Apple’s Face Computer + Crypto Chaos + How Teens Really Feel About Social Media
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I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And you're listening to Hard Fork. Why don't we ever do it in unison like that? Isn't that fun? We should. That sounds good. Let's do it one more time. And you're listening to Hard Fork. I hate to say it. It felt really good. Yeah, I felt like the Beastie Boys. Yep.

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist for The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And you're listening to Hard Fork. This week, the big vision behind Apple's Vision Pro. Then, New York Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellini helps us unpack the worst week in crypto maybe ever. And finally, our teenage listeners tell us how they feel about social media and what we should do about it.

So, Casey, the big news in tech this week was that Apple, after many, many years of frenzied speculation and rumors, has now introduced its headset called the Apple Vision Pro, and it's a mixed reality device. Is this like

I remember when Apple used to announce new products, it was kind of like the tech reporter, like equivalent of the Super Bowl. Yeah. Is this like a special event at your house? Do you like bust out the Tostitos and queso and like settle in? Yes, I ordered some DoorDash, you know, I had my beverages and everything I needed to fully experience the big reveal. Good, you had your like adult diaper on so you didn't have to get up and go to the bathroom. It was only two hours. But yeah, it was a long event. It was. And it was a really interesting event. But I wanted to just start with like,

What is the Apple Vision Pro? Yeah, I think what the Apple Vision Pro is is $3,500. Like, if you heard one thing about it, I think it was just how expensive it is. But it is a headset. It looks like a pair of extremely fancy ski goggles. And you put them over your face.

and you do not see virtual reality, so you won't immediately be transported into a cartoon virtual world. Instead, you see a kind of iOS-like overlay of icons and software in your field of vision.

So you'll be sitting at your desk, say, and you can then call up a word processor, a web browser, FaceTime, something like that. So the idea is bringing computing into the space where you actually are more than

transporting you to some other digital place. Totally. And this was a big point that I noticed sort of between the lines of Apple's announcement. They did not once use the word metaverse during this announcement. No, they did not. They're calling it spatial computing, which is kind of their term for this overlay of digital objects and screens and apps onto the physical world. This is not on sale yet. Apple plans to start shipping it out early next year.

But what did you think of the announcement? Look, I know a lot of people are greeting this product with extreme skepticism. But when I saw it, I thought, you know, this is the start of a 10-year transition. And at the end of it, I think a lot of people will be wearing computers on their faces. I actually do think that.

I'm a little torn about this because I think on one hand, like, you're right. It was an exciting announcement. It certainly was more interesting than the average Apple conference these days. Yeah, and by the way, the rest of the keynote was that you could put widgets on the desktop now. I mean, it was like the things that they were announcing were straight out of 2012. Right. So, you know, my first thought when I saw this headset was like, it kind of looks weird.

Like, we gotta just be upfront about that. Yes, of course it looks weird. We've never worn computers on our faces before. It was always gonna look weird. Right, but the look did grow on me over the course of the announcement. I think for what it is, like a computer that sits on your face, it's like a pretty well-designed and attractive computer that sits on your face.

And one thing that I really liked in this that I didn't expect to like that I thought I might actually find creepy was this feature called eyesight. Did you tune in on this part of the video? Yeah, this is maybe the wildest part of the entire device. Totally. So, you know, we've had other virtual reality and sort of mixed reality headsets before. There's the Quest from Meta. There's the HoloLens from Microsoft. You know, Samsung has a version of this. But

One feature that really stood out to me with the Vision Pro was eyesight. Casey, can you explain eyesight? So eyesight has two modes. There is a mode when you are watching video, say, or doing something quite immersive. And then the exterior of the Vision Pro will show sort of cloudy visions that indicate that you cannot see whatever is in front of you. However, when you're in that kind of

pass-through mode where maybe you're working on a document, but you can actually see the room that you're sitting in, the Vision Pro will render an image of your eyes using the cameras in the device, and then it will show them on the exterior of the device. So it's not your actual eyes, it is a digital rendering of your eyes that is being sort of pasted

and animated on the front of these goggles, which I cannot wait until we hear like the full story of how they came up with this thing, because I don't think anybody ever would have predicted that. Yeah, it's a wild feature and it actually makes a ton of sense to me because one of the things that I've found while using virtual reality headsets before is that it can be quite isolating. Like if you're at home and there's someone else in the house, like

they can't really talk to you because they don't know if, you know, you're in the pass-through mode or you're in a game or something. Maybe they have headphones on. So this is actually not a feature for the wearer of the Vision Pro. It's a feature for everyone who is in the same room as that person to basically just be able to know whether they can see you or not. Yeah, and I thought that

That was so interesting because Meta, which is the leader in this space just in terms of how many units they've sold, they are the social company, right? They make Facebook and Instagram. But to your point, they make these closed-off boxes that almost completely obscure the face of the person who's wearing it. So then along comes Apple, which has famously failed at social networks like Ping, and they

they're like, you know what? We actually need to integrate some kind of pro-social feature into this thing. I thought it was really smart because, again, if you think 10 years from now that people may be wearing these in the office, you do want to know at a glance whether the person you're talking to you can see or not. That gets to my next question for you about the Vision Pro, which is, do you think this will work? Do you think that a $3,500 mixed reality goggle headset device

can actually be a hit for Apple. - So this is a good point to really step back and ask the question, why are they putting a computer on our face? I've seen a lot of chatter, I've talked to people in my life who have not been able to get a handle on why we might want to do that.

And the first thing to say about that is this is an experiment. We are seeing if people like this. The answer might be no. I am open to all of that possibility. But if you want to just put yourself in the mindset of, well, why might this work? Why might this be an improvement on what we have today? There's a couple things I would say.

Number one, I don't know about you, Kevin, but wherever I am, if I am looking at a screen, I basically want that screen to be as big as possible, right? Unless I am mobile and I just want to look at something quickly on my phone. If I'm looking at a laptop, I always wish my laptop screen were a little bigger. If I'm watching TV, I always wish the TV were bigger. If I'm watching a movie, I wish I was looking at an IMAX, right? The more screen, the more immersive something is, the more fun it generally is. Right?

When you put a computer on your face with extremely high resolution displays, you can conjure a screen that is as big as any room that you are in. So the obvious thing to do that is to watch a movie, watch a TV show, right? And people who have used this headset have said that the Vision Pro is very, very good at that, right? If you're taking a long flight, this might be the best way to watch a movie, right, as you're doing that.

But also, if you are at work, a lot of people now are working with two, three, even four screens at their desktop. That's very bulky. That is very expensive. You could probably easily spend $3,500 actually buying four good monitors for your desktop. If you're eventually able to buy a computer that lets you have as many monitors as you want, sort of surround yourself with that information, that might be useful to you in your job.

So I think that is one of the main reasons that people think that this experiment could work. So you see this as mostly a tool for work and for productivity, not for entertainment or talking with your friends or hanging out in this kind of spatial computing way. Well, I think that is how Apple has positioned it at first because they are a productivity and creativity company, right? Apple does not have any real credibility in the gaming world, but they do have credibility among creative types who use their MacBooks for everything.

So I do think that that is sort of where they're going to start. But again, they also showed a lot of people watching movies, having a good time, and they've just introduced a developer kit so that now anyone can go try to figure out what else we might put on this thing. And I bet there's going to be a lot of fun stuff in there as well. But I was struck overall at how serious the tone of this presentation was because I'm

I was contrasting it with what Meta has done in the past, and they've done these sort of very lavish, cartoony displays where, and I'm making this up, but all I can remember is just sort of like, you know, cartoon pandas and alligators, like doing cartwheels all over the metaverse. And, you know, it was like silly and it was fun. And the Apple presentation was like, do you want to succeed in your life? You need a Vision Pro, you know? It was just very different. There's a second,

why I think we might want to put these computers on our faces. So this world I've just described where, okay, you have the ultimate setup for work and entertainment, and it all has to do with kind of the screens and the interaction patterns that this thing enables. Now imagine you can throw that in your bag,

And so you want to go work at the coffee shop? Just put the goggles on your face. You want to get worked on on the plane? Put the goggles on your face. You want to get worked on at the hotel? Put the goggles on your face. So all of a sudden, your perfect setup for productivity and entertainment is now –

10 times more portable than it's ever been. You ever remember the memes of like, I feel like this was like in the 2000s, people would like take creep shots of guys in Starbucks who'd brought their like entire iMac so they could play World of Warcraft. Yeah, they're like playing World of Warcraft against Starbucks. They got three monitors set up on the little Starbucks table. Exactly.

And of course it's ridiculous, but I want you to just think for a moment about what that tells us. Because what it tells us is that people are desperate to bring their perfect rigs everywhere, no matter how ridiculous it is. You saw that meme and you were like, I wish that could be me. I thought that is a person who is self-actualized.

And takes what he wants. And I had a lot of respect for it. Yeah, so I've been thinking about this, and I can come up with a lot of reasons that the Vision Pro might not work, right? Like, it is very expensive for the average person. It's not clear what exactly is the killer app yet. But I'm sort of scared to bet against it. And partially that's because I remember what happened with the Apple

watch. Like 10 years ago, you know, Apple was considering coming out with a watch. And I was very negative about this. I wrote a whole column basically laying out the argument that this was a stupid category for Apple to enter. No one who would wear like a computer watch on their wrist. No one needs to know the time anymore. Yeah.

No, but I was like, you know, because the existing smartwatches were bulky and sort of ugly and, you know, wearing one like immediately made you look like just a huge dork. And there was also this sort of like, what is it for question about like who actually needs this? And, you know, won't it be weird if we're like all talking into our watches or, you know, glancing up at them every time we get an email? Yeah.

And what I think I just missed at the time was that it's just different when Apple does something. Right. Because Apple is very good at making nerdy stuff into the thing that everyone wants. And so when they did come out with the Apple Watch, it took a little while for people to warm up to it. Right.

The first version was not a huge smash, and people said all the same things that we're saying about the Vision Pro now. It's too expensive, and who needs this, and this is just a way to show off. But I think as time went on, A, the price came down, the hardware got better, it could do more things, there were more apps for it.

But it was also just the social norms around it changed to the point where it now like didn't mark you as like a super nerd to be wearing an Apple Watch. In fact, you know, people thought they look kind of cool and the kind of social vibe of the Apple Watch changed. So it wasn't like,

oh, you're looking at your watch every time you get a text, like that's really rude and you shouldn't do that. Yeah, I think the story of the Apple Watch is super useful in understanding what you might expect from the Vision Pro over the next five or 10 years. When the first Apple Watch came out, I kind of thought, I don't really know what this is for. And I had one kind of pedantic quibble with the watch, which was that the screen wasn't on unless you tapped it. And I thought, this thing is worse at being a watch than a watch is, and so I don't want it. But

But Apple kept iterating. And when the Series 5 came out, several years after that first watch, it had an always-on display. And I thought, you know, I actually want one of those things. Something else had happened during those five series that they went through, which is that they figured out what the watch was for, which was essentially health and fitness. And they reoriented the device over time to what consumers were telling them they found it the most useful thing.

I think we're about to go through a similar process with this Vision Pro. The first version is going to be for almost no one. The second version will be for slightly more people, right? But I would expect it's not going to be until that third, fourth, or fifth edition, likely fifth, where people think, "The price has come down. I know what it's for. I know enough other people who have them. It's retained that kind of sense of a status symbol, and that's when this thing starts to get momentum."

So the moment to judge the Vision Pro is not the keynote where it's announced. The moment is five years from now. I was really interested in this question that you brought up in your newsletter this week, which was the difference between kind of Apple's long-term vision for this kind of technology and Meta's long-term vision for this technology. Because when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta, leaning hard into this Metaverse push,

The vision was very much of a digital realm where you would go to escape, right? It was like where you would, you know, you could be whoever you want to be. Your avatar could look however you wanted it to look. You could play games. You could, you know, hang out with your friends. It was kind of like a substitute for the physical world and all the things you might do in the physical world. Apple's vision is very different. So how do you think that they contrasted their vision with Meta's? Well,

I mean, I think the main thing was just focusing on this as a tool for work for high-end professionals. Meta has presented it much more as a gaming console and something that you do for fun. You know, at the same time, when Meta released the Quest Pro last year, which was its own high-end headset, it cost $1,500 at launch, it cost $1,000 today, they showed off some of these similar uses.

They showed off that use case I mentioned earlier of you can pull up a virtual screen and you can do like word processing on a virtual monitor and you can make the monitor as big as you want. They played around with some of that stuff. It hasn't caught on that much because the displays aren't that good. And I think the experience of working in VR like that for eight hours is just not really preferable to using a laptop for most people.

So they've tried to explore that direction. They haven't gotten very far. We'll see if Apple is able to get a little bit farther. But the visions are very different. You know, the Vision Pro is not about escapism. It's about enhancing the computing that you're already doing. Right. It's about sort of bringing your computer into your field of vision rather than like

closing you off from your field of vision altogether. Yeah, and like the reason that I'm optimistic about that is because everywhere I go, I just see people glued to their phones, right? The moment, you know, it's like if you ever see like two people having dinner and one person gets up to use the restroom, the space

speed with which the phone comes out of the other person's pocket is like the fastest like action that any human ever takes, right? And what that tells me is that if eventually people can have, at least for some part of their day, essentially like a sci-fi heads up display that is just sort of regularly pinging them with information that they might find interesting or useful, I think a lot of people are just going to take that option. Yeah. I mean, I think this could still go either way, right? We don't know if this is going to be a huge hit or not. Not necessarily,

all of Apple's products succeed and become major multi-billion dollar businesses. But a lot of them do. And I think if this does take off, if the Vision Pro becomes a hit in ways that other, you know, VR headsets have not, I think part of the reason will be because it's Apple and they've solved some of the design challenges. I think this eyesight feature is going to be widely copied because I think it just is a good idea. And one more thing before we wrap up that I thought was kind of interesting is how Apple has solved kind of

the FaceTime problem. So they, you know, they said in the demo, you know, you can use this to have FaceTime calls with people, right? You can put on your Vision Pro. You can, you know, FaceTime a big group of people. They'll show up, you know, right in front of you. You can, you know, resize their tiles or move them around. There'll be kind of like the spatial audio. So it'll actually sound more like you're in a room with them.

But my question through that was like, well, what are they going to see? If they're not using a Vision Pro or if they're just using like a regular Apple device, do they just see you with your like snowboard goggles on? And it turns out that Apple has solved this problem in a really interesting way. Basically by creating like a personal deep fake of you that it will show to the people that you're FaceTiming with. Like a synthetic created video of your face that's

that will move in time with your actual face, which is really fascinating and weird. Yeah, I mean, I would say of the things that they announced, this was one that I was less enthusiastic about because I was just kind of like, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where I'm appearing as this deep fake of myself in a call with somebody and like, you know, the person

the people I FaceTime with the most are my parents. And my parents would just be like, can you just FaceTime us from your phone? You know, like that's a case where I don't see the experience being improved by this digital representation. Oh, I do. Because I'm like, well, if you're already making a deep fake of me, like, does it have to look like exactly like me? Could you make it like 20% more attractive? Could we like chisel the jaw a little bit while we're at it? So I think this has huge potential for catfishing. You could be right.

When we come back, we'll talk with David Yaffe-Bellany from The New York Times about why the SEC is going after Binance and Coinbase.

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- Hello, this is Yuande Kamalefa from "New York Times Cooking," and I'm sitting on a blanket with Melissa Clark. - And we're having a picnic using recipes that feature some of our favorite summer produce. Yuande, what'd you bring? - So this is a cucumber agua fresca. It's made with fresh cucumbers, ginger, and lime.

How did you get it so green? I kept the cucumber skins on and pureed the entire thing. It's really easy to put together and it's something that you can do in advance. Oh, it is so refreshing. What'd you bring, Melissa?

Well, strawberries are extra delicious this time of year, so I brought my little strawberry almond cakes. Oh, yum. I roast the strawberries before I mix them into the batter. It helps condense the berries' juices and stops them from leaking all over and getting the crumb too soft. Mmm. You get little pockets of concentrated strawberry flavor. That tastes amazing. Oh, thanks. New York Times Cooking has so many easy recipes to fit your summer plans. Find them all at NYTCooking.com. I have sticky strawberry juice all over my fingers.

Kevin, you know how sometimes we check in on the world of crypto? Yes. Yeah, well, I think it's time to do that again. So usually it's a bad update. Then something horrible has happened in the world of crypto. Is this a good update? Kevin, I regret to inform you that today is not a good update. Okay. Because the Securities and Exchange Commission has filed not one, but two lawsuits back to back against two of the biggest crypto exchanges of all, Binance and Coinbase.

Right. And this is part of this huge regulatory crackdown that is going on on the crypto industry and has been since last year when FTX famously imploded. But this latest decision for the SEC to sue Binance and Coinbase is a big deal in the world of crypto. It is basically D-Day for crypto exchanges in the United States.

and one that has the potential to prevent crypto from really working in the U.S. altogether. So to talk about why this is happening now and what this means for Americans who may be interested in crypto and kind of where the industry goes from here, we've invited back our pal and friend of the pod, New York Times crypto reporter David Yaffe-Bellany. David, welcome back to Hard Fork.

Hello. Hi, David. So last time we had you on, we talked about the long string of acronyms. I think it was like IRL, SBF, FTX, FAQ with DYB. So this time I'm proposing a new string of acronyms to talk about the SEC's lawsuits, which is

OMG SEC with DYB. So first of all, can you just explain exactly what happened this week? What are Binance and Coinbase being sued for? And let's start with Binance. Let's start with Binance. Sure. So Binance is the biggest crypto exchange in the world, the most powerful crypto company in the world. And it

It's been under law enforcement scrutiny for a really long time. Different federal agency, the CFTC, had already sued it earlier this year. And so we were kind of expecting that the SEC would also mount some sort of attack. And that happened on Monday. Let's keep our acronyms straight. The CFTC, of course, the Consumer Financial— Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Okay, great. Yes, Kevin's got it. And so just in a sentence, what did they sue Binance over?

A range of things, the most interesting of which was probably allowing bad actors to use the platform. Okay, like Carrot Top? You know, more like terrorists, sanctioned Russians, that kind of thing. Got it. All right, so that lawsuit entered the sphere, and then along comes the SEC, and they say, we have found additional wrongdoing. Okay.

Yes, they make a number of key accusations. The headline one is that just like FTX before it, Binance had commingled customer funds with kind of corporate accounts and were sort of moving the money around in ways that are suspicious. There's not a ton of detail about exactly what happened in the SEC lawsuit, but that was definitely the most

striking allegation. And certainly it is familiar to those of us who remember the FTX case because commingling of funds seemed like it was at the heart of a lot of the problem with that company. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, Binance held itself up as a kind of good actor and all that. We were the ones who went into FTX's accounts, found out all the

Right. So here's this allegation from the SEC that Binance was not kind of keeping its customers' money segregated from the public.

other kinds of money that it was using. Is there anything else that the SEC took issue with when it came to Binance? Yeah, I mean, the SEC has been arguing in all these cases that they brought against crypto companies, and they brought a lot over the last six months that cryptocurrencies are securities and that, you know, Binance, like other crypto companies, was sort of trading in securities, marketing securities to the public without proper registration, without having gone through the kind of official SEC process properly.

that you're supposed to go through when you are distributing securities. Right, which led to my favorite pull quote from the SEC's complaint against Binance. I guess they got some internal communications from the company, and they quoted Binance's chief compliance officer as saying in 2018, quote,

we are operating as a fucking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA, bro. Which is, you know, I'm no lawyer, but I think that's probably a bad thing for your chief compliance officer to be saying. Certainly a bad thing to be putting in writing. Yeah, not a great look when the compliance guy is saying, you know, we're breaking the law, bro. It always sounds like a criminal conspiracy that was hatched at like Kappa Sig. You know what I mean? Right, the barstool frog racket. Yeah.

Some of this sounds a lot like what Sam Bankman Freed was accused of doing with FTX. How is this different? In FTX's case, you know, there was this kind of proverbial run on the bank where, you know, people tried to withdraw money from FTX and it wasn't there and the company imploded. And that hasn't happened with Binance yet. There's no hard evidence that like a huge amount of money is missing from Binance's accounts.

And the SEC suit doesn't go into a ton of detail about the commingling of funds. So it's not clear whether they're alleging the sort of conduct that supposedly happened with FTX, where basically, you know, Sam was treating FTX as kind of a piggy bank to finance political donations, invest in other companies and, you know, do all those sorts of things. Right. We don't know that Changpeng Zhao, CZ, the head of Binance, was like stealing a bunch of money. That's not part of what

has been out there yet. No, not at all. I mean, it's striking that the SEC in a, you know, 100 plus page complaint that they spent years compiling didn't allege that, right? You know, if they had found strong evidence of that, presumably it would have been in there. Right. So if the agency is not sort of accusing Binance of running essentially a Ponzi scheme or stealing customers' money in the way that FTX did, why is the SEC so concerned about Binance? What are the potential harms to U.S. investors that they're trying to prevent?

I mean, the broader harm of having all of these cryptocurrency companies operate, you know, without what the SEC perceives as like the proper registration is that, you know, customers aren't getting the types of disclosures that they need when they invest in experimental crypto products. They're not getting the types of investor protections that, you know, typical kind of fully registered organizations would provide. Right.

and you know things are happening like customer funds ending up in a corporate account maybe it's not stealing but it still isn't great it's still dangerous for the people who are entrusting their money to this exchange so i'm curious david is you know somebody who follows this industry

and knows that something was probably going to be filed against Binance at some point. The folks that you're talking to, is there a sense of, wow, this is a really serious set of allegations. This could really significantly change Binance or even bring it down. Or is there a sense of, hmm, after a really long investigation, this feels like kind of weak relative to what we were expecting?

I think there's a split. There are definitely some kind of hardcore people in the kind of crypto Twitter world who saw the allegations in this lawsuit and were really alarmed, especially the fact that, you know, turns out CZ, the CEO of Binance, had his own trading firms that were trading against customers on this platform. You know, even if that isn't illegal, it's sort of a bad look and reminiscent of FTX. Why do all these guys do this? Like,

this is the part I can't get my brain around. Like you run a very successful crypto exchange. You're a billionaire. Like you have a very successful growing business. Like why do you have to also set up a trading firm and like make bets against your own customers? Like, isn't it enough

to run the casino? Don't you? Do you also have to like go down to the roulette wheel and start throwing chips on the wheel? The problem is there just aren't that many people trading crypto and you need somebody on the other side of those trades, you know, that regular people feel like they can go to the casino and have a good time. And, you know, that's the sort of like internal market maker that both FTX and Binance kind of relied on. So that's the real answer is that the we think the reason that CZ might have been doing this is just to create volume in the market.

Totally. And that's actually another thing that the SEC accused him of, which is wash trading, basically creating kind of like artificial trading activity where, you know, one firm is doing like 80 percent of the trading of a certain token to create the impression that, you know, there's a lot of excitement around it. Right. It's like if you own a casino and you tell your best friend, like hire a bunch of people off the street and like give them some chips and put them at the blackjack table and like make it look really popular in here.

Exactly. Yeah. So, okay, that's the lawsuit against Binance and CZ, which was filed on Monday. And then on Tuesday, the very next day, the SEC announced that it was suing Coinbase, the second biggest crypto exchange in the world. So what is the argument in this case?

So this argument is much narrower. And unlike the Binance case, this is a lawsuit targeted at Coinbase, the company, and not at any particular individual. Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO, he's not getting sued in his kind of individual capacity by the SEC. So already that's a much kind of lower level of seriousness. It's much more narrowly about the fact that according to the SEC, Coinbase is offering trading in tokens that the SEC considers to be securities without having the sort of proper registration.

Now, my understanding is that Coinbase said, hey, look, we have been trying to get clarity from you on this forever. You reviewed our S1 before we went public and you approved it. We reject most of the tokens that people attempt to list on Coinbase. So I think from Coinbase's perspective, they have done everything right. What does the SEC have to say about that?

I mean, Coinbase's refrain for years now has been, we just want clarity. We want the SEC to give us a process, a path toward registration, and the SEC won't do it. We spent millions of dollars coming up with possible paths, and they won't approve any of them. And the SEC says, well, you do have a path. It's the path that every other company has. You just don't like it, and you don't want to follow it. And, you know, that's not an excuse, basically. And what's that path? Is it just like listing every crypto coin –

like public markets or what would they do? It's a very sort of complicated sort of disclosure process that, you know, it's probably not worth getting into the weeds, but basically it would require a huge amount of effort on Coinbase's part. And, you know, there are questions in it that don't sort of neatly track onto the crypto market. It maybe makes sense for an exchange that's trading, you know, traditional stocks like we do on Wall Street, but, you know, it doesn't necessarily kind of neatly align with the way crypto works.

So one thing that the crypto industry has been asking for for years now is like some kind of clarity, as you said, about which specific cryptocurrencies are and aren't securities, right? Because this issue of whether a cryptocurrency is a security or something else matters a lot for all the reasons we just talked about. But the SEC in its lawsuit against Coinbase actually did something that

the crypto industry has been waiting for it to do. It named specific cryptocurrencies that it considers securities, including some of the big ones. So Solana, Cardano, Polygon, these... I'm sorry. It's just so hard for me to keep a straight face when you read the names of three crypto tokens in a row. You sounded like you were doing the first part of the Beach Boys' Kokomo. Solana, Cardano, come on, pretty mama. I'm sorry, go on. You're not a Polygon whale? No, not really. Yeah.

The only polygon I support is the website from Vox Media. Great video game coverage. So these are, in fact, big cryptocurrency projects, despite the fact that you've never heard of them. These are projects that are worth billions of dollars still and that have a lot of big name investors behind them. So, David, what is the significance of the SEC declaring that these specific cryptocurrencies are?

are definitely securities. Well, in a way, it's not that surprising because Gary Gensler, the chair of the SEC, has been saying for years at this point that he believes the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are securities. At other times, he said most of them. He's used different formulations like that without wanting to kind of name and shame particular cryptocurrencies if he doesn't have some formal legal backing for that. So it is a big deal that he's now saying that these huge, high market cap cryptos are securities. But

Does it change the kind of state of play out in the world? Not really, because everyone knew already that the SEC thought these were securities, even if they hadn't specifically said it. And there's going to be a huge amount of litigation over this. And before anything concrete happens out in the world, it's going to get argued about in court. One question I had while looking at this list of cryptocurrencies that the SEC has now said are securities is that the top two cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ether, are not

So why is that? Why is the SEC not calling those securities, but is calling these other cryptocurrencies securities? So Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that Gensler has come out and said this isn't a security. He's kind of definitively ruled it out. And why is that? That goes back to the kind of legal test for determining whether something qualifies as security. It's the Howey test and has various possibilities.

prongs, but at the sort of simplest level, you know, it's like, are you putting money into something because you have an expectation that you're going to profit from the work that other people are putting into that thing? And with Bitcoin, it doesn't really kind of fit the prongs of that test. There's no Bitcoin company that you're relying on to do cool things with Bitcoin and cause the price of it to go up. It was, you know, created by this sort of pseudonymous inventor, then kind of disappeared from the scene. And so it doesn't

look like a security the way that something like Solana looks like a security because there's sort of a core group of developers who put it forward and who people are kind of entrusting with their funds when they sort of invested in it. Ether is a difficult one because when it was initially launched,

that launch looked a lot like a securities offering. There was a kind of small group of developers who were promising to build great applications on Ethereum that would change the financial system, and people bought into Ether because they thought that, you know, that was promising, they could make money from it. But the sort of Ethereum community has changed a lot since then. It's way more decentralized at this point. There isn't the same sort of core leadership, and so it's much more debatable whether Ether

qualifies as a security. The SEC probably thinks it does, given how aggressive they've been on this, but it's a harder fight to win. And it seems as if they're kind of picking their battles a little bit. And some people I've talked to in the crypto industry have basically said that this is kind of like the do or die question for the entire crypto ecosystem. Because if these tokens are securities, if all these

not just Solano and Cardano and all the Kokomo ones that we've talked about. But if Ethereum in particular is considered a security, then the whole kind of like world of DeFi, this decentralized finance world, a lot of which runs on specifically on Ethereum-based projects, it all kind of doesn't work if these things are considered and treated as security. So is that what you're hearing from sources? Are they thinking like this could be the end of crypto security?

as we know it? Yeah, I mean, I think that's the sort of existential concern. One of the things people like about crypto is that anyone can make a token, anyone can kind of experiment with it and attempt different applications. If it's security, then the sort of act of using it, engaging with it becomes much more legally fraught. And so the fear is that it could like stop, you know, a lot of the exciting innovation around this technology. I mean, the position of the SEC, and I think actually Gensler came out and said this more explicitly than he has in the past, is

Like, what exciting innovation? Like, what's this really doing? You know, we already have digital money. It's like your credit card, basically. Yeah, well, I look forward to the day when the Bored Ape Yacht Club members have to go to the court and get a certificate for their ape and any slurp juices it may need to...

You know, it strikes me that we lately have only talked about crypto in terms of regulation around it, legal actions against it, founders going to prison, because there is not another part of the story, which is the people building things that other people want. You know, if you're a tech reporter, you usually focus on products that

have gone out into the market, are attracting growing numbers of users. Some of those users really love the thing. It changes the way that they do something for the better. And as all of this has gone on in crypto over the past year and a half, I remember at the start of the sort of collapse in prices, and people would say, oh, we have been waiting for this moment. Finally, all the tourists are gone, and the builders can just buy.

build. Time to build, baby. It's time to build. And what has been built in the past year and a half? Bupkis. There is not one crypto product to my knowledge that has, let's call it, 100 million users that it's acquired over the past year. Meanwhile, ChatGPT comes along and gets 100 million users, allegedly, within the first couple months or so.

So I'm so grateful that the AI revolution came along if for no other reason than that it showed us what it looks like when consumers actually get excited about something. And it truly revealed in my mind that the crypto story that we have been covering since 2021 really was about 98% hype.

Well, Casey, clearly you have not been following the crypto story that closely because just this week there was a new promising crypto project announced, which is the Stand With Crypto Commemorative NFT, which Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted out

after this lawsuit came down. Basically, in response to these lawsuits, the crypto community is banding together to fight back against the regulators who are trying to kill their industry. And one way that they're doing so is with a commemorative NFT. Brian Armstrong is trying to kind of cast himself as this sort of like brave defender of the crypto world. And because he's, you know, never been the most sort of like socially smooth operator, it's all been a little bit awkward.

where he did a dinner for a bunch of crypto people and tweeted a photo from it a few months ago. And it was like 10 white guys at a table. And he called it the Build Back Better Dinner. And everyone pointed out, you know, you kind of stole that from the Biden administration. Yeah.

You know, I talked to someone who was there and asked him about the photo, and he basically just put his head in his hands. You know, but you think about when Uber was under regulatory pressure, right? And the government was coming in and saying, hey, look, you can't just be putting all these cars on the road and trying to supplant the taxi industry. And Uber went to riders and said, hey, if you like this product,

You need to get out on the streets. You need to call your elected officials. You need to let them know that you want Uber to exist. And they did. And it worked. And Uber is still around, right? And it's a big company. And I just don't think there is a similar faction in the crypto world. Right. So let's talk about what the crypto industry is doing in response to these lawsuits. How have Binance and Coinbase responded? And kind of what's their next plan of attack?

They both responded really aggressively. CZ was on Twitter kind of attacking Gary Gensler and, you know, quote tweeting him and all that sort of thing. Not the normal way. Not the quote tweet. Yes, industry engages with its regulators. And Coinbase, similarly, you know, they put out, you know, fancy ads. They've been preparing this for months. I mean, they sort of already kind of responded to the SEC even before this complaint dropped. And so they've kind of rolled out, you know, more of that kind of PR material. Yeah.

Clearly, all of this will have to go to the courts now, right? From what I understand, the next step in this process is that there will be, you know, sort of counterclaims by Binance and Coinbase. This will all go to court, and the courts will ultimately decide whether or not the SEC is right here, and these companies essentially have to shut down their American operations, or whether they can continue to operate in some...

other way. So are the companies optimistic about how the courts will treat their cases? Or is that just kind of one more loss that they see coming? So yeah, I mean, these cases are actually a big risk for the SEC. I mean, usually when the SEC goes after a crypto company, it's kind of small and it sort of rolls over and it

pays a fine and stops doing the thing that the SEC said it was doing wrong. But in these cases, the SEC is going after huge, super well-funded companies that have fancy law firms working for them and that have like vowed to fight this until the end. And I mean, these are cases that are going to stretch beyond Gary Gensler's tenure at the SEC. You know, the political landscape could change. The landscape around crypto could change. They're really kind of long-term fights. And yeah, they're going to determine a lot about the

future of crypto in the U.S. And until the courts rule on this, like, is there risk to the customers of these exchanges? If I'm just a normal person with a Binance account or a Coinbase account, maybe I have a few thousand dollars or a few hundred dollars worth of crypto that I bought a couple years ago and haven't touched. Are you trying to tell us something, Kevin? No, I'm not. But I'm curious, like, for those people, because I do know a lot of those people, are they now...

are transacting with essentially an illegal operation? Are they at any legal risk? I mean, no, because these companies haven't been, you know, haven't lost these cases yet. These are just charges at this point. I mean, I think the risk that you might see as a crypto trader is, you know, if you have all your money in Coinbase or Binance.us or whatever, you might fear that if this legal battle goes the wrong way, you know, the company could fold, there could be business pressures that, you know,

kind of overwhelm it and that that could put your funds at risk. Of course, the companies maintain that, you know, we hold all these funds one to one and there's no risk of you losing your money. But given the experiences of the last year, people are understandably, I think, a little skeptical. And there've been a lot of withdrawals from Coinbase and Binance over the last couple of days since these suits were filed.

I think I read 780 million out of Binance. But, you know, that's actually a kind of a drop in the bucket. I mean, you know, Binance holds something like $60 billion in customer assets. So, you know, that's not insignificant, but it's, you know, in the grand scheme, it's not a lot. Right. I mean, one thing that struck me was just like the crypto market seemed to have already kind of priced this in, right? Like after these lawsuits came out and people were declaring, you know, this is war, this is the

end of crypto in America. Crypto prices actually have been doing okay. Like, what does that tell you? If these lawsuits are, in fact, a huge escalation of this war between regulators and the crypto industry, why isn't the market seeming to panic about it? I think you're right. I mean, they're priced in. None of this is remotely surprising. I mean, the SEC has been investigating Coinbase for, you know, something, you know,

We've known about it for at least a year, I think even longer. And Coinbase got a notice a few months ago that said the SEC is probably going to sue you, and they went public with that. And so we've known for a long time that this was coming. And really the same with Binance. There's been negative headlines about Binance for years at this point, talk of investigations going.

There's a criminal investigation still ongoing that could lead to charges against CZ, which could also be an existential threat to the company. But people kind of understand that this is happening. You know, it's not a surprise. I'm just like trying to understand the mindset of somebody who's leaving thousands of dollars in one of these exchanges. Like how high must your risk tolerance be? You know, I would rather like put a stack of cash on the top of my car and like drive it to the grocery store. Like that's the level of security I would feel in my money if I had money in one of these exchanges. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about some of the other ways that the exchanges are responding to this. I saw a Coinbase tweet the other day that was making vague threats about what would happen if crypto exchanges were effectively banned in the U.S. And what it said was that a million jobs could be driven offshore by these U.S. regulatory moves. So,

David, my questions for you are two. One is, are there really a million crypto jobs in the U.S. that would be driven offshore? And question number two, if Coinbase is right and the entire crypto industry is kind of forced out of the country, what would that do to crypto? Yeah.

Yeah, so I don't know where Coinbase got that one million figure, but I imagine there are a lot of assumptions that underlie it, including the fact that crypto will continue to grow and to be a huge industry. And so that's the kind of worst case scenario that the crypto industry is trying to convince us is around the corner, that crypto will become this enormous international industry with a million people working in it, and yet that'll all be happening offshore because our legal system is so hostile to it.

Whether that's true, it depends on the continued success of crypto as a technology, which is certainly in a lot of doubt for all the reasons we've discussed. And it also depends on how the legal landscape here actually evolves. Is this really such a bad outcome if crypto becomes one of those offshore gambling apps, basically? Where it's like you can access it, but you need a VPN and you need a little bit of know-how.

But just like the fact that you have to jump through so many hoops prevents the average person from accidentally losing their shirt. Yeah, I mean, we're already sort of seeing this, right? Like FTX was headquartered in the Bahamas for pretty similar reasons. Binance is sort of an offshore entity already. Coinbase is really the sort of only big American crypto exchange. Is that right? Yeah. Though, of course, part of what the SEC is doing in its Binance case is saying that, you know, you aren't doing enough to

prevent American traders from accessing your international platform. You know, they can just install a VPN and go and trade. And so now these companies are saying, well, maybe if you make that too easy, you can get into a lot of trouble. Can you explain that to me? Like, why would an American crypto trader want to, like, use a VPN to go access the international version of Binance?

Because Binance also has like an American platform. Why wouldn't they just use the American platform? Yeah, this is a crucial point, which is that the Binance international platform allows you to do a lot of crazy, risky, experimental crypto things that you can't do in the U.S. already, even under sort of existing law. You know, you can't borrow 100 times your funds and bet all of that on the price of a token going up.

You can do that internationally. And that's what leads to like the biggest gains and the biggest transaction fees for Binance. But it's also what leads to just like catastrophic instantaneous losses. Like this is really complicated financial engineering that like most normal people frankly aren't

equipped to do and a lot of experts will say just shouldn't be allowed to do. And Binance allows you to do that with crypto, which is what's exciting to some people. And so that's why they'll, you know, get a VPN and access the Binance international platform rather than the Binance US platform that is much more conservative and will let you kind of like buy some Bitcoin, but maybe not borrow a ton of money to, you know, amplify your bet.

Right, so the overseas crypto casinos are just like more fun, higher stakes, like you can do more types of risky gambling in them, whereas the U.S. ones are a little more tame. Yes, exactly. This would, by the way, this would be like a great viral YouTube video is like, I just did the 10 riskiest trades in crypto possible. I would watch the hell out of that video. Like it's a Mr. Beast video, except that at the end of it, no one gets a million dollars. Everyone just loses a million dollars. Life savings. Yeah.

So what are the crypto industries outs here? How could they still manage to secure, if not a victory here, then at least be able to continue to operate in the U.S.? I think one thing is that the political landscape could change very soon. If

Biden loses reelection, then there'll be a new SEC chair. There might be a new SEC chair even if Biden wins. And that person could have a very different perspective on crypto than Gary Gensler has. And so you do hear from some people, I'm just waiting till 2025. And once we get to 2025, everything will be better.

The other thing is the courts. A lot of people in the crypto industry are convinced that they're in the right and they have the better legal argument, that actually these cryptocurrencies don't meet the prongs of the Howey test and they can show that in court and win and the SEC will be defeated.

The third thing is Congress. There's still hope, and it's faded a bit since the pre-FTX days, that we could get a bill through Congress that essentially creates a new sort of bespoke regulatory regime just for crypto. It's not a security. It's not a commodity. It's like a new type of thing, and here are the rules for it. And by the way, an army of crypto lobbyists wrote those rules, so they're beneficial to the industry. Yeah.

Well, I mean, those seem like a good number of outs, right? And it doesn't seem totally implausible that at least one of those things might happen. And look, maybe once all of that gets sorted out, the crypto folks will be able to build something that people like that isn't just a casino. But I continue to be struck by how little progress anyone has made on that front.

So if these threats are real, if Coinbase and other U.S. exchanges really are going to respond to these lawsuits by effectively just like packing their bags and leaving the United States altogether, what would that mean for Americans who are trade

trading crypto or have a couple thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin, would they have to then move those funds offshore as well? So usually, I mean, there's precedent for this of crypto companies that have U.S. operations and then close those U.S. operations. And the responsible thing is there's sort of a window of time where everyone withdraws their money. And you can hold crypto in your own wallet. It doesn't have to be custodied with another company. In fact, a lot of crypto

people think that's a bad idea. So if this happened in kind of an orderly way, people could take their money off the platform and sort of store it independently. - My next sort of question, maybe the final thought here is like, what do you do if you are a crypto company in the US or maybe a venture capital fund that has raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to invest in crypto companies?

Now, the SEC, the top regulator in the land, is saying effectively, like, none of this is legal. None of what you're doing is legal. And it's not going to be legal anytime soon. How do you actually continue to operate? What is the crypto industry going to do while it waits for maybe 2025 when a new SEC chair comes in and starts changing some of these rules, they hope? Two words, metaverse pivot. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's basically business as usual. I mean, like, again, everybody knew long before this week that the SEC thought all these things were securities and they went off and did all this stuff anyway. And now the SEC has come out and said it as concretely as they ever have. And there's a long legal fight. And, you know, from the perspective of the VCs and the crypto startup bros, it's like we're fighting back against this. You know, it's still up in the air. The courts will decide. Right.

Well, look, I know we've said a lot of really pessimistic things about crypto this morning, but I did read one story today that made me feel like maybe there is a glimmer of hope here. I don't know if you guys saw this, but Louis Vuitton is getting into the NFT game. Do you see this? It's huge. Yeah. Game-changing. They're selling a new collection of digital and physical treasure trunks, which will grant owners access to future products and experiences—

as well as a community of fellow holders. Each piece costs 39,000 euros and only several hundred will be made available. Wow. Well, I know what I'm getting you for your birthday. Thanks in advance. All right. David Duffy Bellany, thank you so much for joining us as always. Thank you, David. Thanks for having me.

After the break, what teens had to say about how social media is affecting their lives. So

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Christine, have you ever bought something and thought, wow, this product actually made my life better? Totally. And usually I find those products through Wirecutter. Yeah, but you work here. We both do. We're the hosts of The Wirecutter Show from The New York Times. It's our job to research, test, and vet products and then recommend our favorites. We'll talk to members of our team of 140 journalists to bring you the very best product recommendations in every category that will actually make your life better. The Wirecutter Show, available wherever you get podcasts.

So a few weeks ago, we talked on the show about this report from the Surgeon General of the United States about social media and its effects on adolescents. Yes. And the takeaway from this report was basically, look, social media, it can be a good thing for some teenagers, but it can also be really harmful to some teenagers. And the more time that adolescents spend on social media, the more likely it is that they feel depressed or have, you know, bad self-esteem or other really negative effects. Right.

And we asked our teenage listeners, teens who listen to this podcast, to send us some thoughts about it. And so many did. It was really, really fun to listen to them. It was. One thing we said when we started the show was the teens will always have a voice on the show. And here's why. They're the future, Kevin. Okay? These kids are the future. And we want to know how they see the world that they're growing up in. And we want to hear from them directly. And so thank you to every single person who sent us an email or a voice memo because we truly learned a ton listening to your comments.

Yeah, so we got dozens and dozens of submissions and we can't play all of them, but we are so thankful for everyone who sent something in and we did actually make a little montage that we want to play for you now. Hey, Hard Fork. Hello, Hard Fork. Hi, Kevin and Casey. Hi, I'm Ben. Hello, I am Roy. I am 15 years old and I speak for all students. My name is Mars. I was born in 2003. I'm 19 and in college right now. I'm currently a 17-year-old and I've been dealing with the social media dilemma for a very long time.

I have, I would say, a different relationship with social media than a lot of my peers. I have a positive relationship with social media. My brain would like physically feel the need to go on Instagram and I'd be like, "No, no more." You know, it's the endless scrolling that affects the way you see yourself and all the ways that you're not good enough. It was destroying me, for real.

So I deleted everything, and it has been amazing. It's been so freeing. And I love technology, and I think it's great, but at a certain point, I feel like, man, we need to stop. What an amazing set of responses. God, so good. I love hearing their voices because you hear how seriously that folks feel this issue, right? This is not something that people have an indifferent relationship to. It really keeps people up at night. Totally. I think that really captures the...

some of the responses that we heard, where like some people really like social media, some people really hate it. Everyone we heard from seems to have a complicated relationship with social media and seems to think about it a lot. It is very present in their lives. And there were a few responses that I actually did want to just like pull out and spend some more time talking about in particular, because I think they really illustrate how thorny and complicated an issue social media has become for teens. Yeah.

So the first one I want to focus on is from a listener named Sierra. Hey, Hardfork. On the podcast, you mentioned like, hey, I think that parents should be talking to their kids about social media the same way that they talk about sex or drugs. Well,

High school health classes talk about sex and drugs and other health issues in their health classes. And I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be educating kids on social media. What I've learned as I've become educated on how the TikTok algorithm works or the Instagram algorithm works is that the more I know, the more I'm able to self-regulate.

So like if I see something negative on my TikTok that kind of evokes a reaction out of me and I really want to press on the comment sections and see what people are saying, I don't because I know that these social medias are tracking how you react to posts.

But if I see something super positive, like, hey, here are five workouts that you can do, or hey, here are some tips to do better with your homework, blah, blah, blah. I will like those posts because I know the more that I like productive things, the more they'll appear in my feed. And I think that everyone should know that. I think a lot of people just aren't aware of the fact that if you like and interact with things that are positive, your feed will be positive.

What a great voice memo, and thank you, Sierra. And I think there is a lot in here that folks should take seriously. Like, I think what Sierra is really talking about is digital literacy. And given how much of our lives we live online, it does feel like it should be part of the curriculum, right?

Totally. I mean, I think this should be taught in classes, as Sierra was saying, like a kind of health class that is revamped for the 21st century world that doesn't just teach you about like ways to keep your body healthy, but also teaches you like how to interact with social media in a healthy way is a really good idea. And I hope that schools will take that and run with it. I also think this issue of like agency is very important, right? One thing that Sierra talked about that I thought was really interesting and important was the idea that as you learn more about these apps,

and these social media platforms and how they work and what trains the algorithms and how various actions that you take correspond with what you see in your feed, I really think that is empowering for young people to just say, like, this social media thing, it's not just, like, a thing that I am passive about.

about, like that happens to me. It is actually a thing that I can make better for myself by playing around and adjusting the settings and really customizing my feed so that my experience is better. Yeah, I remember, you know, I used to get so confused when I would get these push notifications from a social network that was like, hey, like we found this post that we thought you might like. And eventually, just as a reporter, I learned that there was some product manager who was trying to hit a quarterly goal of getting me to open up the app a certain number of times. And it had no idea, you know, they had no idea

what the post was or whether I would like it. But that enabled me essentially to just turn off all my notifications for social networks because I knew that they weren't going to be any value to me. So I don't know how much of that you realistically get into a curriculum for students. But yeah, to the extent that we can teach kids and adults how to use this in ways that feel better for them, we're all going to be better off. Totally. I mean, I think that point about adults, too, is really important here. It's not just teens who struggle with understanding how social media apps work

and how their actions and their habits may be reinforcing or even worsening some of what they feel about the app. These things are not static. And I think that tech companies need to build in these kinds of controls so that people can have more agency over what they see on their feeds.

But I also think that it is worth it to educate people and to kind of demystify what is going on inside these apps because I think it really does make people feel a lot less helpless. All right, let's listen to another one. This one is from Paxton. Hi, my name is Paxton. I am from Colorado and I am 19 years old.

The biggest issue and conversation that I see a lot with people my age, either Gen Z or younger millennials, is a lot of people are sick and tired of the movement to short-form video content. I've refused to get on TikTok because I know it would be so bad for me, but even Instagram Reels is bad enough and I can find myself spending hours on there and I feel so crappy afterwards because...

I didn't want to do that, but it sucks you in so quickly and then suddenly, oh shit, an hour or two hours has passed and I've just been sitting and scrolling and that's one of the things I wish we could address more because it's at the root and so often we're the ones who are blamed.

for having this addiction to social media, restricting children's access to social media, requiring parents to monitor people's screens. None of that works if we don't get at the source of why these things are so addictive in the first place.

Oh, and you can just sort of hear in Paxton's voice the frustration with the rise of short form video and how much fun it is to watch. But this one is tricky for me because I think it reflects a revealed preference, which is that when you have a bunch of short form videos and you show them to people, they will watch a huge number of them. And social media companies are in the business of giving people what they want. So what do we do about this one, Kevin? Well, I think

this is a point that comes up often when you talk with executives or employees at the big social media companies. They like to really place the blame or the responsibility on the user. And they'll say, you know, we're just giving people what they want. If you want to spend 45 minutes watching TikTok fail videos, like rather than, you know, logging off and spending time with your family, like that is on you. All we are doing is sort of giving you the option of consuming that content or not.

And I really think that's kind of unfair to the user because I think we as users have different kinds of desires, right? There's like kind of the base level desire that is like kind of the lizard brain that's like, if I go to McDonald's and I see the Big Mac and I see the fries, like part of me wants that. And then another part of me, this sort of deeper long-term desire thinks like, well, maybe I should have a salad instead. Maybe that's not the best thing for me. Social media companies, they're only incentivized to

optimized for that first kind of kind of lizard brain engagement. And I really think that's been one of their big failings is that they're not thinking about the long-term impacts of what they're doing with these algorithms on teens. I don't know. What's your take? Well, so you can get a salad at McDonald's. So what is the equivalent on a social network of a salad that you would like to see offered to these kids?

Well, I think part of it is these product features that kind of encourage people to, I don't know, like put down their phone and talk to their friends or do something with their family. I mean, it can sound a little paternalistic when your phone tells you like, you've spent so much time on this app, maybe you should get a life.

But I really do think that can be powerful for people. And so I appreciate the things that, for example, Apple has done to help people keep track of their screen time and just say, like, is this how you want to be spending your time? Yeah, I mean, I think it's great, too. But I don't know one person who's ever taken a look at their screen time statistic and said, well, I guess I'm going to actually spend the afternoon reading Proust. You know, like, I just don't

- I don't know effectively what people do with those statistics. - I think it does influence people. 'Cause if you ask people, do you wanna spend two hours a day watching TikTok videos, I think probably most of them will say no. That is not, and we've talked about this before, if these things were just an unalloyed good, if it really was just revealed preference and people getting what they want, people would not have these tortured relationships with their phones. - Can we talk about stupid time?

What is stupid time? So Kevin and I had dinner for his birthday this week. Happy birthday, Kevin. Thank you. With a couple of his friends. And they told us that every few days they have something called stupid time, which is 15 minutes that they allot to sitting together jointly and scrolling through TikTok. And they've sort of, they've like tried to quarantine this experience to a 15 minute period. They did tell us that it usually lasts 40 minutes. Yeah.

because they can't stop watching. But the thing that I loved about it was the idea of like, look, everybody needs a little bit of popcorn. Everybody wants a few French fries. But just like try to put that in a box and try to keep it in the box as much as you can. And you'll be better off in the long run. Yes, this was my friends who came up with this stupid time idea. I think it's brilliant. And I'm going to try adopting this in my own life too. But I do think there's also this issue that Paxton is identifying, which is real, which is that

it is in some ways not a fair fight, right? Every time you open your phone and you open up Instagram or you open up YouTube or you open up TikTok, it is effectively you and your brain competing with

Some of the world's best AI engineers, people with PhDs in machine learning who have spent years and state of the art techniques and billions of dollars in R&D, like trying to hook you to that screen. And so I think for the average person, that fight can just feel kind of like overwhelming and like maybe I should just give up and do stupid time all the time.

Yeah, and if you're really worried about that, I would suggest not putting a computer on your face when mom and dad buy one of those. All right, so this last one is a voice memo that we got from a listener named Mars. Hello, Hard Fork. I'm 19, and I'm from Seattle. I am worried about the blanket anti-social media laws being passed. I remember by eighth grade, I think, everybody in my grade had a smartphone.

And there were some negatives and some positives with that. But one of the positives was I'm queer. So it was a really awesome place to find community and learn more about my identity. And I think something that social media offers is...

When you're online and you're in those spaces, you feel like you can share more about what you're really going through or any struggles that you're having because you're not worried about judgment. And another thing is that you can meet queer people from all different backgrounds, from different countries, different age groups, different identities, which I think was really important for me, being able to contextualize my own identity or this person says that they feel this way. And I'm like, oh, that's really similar to how I feel, even if I didn't know anybody

in my real life who felt that way too. Yeah, amen to that. I mean, I'm really glad that Mars sent in that memo because it reflects a reality that a lot of people grow up lonely, not seeing folks like themselves represented in other media, wanting to connect with folks like them, even when that might not be possible geographically. And through social media, people can have those experiences. And

I think it's really interesting to think about this kind of usage of social media in contrast to what we were just talking about, this sort of like passive, addictive scrolling. My assumption here is that while I'm sure Mars did some scrolling, it sounds like Mars was...

actively searching, was sending messages, was truly interacting and being social on social media. And from what we know, it just seems like that leads to more happiness in the long run. So less scrolling, more interacting. Yeah, and this was actually something that was in the Surgeon General's report that we talked about a few weeks ago, which summarized some research that found that queer adolescents are actually a group that seems to be getting something valuable out

out of social media and that seems to have actually in some cases be having their mental health outcomes improved by using social media. And so I think one question that you could ask about that is like, well, what are platforms doing to try to encourage queer adolescents in particular to feel safe and to be able to use those platforms in the ways that actually do help their mental health outcomes?

I think that really varies by platform. I think a place like Instagram has tried hard to reduce bullying and things like that. Twitter, obviously, is going in a very different direction, and I would say is probably not the safest place. They've tried to increase bullying. It's a really fascinating experiment. And so I also think there's this question of, well,

What could platforms do to kind of generalize that effect? You know, not all adolescents are queer, not all adults are queer, but how do we give people using these platforms the kind of experience that Mars is talking about, where you are queer?

logging on, you are seeing things that kind of affirm your identity, that allow you to connect with like-minded people. Like, how do we get some of that back into social media? Because it feels like that's really been disappearing. Yeah, I agree. This seems like a great opportunity for social networks to study how these kids are using their products and expand.

So there you have it. Social media. Some people like it. Other people don't. Very controversial. We'll see what happens. But seriously, a lot to chew on in there. Thank you so much to all the teens who sent in voice memos. And hey, don't be surprised if we ask you for thoughts on other issues because we want to keep the dialogue going. Yeah, we love you, teens. Thanks for sending in your memos.

Before we go, we wanted to tell you about our new New York Times podcast. What's it called? It's called Matter of Opinion, and it's a chat show. And it's, you know, in some ways, sort of like Hard Fork. People sitting around talking about the issues of the day. It is not about tech specifically, but it's about kind of everything. And they actually have double the hosts that we do. It's twice the hosts, twice the opinions. And it's called Matter of Opinion.

So it's hosted by opinion columnists Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada, Lydia Polgreen, and editorial board writer Michelle Cottle. It comes out every Thursday. They're talking through a lot of things related to the news, to politics, to culture, to their own work, just kind of trying to make sense of the world. Again, it's called Matter of Opinion. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts or at nytimes.com slash matterofopinion.

Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We're edited by Jen Poyan. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Corey Schreppel. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Sophia Landman, and

and Rowan Nemisto. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui-Wing Tam, Nelga Logli, Kate Lopresti, Jeffrey Miranda, and Molly Josephs. And all the teens who sent us voice memos. You can email us too at hardfork at nytimes.com.

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