A jury says Meta and Google hurt a kid. What now?

21:40Nilay Patel:They went up, they lost. We'll see what happens next. The real turn here is what do they all do now, right? They've been held liable for these product features. There's some conversation that we should have at the industry that, you know, the United States of America is going to have about the difference between free speech and product features. We'll come back to that. But in the meantime, they've got to do something, right? They've got to change something about how their products work to avoid ongoing liability from anyone else who might look at these cases and say, we're going to see you too.

22:12Nilay Patel:Casey, this feels like a trust and safety problem, right? This is your audience. This is the people you talk to the most. What is their reaction to this? Their reaction is really negative. I mean, like in particular, talking to people who still work there. And what they'll say is like, even if you buy the plaintiff's arguments here, fixing this is really tricky, right? Because again, even if you believe that this individual teenager had like a horrible time looking at the, at these platforms for too long and it made all of her problems worse. Okay. Which design feature of this platform are you going to remove?

22:47And how is that going to fix her problem? Right? Like if Instagram and YouTube did not have autoplay video, if it didn't have infinite scroll, if it didn't have push notifications, would that have improved her mental health to a point where she no longer would have sued the company saying this is a defective product? I don't know, right? I think that the problem that we just have as like a society right now is we don't know what safe social media is. We don't know what features are really the most dangerous. I think we have instincts. I think there are experiments that we should run, but it's not as simple as, well, just turn off the autoplay video and all the teenagers will go play outside again.

23:26Nilay Patel:Is it as simple as none of the teenagers in Australia should use social media? Here's the thing. As somebody who writes more about social media than anything else, I have been shocked at the degree to which I am just throwing in my lot with Jonathan Haidt. Because I also don't know. I do not know which are the features that we should get rid of that are going to make all the teenagers safe. What I can tell you is nobody who works at the platforms cares enough about any of your teenagers for me to trust your teenagers with them. So I would rather say, don't look at it until you turn 16, because I know that's going to be better for you than them looking at it.

24:02Nilay Patel:So I think we can hear Casey, who talks to the people who works at the platform companies, fully crashing out about that experience. Lauren, you talk to policymakers all day long. Nominally, you are our policy reporter in DC, you cover Capitol Hill. We don't send you to courtrooms all day and all night, although that's what you've been doing. On that side of the house, what are the policymakers doing in reaction to these verdicts? So far, we've seen a big push from lawmakers who are behind some of the biggest social media reform laws like Kids Online Safety Act saying, well, this just shows that we need these new laws or we need to repeal old laws like Section 230 in order to make kids safe.

24:45So I think that is the big push right now. I think, you know, it's still really early days, though. And I am going to be really interested to see, is that kind of where the momentum moves? Or is there maybe even a kind of a counterbalance to that that says, maybe let's slow down because actually, the sort of cases we thought wouldn't be able to go through the courthouse are actually moving forward. And they're doing so even with Section 230 in place, even without COSA. I'm going to be really interested to see which way that argument goes and if that kind of speeds up or slows momentum in either direction.

25:25All right.

25:25Nilay Patel:I warned you both that I was also having a crash out about all of this. And Lauren, you've just arrived at it. The notion that those laws have anything to do with these trials and that these trials should let the government pass what amount to very strict speech regulations is just making me feel personally crazy, right? That, okay, the platforms had some design features that made them addictive, so we should pass COSA, which will restrict the speech of marginalized groups, does not have any through line to me. Josh Hawley is saying we should get rid of Section 230 and these trials prove it, and I can't tell you why that is.

26:04Nilay Patel:I cannot make the link in my brain between, okay, the platforms were optimized for virality and engagement and negative sentiment. So making them responsible for the speech in a way that will force them to take down more speech is the way to solve that problem. I cannot link those ideas together. Can either of you? No. Truly, I have read so many of the interviews with the Republican policymakers when they get asked about this stuff. and none of them seem to understand that if they do in fact get rid of 230, platforms will over-moderate content because they will be in terror that a wide variety of things that can now be linked back to them could potentially result in legal liability and they're going to hate it, right?

26:46Like these are the guys that hate all content moderation and if you delete Section 230, you're going to get more of it. So no, it doesn't make any sense.

26:52Nilay Patel:Lauren, you've covered bipartisan attempts to reform 230, bipartisan attempts to do age verification in laws like COSA. What's the view on the Democrat side? I think there are really a lot of Democrats who support COSA and really are fully on board with those kinds of changes to the law and definitely have acknowledged some of the critiques around that, you know, this might harm marginalized communities or make it harder to access certain kinds of content that might get politicized on the internet, but generally just think that those have been pretty much dealt with in the language of the statute.

27:32It's not really going to come to pass. And they've just accepted that they feel like this is the best way forward. I mean, certainly not all Democrats, you know, obviously, Ron Wyden, who co-authored Section 230, has not supported COSA. There really is broad bipartisan support for these kinds of issues. So I think that's going to be the challenge for some of the hardliners on Section 230 and against COSA right now to think like, is it that there's never going to be anything that changes on these issues or is there going to be some kind of change and we have to figure out what we can live with?

28:09Nilay Patel:Here's where it gets really complicated for me. And you two are just going to help me process these feelings together as a family. I look at, okay, there was a big trial that got lost. These companies are liable for more of what happens in their platforms in a narrow way. And now there's a group of people that want to say, you're actually responsible for everything. We're going to tear down 230. You're responsible for the content that you're distributing. And that will lead to even more liability. And maybe you're going to take even more steps. And then I think, well, that's bad. Like taking down 230 is bad.

28:37Nilay Patel:I've felt that way for 20 odd years. There's an infinite amount of coverage on theverge.com about why tearing down 230 is bad. And then I sit there for one more turn and I think, well, why? Like we've all talked to Ron Wyden. Ron Wyden has been on the show. Lauren, I think you just recently spoke to him as well. Ron Wyden's a nice guy. Chris Cox, who wrote 230 with Wyden, is a nice guy. The world that they were trying to create with Section 230 never happened. Like it literally does not exist. This law is 30 years old. It was written in a time when AOL and Usenet existed and were the dominant ways of communicating online.

29:14Nilay Patel:And their goal was to create a competitive marketplace of moderation, where if you wanted your computer to be safe for your kids, you would literally download software and run it locally on your computer. And it would sit in front of CompuServe and like filter the internet for you. And that just never happened. It never existed. So now I feel like I'm in this place where I'm required to boldly defend a 30-year-old law whose policy goals were never achieved. And I don't know why. Casey, I know you've been wrestling with this too. How should I feel about this? I have complicated feelings, too, because I want Section 230 to exist so that platforms can host political speech, all sorts of speech.

30:02I think that it creates the possibility for platforms that are very rich and vibrant and fun. At the same time, there's this 230 case that I paid a lot of attention to as a gay guy about Grindr. You guys, I'm sure, are familiar with this case. But basically, there's this horrible ex that's like, I'm going to get back at my ex by posting his photos on Grindr, and I'm going to send everyone his physical address and say, go to this guy's house, and he's going to indulge in your craziest fantasies and give you drugs. and this gets tossed out because of Section 230, right? They sue Grindr saying, like, this is awful.

30:40You got to do something. And Grindr is like, 230 and the case goes away. That seems really awful for the victim of that case. Like, if I were in that situation, I'd be really mad at Grindr too. At the same time, why should 230 be the thing that gets that person justice? Why don't we just take online harassment and violence more seriously in this country. So this is kind of how I square the circle is by saying section 230 in general does still support the kind of internet that I want. And for a lot of the harms, mostly not the ones we're talking about today, but for a lot of the harms that do absolutely get enabled and protected by 230, I think we can probably find other ways of addressing the harm.

31:19But here's another thought experiment. What if the brain trust over at Meta got together and said, what would Instagram look like if it were great for teenagers? Do you think it would look a lot like the Instagram that we have today? Or do you think it would look a lot different? I bet it'd be the latter, right? I bet it would look really, really different. And I think that there is a world where, we don't live in this world, but I think that there's another world where the executives at Instagram did do that and said, you know what, like we're actually going to put out that version of Instagram for teens.

31:47And look, it's like mostly educational content. It's actually not personalized to your teen at all. We've disabled all the communication features. You can only use it during daylight hours. You can imagine a million things that would probably just make this a safe product. So on some level, yes, it's tricky to figure out, oh, what would the right version of Instagram be that would not get met into trouble? On the other hand, I think you actually could kind of sketch it out. So my curiosity is, to what extent are they going to try to go down that road? Because I'm sure they're going to be desperate not to be sued by every teenager in America.

32:15And to what extent are they just going to, I don't know, try something shady and underhanded that I haven't thought of yet.

32:21Nilay Patel:They've announced sort of like Instagram for younger people, right? These tools for younger people, and they get just dumped on for being cynical and trying to target kids. Like, can they do, do they have the social capital to say this product is safe anymore? No. I mean, like my, my sort of nihilistic view on this is like, ultimately like what solves the meta problem is that they just like get outcompeted by another company that like maybe is better in certain dimensions. But yeah, I like, I don't think the change is going to come from within from these guys because all they care about is just winning.

32:50And for them, winning looks like maximum time engaged.

32:53Nilay Patel:I mean, to be fair, Mark Zuckerberg is currently busy hiring and firing hundreds of AI researchers every week against some goal that is yet to be defined. And the idea that he's going to stop and put all of his attention on Instagram safe for kids, like maybe only existential amounts of litigation will make him do that. But I honestly wonder if Mark Zuckerberg is the right face of teen safety in America. And I think the answer is just flatly no. Yeah, I don't think the track record really would lead you to putting him in charge of that particular project. Again, and I think it's important to underline this for folks, to meta addiction looks like success.

33:35Yes, they have huge teams inside the company, cognitive scientists who work to understand the human brain so that they can get you to pick up your phone and look at it as many times as possible. And this is why I feel so bad for the people who are mad at themselves for all the time they spend looking at Instagram. It's like, you were not in a fair fight, okay? Like you lost a rigged game. And the reason that Meta is doing that is not because they're literally evil. It's that they feel like the incentives of their business require them to do this. So unless those incentives change, no, Neelay, Meta is not going to be the place to go to look for moral leadership on teen safety.

34:18Nilay Patel:We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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36:33Nilay Patel:It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. Participate in McDonald's while supplies last. Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

37:20Nilay Patel:We're back with platformers Casey Newton and Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner. We just spent a good deal of time talking about Section 230 and whether the world it was designed to create ever really came into existence and whether or not Section 230 itself is still worth defending. But there's another complication here, an important one, the First Amendment. Let's get into it. The last piece of the puzzle, which I haven't really touched on here, but is definitely a through line, is the First Amendment, is freedom of speech. We are talking about platforms that regulate and control vast amounts of speech from almost everybody in the country all the time.

37:52Nilay Patel:When you talk about changing the limits on these platforms and what they are liable for and how their products work, you are very directly talking about how speech is amplified and distributed in this country. There are a lot of people who have built entire businesses based on understanding how meta will make their stuff go viral. You can have a lot of feelings about what those businesses are and what they look like and what they're doing to the brains of teenagers. But there are a lot of people who have built really big businesses on the back of these platforms. Are we just going to run headfirst in the First Amendment here?

38:20Nilay Patel:Is it impossible? Mike Masnick, who runs TechDirt, he was just on the show, good friend. He thinks it's a disaster for the First Amendment. Taylor Lawrence, a friend, thinks this is a disaster for the First Amendment. Their argument is you cannot separate the product from the speech. The product itself means nothing. It is a speech that the product is distributing that is the problem. And so you are just trying to backdoor your way into a speech regulation by making the product liable for whatever harm. There's a part of me that buys this. But Casey, I know you think you can pull the two apart.

38:49I agree that this is tricky and we should be careful. And lawsuits are often not the best way to work through this stuff because just in general, I would rather have like lawmakers and policymakers writing really careful versions of this. At the same time, why is infinite scroll speech? Why are like streaks speech? Like why is like autoplay video speech? Like at a certain point, I think you can get yourself all the way to like, why do we make Ford put seatbelts on their car? Like that you're compelling speech is like, no, you're compelling a seatbelt. Like, I think you should be able to compel product safety features once it becomes clear that you actually have a product safety issue.

39:33Now I should say there are things that I would actually love to compel these platforms to do that are just obviously unconstitutional. Like I would love to compel them to show educational content to children in the same way that Congress once passed a law saying that broadcasters needed to provide at least three hours of educational programming a week. I think that was really good for society. It turned out, at least when you apply to social media, that's just obviously unconstitutional. So I do think that you have to be really careful here. But if you're going to tell me that every single product feature of every social media app is speech, you truly are caping for these platforms in a way that it makes me uncomfortable.

40:08Nilay Patel:Lauren, one thing that I've been thinking about a lot is what happens to 230 in a world where the platforms are generating more and more of the content directly with AI. Google's AI overviews, that is probably Google's speech, even though it's synthesized from the speech of millions of other people on websites. Do any of these regulatory regimes or attempts to change any of these laws contemplate that problem? I think that's kind of the new Wild West that we're going to be running into here with probably new lawsuits. But I think even And Ron Wyden, who we've discussed many times today, has said that AI outputs aren't necessarily protected by Section 230.

40:47So I think those will likely be treated differently. I mean, we won't really know till we see a court case come out on it. But I think that's going to be a big question. And I think the thing to remember with Section 230 is that it's really a procedural tool that stops lawsuits kind of in their tracks. and how cases get decided in the end is based on the First Amendment. So, you know, unless you're going to get rid of the First Amendment, getting rid of Section 230 doesn't really completely get rid of the problems that maybe some people think they would. I want to ask you guys what you think about something, because I'm still working through this in my own mind.

41:26We were talking earlier about, like, okay, well, what is the specific feature that, like, leads to the mental health problems suffered by, like, Kaylee and some of the other folks in these bellwether cases? And I do suspect that autoplay video, infinite scroll, endless push notifications, that all have something to do with it. I suspect maybe, though, the strongest factor is algorithmic personalization, right? It's I search for one video about how to get skinny, and now all of a sudden I'm in like a nightmare wasteland of eating disorder content. And that actually does increase my depression, and it leads to increase the intensity of my eating disorder.

41:59Okay, as a society, I think we want to stop that, right? We don't want you to get dragged down that rabbit hole. We don't want you to develop that eating disorder. Can we regulate that? This is actually just the trickiest issue to me, right? Because on one hand, I could see Congress passing a law saying, hey, if you're 16 and younger, we just want to disable algorithmic personalization, at least at the level of the individual, right? Maybe we'll group you into a bucket and we'll say, 16-year-olds in America seem to like this kind of content, and we're okay with that. But you personally know we're going to block that for you because we don't want you to get dragged down a rabbit hole.

42:32But is that constitutional under the First Amendment? I don't know. I'm just curious what you guys make of that.

42:37Nilay Patel:I've been thinking about this a lot. And I keep thinking back to Barack Obama on Decoder. And we talked about regulating AI a lot. And he was talking about regulating AI with me because he felt he had failed to regulate social media. And you could see the connection in his brain. It was clear as day. He's like, we failed social media. We got to get AI right. And I kept asking him about the First Amendment over and over again? How are you going to get past the First Amendment? And at the end, he said, look, you just need a hook. You just need to find a hook the way that we found a hook to regulate broadcast television.

43:07Nilay Patel:In the case of broadcast television, the hook is very obvious, right? There's only so much spectrum. It's a scarce public resource. So we can make some regulations to make sure we make good use of that resource. And you can immediately see the danger in that, which is that Brendan Carr has power over broadcast television. And now we have an unrestrained speech regulator in this country. That's not good. At the same time, the idea that Barack Obama's like, you just need a hook, is a reflection of the standard in the law, which is called strict scrutiny. And you can do a speech regulation under the First Amendment if it's narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government purpose.

43:40Nilay Patel:These are the words in the precedent. Strict scrutiny, narrowly tailored, compelling government interest. Well, I don't want a bunch of 16-year-old girls to get eating disorders. It feels like a very compelling government interest. You can attach a very narrowly tailored rule to accomplish. And I'm very curious if that is the future, where we're going to say this stuff causes harm. Here's one rule to stop this content. You can detect this content with the power of AI, Mark. You can now detect all those GPUs, detect the eating disorder content, get rid of those communities. I think that's just as bad, right?

44:14Nilay Patel:That's just as bad as Brendan Carr unrestrained speech regulator. That's just a bunch of government speech regulations. But if 230 prevents mass litigation against the platforms, right? Because as Lauren's saying, it's a procedural mechanism that says you can't sue us at all. If you have to dance through these hoops of, well, it's product design features, but no one can identify the specific product design features. I think a bunch of state regulators are going to say, look, there's some stuff we know is bad. And we're going to pass those laws. And we're going to take those to this Supreme Court and say, these are narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest.

44:49Nilay Patel:And I don't know if that's how that will play out. I suspect it's going to start. And I certainly don't know if that's good. But you can see that that is the next escape patch here because that is the standard for a law that regulates speech in this country. Casey, I think that's exactly the right question about algorithms, because I think it's much easier to make the argument that, you know, infinite scroll or autoplay, it's not really about content. It's not really even much of a decision by the platforms. But what a company chooses to program their algorithm to recommend or not recommend, those are kind of their deliberate choices.

45:25And, you know, we've already had a Supreme Court decision saying that like content moderation is basically editorial discretion. So I think that's where it gets really tricky. And I think you're right. That is kind of exactly the sort of thing that people who are advocating for these changes want to see changed. But it's probably the trickiest one to do.

45:45Nilay Patel:Addie Robertson wrote this for us a while back. It was just a piece on how America turned against the First Amendment. This notion that we all care about free speech and everyone says it and then you kind of push on it. And everyone wants a little bit more speech regulation than before. And that has only been growing over time. Even the people that are like, I love Elon. We're watching in the Elon-Sam Altman trial, text from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk saying, I'm deleting all content that identifies the people in Doge. And Elon's like, great. Do you want to buy OpenAI with me? Like, Mr. Free Speech Warrior is like, yeah, delete that stuff.

46:20Nilay Patel:And Mark is saying, I will never, ever cave to the government again. and he's emailing the government employees saying, I'm deleting the names of government employees. This is crazy to me. And it just seems like we are entering a period where there's more pressure from the government on speech than ever before. Everyone is a little more okay with it than ever before. And we are all still pretending like we all care about free speech the most. Casey, that feels like a nightmare in the trust and safety context. You wrote, I think, at the beginning of Trump 2 on how trust and safety was out of favor and no one was pushing back anymore.

46:51Nilay Patel:That was a while ago. What does it feel like now? So I wrote this piece and the headline was, is anyone left to stand up for trust and safety? You know, trust and safety used to be a really vocal part of the tech industry. And they advocated for a lot of good pro-social civic values. They talked a lot about human rights. They tried to bake human rights principles into the policies that these platforms observed when they were moderating content. And so I just sort of had a natural affinity to them, right? Like in my view, these were the good guys. And then Trump gets swept back into power. A bunch of layoffs happen.

47:26Every platform decides almost without exception that their best move is to try to curry favor with the Trump administration. And all of these folks just get pushed aside. The ones who were the most vocal about human rights principles disappear. and all of a sudden you have people like Joel Kaplan at Meta running the policy operation. And his main job is just to essentially get Donald Trump to like Mark Zuckerberg and try to ensure that we get, you know, whatever we want. And it's been hugely effective for them, by the way. Mark Zuckerberg has gotten an insane number of things from Donald Trump, and I'm sure he'll get more, you know, as the years go on.

48:02So I got a lot of pushback from the trust and safety community when I wrote this piece because I was essentially calling them out, just being like, hey, where are you guys? Are you actually going to get on a microphone anywhere and say, hey, it's really bad what is happening to our industry? And what they told me very justifiably was like, we do not have the power that you think we have. And also when we do speak up and when people do know our names, we get death threats and we get hounded to the ends of the earth and it's really scary. And you're asking us to sacrifice maybe even our lives to speak out in favor of these principles.

48:33That's like kind of a big ass. So all of that is fair. And yet fast forward to almost a year later now, I think the question still stands. Like what happened when these people stopped speaking out was they just gave free reign to the oligarchs to run these platforms as they see fit. That's a really scary thing to me is that trust and safety really is no longer meaningful at any of these platforms, except as a compliance function to keep them in line with various regulations. And the result is now you just have a bunch of oligarchs trading favors over Signal.

49:02Nilay Patel:Lauren, I want to end with you. Obviously, the regulatory side of this is just in full throttle right now. They have something that at least shows that meta is bad, that YouTube is bad, and you can make some moves. What do you think happens next on that side of things? I think we're going to see a lot of discussion in Congress about whether to pass these new laws to repeal Section 230. But I think where we've seen most of the action has been in the states. I think we'll probably continue to see that move forward. I think in the courts, we'll see these cases be appealed. And at the same time, we're going to see new cases brought.

49:40There's still, you know, in the L.A. case, there's, I think, over 1 ,500 cases behind that. There's several more bellwether trials just in that set of cases that are already scheduled. The next one, I think, is going to be in a few months. And then there's a totally different set of bellwether trials in a federal version of these cases with the first one kicking off in June. And that's, you know, a school district and there's school districts, state AGs, individual plaintiffs. So this is really not going to slow down at all. And I think if nothing else, what these trials have done is just brought to light a lot of this information about how these companies work.

50:18And I think you just brought more awareness among the general public about, you know, what to be thinking about and aware of when their kids are using social media.

50:28Nilay Patel:It does feel like just a perfect description of the experience of being in America right now. They're going to set just a mishmash of policies across the country until everyone pays enough money to the lobbyists to get a law passed that solves the problem. And that just feels like at once the most nihilistic, cynical thing I can say, and also just how everything works all the time. Do either of you see an off-ramp from that? I mean, recent history would suggest that no, there's not really an off ramp. Because again, all the incentives are for these companies to get you to look at their app for as long as they can get you to do that.

51:06And so until the pain of those incentives is worse than the benefits of the revenue that brings in and what it does to their stock price, I don't see a big change coming.

51:18Nilay Patel:Lauren, do policymakers sense that they're trapped in this kind of doom loop? I feel like the policymakers who have decided that COSA is the way, repealing Section 230 is the way, you know, that is their focus. You know, I don't think there's kind of this new discussion about how exactly should we do this. We have seen some newer approaches with things like App Store age verification, and there's kind of different variations on how that could potentially work, whether it's real verification or assurance. I think in general, policymakers have chosen what they think the solution is, and that's how this conversation is going forward.

51:58And I think if people want to change, you know, what are the mechanisms of that conversation, they're really going to have to inject new solutions or think differently about the incentives here.

52:10Nilay Patel:Here are my three ideas, just to end with. I'm curious for your thoughts. One, I think a federal privacy law is long overdue. That doesn't feel like it insults the First Amendment. Two, I think, Casey, your point about algorithmic personalization, I think just requiring algorithmic transparency would go a long, long way. Show us why you are showing us the things you're showing us. Make your algorithm transparent. And then third, require them to do the research. Make them do the research and publish it so there's not this incredible negative incentive to avoid knowing anything ever. I look at all that.

52:43Nilay Patel:I'm like, oh, that's the European approach. I'm just describing Europe. Have any of those things worked in Europe yet, or is it just too early to tell? I think it's too early to tell. I think that some of the transparency requirements that they've implemented have been good. It's like there's now some kind of database that you can go to where they have to essentially file a lot of the moderation decisions that you've made. That's accessible to the public. I think these are good things. I think what we haven't seen yet is consensus on the specific problem we're trying to solve and like the exact right mechanisms for solving it, right?

53:19I think it's like, and again, because it gets so like mixed up in these speech issues. So I think we need to continue to try to like narrow in on like what is the exact problem we're trying to solve? And then from there, try to build some consensus around like, okay, what can we really say in an empirical way? Like this is what is going to protect the teens from like having horrible outcomes. I think we got to keep driving at those things or otherwise we're just going to continue to spin our wheels.

53:43Nilay Patel:Casey writes, platformer, He podcasts with Kevin Roos at Hard Fork, which is wonderful, although they're my sworn enemies and I think they should be legal. Lauren's work is all over the verge. Lauren, you've been on Decoder so much recently. Thank you for coming on yet again. Let us know what you think. I'm dying for feedback on this episode because unlike so many Decoder episodes, I think you can feel none of us quite know what's going to happen next or maybe more troubling what should happen. I'd like to thank Casey and Lauren for taking time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.

54:14Nilay Patel:If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all the emails or hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram at the same handle, at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcast. Decoder is production of The Verge. I'm part of the Vox Community Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat.

54:37Nilay Patel:It's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Thank you.