah.

And in fairness to other sort of frontier AI companies, we should also say a few of them have also gotten upgrades since the last time we did a tool time segment.

Claude now has the ability to search the internet, which is a feature that we had asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amade about when he came on the show earlier.

Gemini is also, people are very excited about the new model that is inside Gemini.

Gemini 2.5 is the newest version.

All these models are just kind of taking big steps up as a result of these new reasoning functions.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Okay, next tool.

Casey, you want to talk about something called Tana.

Now, what is Tana?

I've been pronouncing it Tana, but it might be called Tana.

Many folks who work on the team are from Norway, and I don't really know how they pronounce Valas over there.

But I'm going to call it Tana for this segment.

It was built by some former Googlers, including one who helped to build Google Wave, which was a product that I loved way back in the 2000s.

There was an early step at creating this kind of collaboration software.

It sort of borrowed elements from wikis and tried to create something really cool.

I loved it.

Didn't really take off, but a lot of those ideas wound up surfacing again in what I'm going to call these collaborative workspace apps like Notion, I think is maybe the most popular one.

I've also talked previously on the show about other kind of similar note-taking personal knowledge management apps like Obsidian or Rome.

And on one level, Tana is just kind of another one of those, but I have been using it in a way that I have been finding cool that I did want to talk about.

All right, tell me.

So what I decided to do is essentially have one piece of software that I just use as as my AI journal.

Okay.

I'm a big believer in journaling.

I think one reason why I'm constantly talking about note-taking and productivity is I do believe that everyone should keep a journal of some kind.

I just think that it is both, it's good for you at work, it's good for you at home.

It's just a good thing to do.

But if you put everything into one journal, it can feel very crowded, very cluttered, and it feels like it maybe doesn't have the utility that you want.

I do most of my daily journaling in another great app called Capacities, which we've talked about on the show.

I still really like capacities.

I still use it basically every day.

But once Tana came around, I said, you know, I have this other idea, which is every day there's a ton of AI headlines, and I'm really trying to make myself as smart as I can about AI.

So every day, I'm just going to take all the top headlines about AI and I'm going to put them in one place and I'm going to add tags and then I'm just going to revisit it throughout the week, right?

Because maybe I'm writing about open AI this week.

Now I just click on a tag and I see everything that has happened in my world with Open AI in that week.

I can quickly open up that story and figure out what I thought was interesting.

So what I'm hoping is over time, I will just have built this really interesting chronological log of the development of the AI industry that I can dip into at any time that is very easily searchable and that I'm hoping will make me smarter about the subject overall.

And I mean, that sounds very useful, but I'm also like remembering.

previous productivity apps that you've described to me that work in very similar ways that allow you to create tags and kind of keep track of topics.

So how is this one different or better?

To me, it's like it's like it's useful in the same way that like just opening a new browser window can be useful sometimes, right?

It's like you could have just opened the tab in the old browser window, but sometimes it is that blank sheet of paper that actually draws you to using it.

And so, that is how I am trying to use it.

So, I guess what I'm really suggesting, or what I'm curious about, is: do you think that there can just be a value in like having a journal dedicated to something particular, a specific app that I do a specific thing in, you know, instead of just trying to turn every app into a Swiss army knife, like sometimes you just want a hammer.

And so I'm trying to use Tana as a hammer to organize one particular thing.

Okay, well, let me know how your experiment goes.

I hope this is the productivity app that finally fixes the gaping void inside you.

Casey, how much does Tana cost?

And are there any other things you'd like to say about it?

So it's a freemium model.

There's a fairly generous free tier.

If you get really into it, there's a paid plan that starts at eight bucks a month or 96 bucks a year.

I don't have any particular feeling like, oh, you have to rush out and try Tana.

You could also try Obsidian, which is free to use in almost every case.

And like you could definitely do everything I'm talking about there, but I don't know.

Just experiment with having a single subject journal and just let me know how it goes.

Or if you've done that in the past, email us and tell me what you learned from that experience.

It could be useful to me.

Now, I believe you are also using an interesting new tool, Kevin.

Why don't you tell us about it?

Now, if you will remember the last time we did a tool time segment, I said that I was drowning in unread emails and I was desperate for a company or a startup or someone to come along and build for me an app that would allow me to put my entire email inbox on autopilot, just to have AI like draft responses to all of my emails, let me push one button and send everything, never have to think about email again.

And you predicted.

That when we published that episode, a bunch of listeners would reach out and say, hey, I actually have built that app.

Why don't you try it?

And that I I would try them and be disappointed by all of them.

Yeah.

Well, what happened?

Well, Casey, you were right.

So after we published that episode, I heard from a number of listeners saying basically, we have this.

It exists.

Come try it out.

I talked to a bunch of their CEOs.

I got some demos.

I was very excited to try some of these email autopilot products.

And then I started running into walls.

So one of the walls is that I realized that my requirements for this program were going to be very hard to meet.

So my first requirement, as you will remember, was that the email autopilot program not send any of my data to an AI company in a way that would require me to like trust that they are handling that safely.

And the second requirement that I didn't know when we taped the show last week was related to something that I am enrolled in called Google Advanced Protection.

This is a kind of high security program for journalists or politicians or dissidents who need a little bit of extra security on their Google accounts.

And one thing that Google Advanced Protection does is it blocks access to third-party plug-ins that want to go into your Gmail and sort of use that data or take it somewhere and analyze it in some way.

That makes sense.

So All of these demos suffer from the same problem, which is that in order to use their email autopilot software, you have to essentially fork over your Gmail account to these companies, you know, many of which I assume are trustworthy, but I'm just not sure enough to give them 20 years worth of my email.

Yes.

So what happened?

So then, Casey, my saga was not done because I attempted some vibe coding experiments to try to build my own app that would run locally on my machine.

And Casey, I tried so many different things.

I tried with O3 building an extension for a mail program called Thunderbird, but it turned out the New York Times tech people didn't allow that either.

I tried to build my own Chrome extension that would sort of look at my Gmail as it was coming in and draft responses.

That didn't work either because of some security things.

I even tried creating something called an Electron app, which was terrifying.

Eventually, I got to the point where O3 was getting so desperate with all of my crazy requirements and wanted to help me so badly that it actually suggested that I essentially build my own malware, like a program that I could install on my computer that would like screen grab my screen and log all my keystrokes and like analyze it and use that to respond to my emails.

I thought that was a little bit overboard.

Yeah.

But this sad end to my email autopilot saga is not where I leave you today because Casey, I have found a new path through the email wilderness.

All right, give us some hope here, Roos.

I have become a dictator, Casey.

Yeah, our producers already could have told you that.

Not the tinpot kind.

I have become a person who uses AI dictation software.

Now, we have talked on this show before.

I'm a guy who likes to talk rather than write.

And now there are these AI-powered dictation tools that can do a lot of what I've been hoping that something like email autopilot would do for me, which is to blaze blaze through a bunch of emails very quickly just by talking to my computer.

So I sort of found a second route.

Okay, yeah.

So tell it, like, what app are you using here?

So there are a bunch of them out there.

There's Aqua, there's Whisperflow.

The one I've been using most is called Super Whisper.

And basically, you know, we've had dictation apps and speech recognition apps for a long time.

They're built into like probably every phone and computer now.

But these new dictation apps can do more than just transcribe the words you're saying.

They're connected to large language models, so you can talk into them and then they can capture what you're saying and transform it in some way.

Maybe they can summarize it or create a bullet point list or change the tone slightly or just take out the filler words and kind of format everything in a very context-aware way.

So if you're writing emails, it can sound like an email.

If you're writing messages, it can sound like a message.

If you're doing a draft of a piece, it can sound like a draft of a piece.

And it can do this across any app.

So anything that you're doing on your computer, you just kind of hit your hotkey, start talking, and it types into whatever box you're typing into.

Right.

And so how much time does that save you just like talking an email rather than writing it?

I've found it saving me like probably 50% of my email time, just being able to talk.

I talk faster than I type.

I think a lot of people do.

I mean, I'm sure you've seen people going around dictating text messages and they always have to say like, tell Tom I'm going to the grocery store, period.

Does he want cookies?

Question mark.

And like, you don't have to do that.

Telegrams.

Yes.

And you don't have to do that with these new AI dictation apps.

You can just sort of talk naturally the way that you would talk to a person.

Interesting.

I have to say, I do not like sitting alone in a room talking to myself.

Like I feel self-conscious about it.

It also feels like I'm using more energy than maybe I would when I'm just, you know, sort of running my little fingers over the keyboard.

So, you know, I guess it doesn't surprise me that you love to talk to yourself, but I just don't think it would work for me in quite the same way.

I've got big like muttering energy.

Is that what you're trying to say?

So that is my tool of the week.

I like these AI dictation apps.

And if you are a person who likes to talk, try one out.

All right.

Well, those are a few tools for your consideration.

And, you know, listeners, if you've been using any cool tools recently, you want us to tell us about, maybe even get our take on, email us.

We're always always looking for fun new things to try.

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One more thing before we go.

We told you last week that we are excited to tell you who our special guest is going to be for an upcoming hard questions episode.

And we can now tell you who that person is, Kevin.

It's Pope Francis.

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No, it's not.

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Most importantly, Et is going to be joining us to help answer your ethical dilemmas and tech-related moral quandaries.

So please send them in.

Yeah, and just if you're wondering what kind of quandary, you know, might we be looking for here, here's a couple we've had in the past.

There was one that was like, my top daycare choice is requiring a photo release and the rights to use my child's image in promotional materials as a precondition for registering.

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Send us a short voice memo or even a video of yourself.

Keep it around 30 seconds if you can, and send it to hardfork at nytimes.com.

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