Anthropic’s Cybersecurity Shock Wave + Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz on Their Sam Altman Investigation + One Good Thing

27:08Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz, welcome to Hard Fork. Thank you, guys. Happy to be here. I mean, truly long time, first time. And in fact, I brought receipts to that effect. This is your show. You can take or leave this in the edit. but I wanted to show what a devoted longtime fan I am of Hard Fork. I know the show well. I know you guys like merch and I know you guys like disclosures, but you don't have any disclosure merch to my knowledge. So I had these made for you. Come on. One for each. One for you, one for you. I'm going to put it in the mail after we get off. One of them says I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity for alleged copyright violations.

27:51the other one says and my fiancee works at anthropic oh my gosh that is amazing time limited it's gonna be a time capsule but i mean made at the print shop in brooklyn one of a kind that's incredible you are and i also i think i should also make when i gave you a a hat at your wedding uh and i gave you one at your wedding so i think that's true we have a sort of a theme going on here. Okay. Right. Well, and that's also our disclosure, which is that Kevin and I are buds and have known each other forever. So actually, Casey, you can come to me anytime. I know you guys like to rib and roast on the show.

28:31So you can come to me behind the scenes for any roastable Kevin material. Oh, my dream has been to get the New Yorker to investigate Kevin Roos. So you guys really could not have come along at a better time. We're on it. Don't tempt us. I'm not picking up the phone. Okay. Let's talk about this big piece that you both just published in The New Yorker. The title of the piece is Can Sam Altman Be Trusted? Now, usually there's this sort of folk rule about headlines that end with question marks, which is that the answer is always no. So I want to put this question to you. Can Sam Altman be trusted?

29:08Well, I think one important thing to note is the piece is really forensic and even. And actually to a point where I've been happy to see there's a range of reactions, right? There's people who have answered that question in a very severe way and looked at the fact pattern that is laid out here and the documentation that's laid out and said, you know, this is someone who poses an acute danger and should be kept away from an authority position. And then there's people who, I mean, hilariously enough, my mother called me and she's like, you know, I kind of like him. And so I think that is a true reflection of our intentions.

29:49In this case, as you might imagine, there was deep consultation with all of the subjects of the reporting to really understand their feelings. And anytime we thought there was a persuasive argument from Sam or anyone else that, you know, something shouldn't make it in or something would be sensationalist, we really carefully discussed that editorially. So the result is very even. And I would say on the question itself, what we lay out is something that is remarkable, I'd say, even against the backdrop of the culture of mistrust in Silicon Valley, where everybody understands and expects, right, that being a founder means telling different audiences different things at times to some extent, where everyone understands that the entire enterprise is building based on hype long before there is actual actionable, deliverable product.

30:36Even against that backdrop, there is an extraordinary preponderance of people who emerge from interactions with Sam Altman, including close years long ones, with really active complaints and allegations that he lies repeatedly about things big and small. Well, one of my favorites was when you quote him telling you that he wears a gray sweater every day to avoid decision fatigue, and then he shows up for his next interview in a green sweater. That felt like a really satisfying detail. That was just for you, Casey. Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that eye for fashion that you so rarely get in these tech profiles.

31:09Andrew was our fashionista in the writer's room. But that's the kind of thing where, you know, we didn't want to make too much of that. Right. Because it's like, oh, we caught you in this deep hypocrisy of, you know, choosing a green sweater. And this is consistent with a lot of the things people say throughout the piece and throughout the career of Altman and OpenAI is that there isn't this one smoking gun thing where he's like caught, you know, with his hand in the cookie jar. It's this sort of allegedly longer, more subtle accumulation of facts, which my kind of like glib and, you know, annoying way of describing it is like the fabled memos and documents that were compiled that led to him being fired in 2023 and that have kind of dogged him throughout his career.

31:57They really shouldn't have been like a secret bullet pointed list. They should have been a 16 ,000 word New Yorker piece because they only really make sense when you like lay them all out together in narrative form. Yeah, I mean, you guys mentioned in your story that there have been sort of these rap sheets that have been circulating about Sam inside OpenAI and other parts of the AI industry for years. One of them was compiled by Dario Amadei when he worked at OpenAI under Sam Altman. One of them, you said, was maybe circulated by some allies of Elon Musk and people who are opposed to open AI.

32:35So give us some sort of behind-the-scenes details about what is being said by whom and how and to what ends about Sam Altman in Silicon Valley. Well, it was really important to us to filter for the obvious competitive incentives out there. There are people who are massively incentivized to go after Sam Altman. And the reality is that there are very firmly evidence-based critiques, many of which are promulgated not just by the rivals, although they're certainly amplified by them heavily, but also by more neutral figures and people who are just kind of technologists who aren't in the fight. And then there is the white hot center of the rivalry, the stuff you mentioned that I think is in a very different category, which is, you know, Elon Musk and other direct competitors really amplifying everything they can come up with.

33:33And in some cases, we document things that are inflated or trumped up or just seem to not be true. So Elon Musk in particular has intermediaries circulating some pretty spicy and pretty unsubstantiated material in Silicon Valley. And we talk about that. I really appreciated that about the piece because this has become like more salient over the past year as these rivalries heat up and you hear more and more of these scurrilous rumors. and while I do think this winds up being a pretty damning portrait of Sam on the whole, you do also point out that in some very real ways, he's the subject of legitimate smear campaign.

34:11Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think that's absolutely accurate. And we were trying not to go in, you know, with naivete of like, can you believe business titans are being mean to each other? But like the level of this really does seem kind of shocking and unprecedented. presented and you know it's kind of consistent with people who think of this as like whoever gets the ring first will control the world like it just seems like all bets are off and so as a reporter it's very challenging to be like do you bring up the scurrilous rumors to knock them down and so we we had like months of conversations about how best to do that so there's been a lot of reporting on sam altman especially around the the board coup a few years ago could you maybe give us like the two or three things that you think are new and important from your reporting that rise above the rest in terms of people's understanding of Sam Altman and OpenAI?

35:03So I think there are things here that put to rest some of the longstanding rumors, right? I mean, Altman has always said, and Paul Graham at Y Combinator has always said, he was not pushed out. He left of his own volition. It really seems from our reporting that that was not the case. They have talked a lot about their fundraising in the Gulf, in the Middle East, as innocuous. All businesses do this. It really seems from our reporting that the relationships that Sam has cultivated with some Emirati and Saudi royals is deeper than was previously realized. Ronan, what am I missing? There are several things like this.

35:42We just didn't really know in full what was in those Ilya Satsukovar memos. we didn't really have the detailed multiple sourced heavily documented accounts of the individual proof points that were offered in those memos we didn't have the contents of those Dario Amadei notes and we didn't have a lot of these people on the record yet so I think actually in a way that was a disservice not only to Sam's critics but also to Sam himself there was a bit of a veil of mystery and and that wasn't purely accidental one of the things we document that's new here is as a condition of the exit of the board members who had moved against Sam that he wanted out, they insisted on an outside investigation.

36:27What happened there is, in my view, quite extraordinary, which is, yes, at private companies, sometimes reports of this type, when a law firm is brought in to restore legitimacy, can be kept out of writing. Often it's to limit liability. And often legal experts say it's a bit of a red flag. This is a different kind of case. This isn't just any private company. This is a high profile scandal that engulfed Silicon Valley when Sam was fired. And ostensibly at a non-profit. At a 501c3, exactly. And so there were stakeholders, not just in the public, but within this company, that would be the bare minimum threshold, right?

37:05Where senior executives thought, okay, we're going to get some kind of at least detailed summary of what this law firm investigation found when they invoke it to rubber stamp Sam coming back. And instead, what happened was an 800-word press release that said there had vaguely been a breakdown in trust and offered very few other details. And what we reported in this piece for the first time is there wasn't a report. For years, people were like, where's the report? Where's the report? There wasn't a report because it was kept out of writing. And this is no longer just a speculative supposition, one of the two board members who Sam helped select who oversaw this process just explicitly says, well, you know, a written report was not needed is now their line on this.

37:49Yeah, I'm glad you brought it up. It was actually my favorite detail in the piece because it was something I'd been curious about forever. I mean, the thing that I found most interesting from the piece were the people who spoke on the record or at least gave you quotes and some of them were unattributed about Sam, who, you know, I think previously might have supported him or at least felt like there was no upside in sort of, you know, talking about him in a negative way in public. There was a Microsoft executive quote in your piece as saying that there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-free level scammer.

38:24There's another unnamed board member who said, quote, he's unconstrained by truth and said that he has a, quote, an almost sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone. I haven't been on a lot of corporate boards, but I think that is something that's quite rare to hear a board member say about a CEO of a company. I'm just curious, like when you were weighing these statements, did you feel like there are people who used to be fans of Sam who have soured on him? Or are these people who have really held a grudge against him for a long time. The thing that you point out about people changing their tune over time, I think is an integral part of what we document in the piece, which is, you know, the fact that Sam Altman comes up through this Y Combinator world is not incidental.

39:17The fact that he has an investment portfolio in, by his own estimation, you know, about 400 other tech companies, the fact that he has sat on everyone's board and everyone has sat on his board. I think our sort of line about this in the piece is like, we spoke to people who are Sam's friends, Sam's enemies, and given the mercenary nature of Silicon Valley, some people who have been both, right? So given that that's the landscape, you are going to have people who change their tune as the wind blows different ways. And that's a lot of how Altman's been able to weather a lot of this stuff in the past.

39:50One thing that results from that spread of opinions is to your question about evolving takes on Sam, there's definitely a class of nuts and bolts investors, prominent people in Silicon Valley who are really pragmatists, not just safetyists, and who are growth and business oriented, who told us that at the time of Sam's firing of the blip, they gave him the benefit of the doubt. And especially because of the factor we talked about before, where there just was a dearth of clear information. In that void, a lot of prominent people gave him the benefit of the doubt and saw only upside in bringing him back and removing the board that tried to fire him.

40:30There are a number of those prominent people in that category now who say, I don't know that I would have given him the benefit of the doubt if I knew everything then that I now know. It just strikes me, though, that everyone who digs into this winds up coming back with essentially the same story. You know what I mean? It's like there are not like 17 versions of Sam Altman out there, like depending on which reporter calls which different source. I feel like we now sort of know like the broad outlines of this person's psychology. I don't know. I want to challenge that. Like I do talk to people who are big fans of Sam, some of whom work for him, some of whom don't.

41:09Clearly this is a guy who has been able to, at various points, like lead very important technology projects and like rally people behind a vision. These people are not like mindless sheep, Like, they're critical and discerning and thoughtful people. So I don't want to, like, seem like I'm, you know, taking Sam's side on anything. But I just, like, I think that there are a lot of people with very strong feelings about Sam Altman. Positive and negative. I think the positive side tends to be more, like, people defending him in private. And the public side tends to be more people criticizing him. But I don't know, I guess for Ronan and Andrew, like, do you feel like there are vocal supporters who you came across in reporting the story who had sort of no direct employment relationship with OpenAI or Sam or, you know, weren't leading companies that he invested in or something who were like, yeah, this guy seems pretty good and smart and talented.

42:04Yeah, I was an 11 year old who used ChatGPT to pass sixth grade. Oh, my God. No, no. There were legit defenders of Sam on a number of these fronts who we talked to for sure. I think a lot of this has to do with like what baseline expectation are you starting from? Like, if you think of this as a business and you start from the premise that people who run giant successful businesses have to say a lot of different things to a lot of different people, like, why is anyone even why is this a story? I think, though, there's a kind of level setting here where one of the things you can do when you take a big sort of putting everything in one place narrative effort like this is you can start from the beginning and remember what the original pitch was.

42:55And when you go back to what the original pitch was, the defense of why are you guys being so naive? This is a normal competitive business. Like, OK, so when you pitch this as a nonprofit safety focused research lab that would aggressively comply with all regulation, like were the people who believed that naive to believe it at the time? Right. So that's when the defenses start to feel a little more like pressured to me. Yeah. Also, like for what it's worth, you know, it's like, oh, you know, is it really a story that this guy is, you know, telling different things to so many different groups?

43:28It's like, that's not like really a story that gets told about Satya Nadella. It's not really a story that gets told about Sunar Pichai. It's not really a story that gets told about Tim Cook, right? Like there does seem to be something really unusual here. And my question for you guys, now that you've sort of spent so much time immersed in this company, is what do you think it means for OpenAI? Well, I mean, luckily, we have a really robust independent tech media to, you know, so I was going to tune into TVPN and see what their independent journalistic take on this would be. Do you want to give listeners who may not be familiar with what you're talking about some context?

44:02I think the day after our piece closed, Ronan, or something like late last week, OpenAI acquired TBPN, which is this big sort of tech chat show. So that's one aspect of this answer, right? That as OpenAI expands and grows, they seem to be sort of buying up more of the press infrastructure to tell their own story. Relatedly, by the way, a lot of announcements over there right concentrated around when they knew we were going to be running and right developed in the period where we were in these intensive conversations with them. And many of them sort of pointed at the topics in the piece. You know, they announced this new safety fellowship that's very airy.

44:41They announced this new governance plan that's very sort of airy and ethereal but are meant to, I think, you know, occupy space in the conversation on the same topics. And look, I mean, everyone, Ronan, you should say more about this, but everyone, including Altman and the OpenAI execs we spoke to, recognizes the economic pressures here. I mean, I think you guys were there when he said, oh, yeah, it's definitely a bubble and someone's going to lose a phenomenal amount of money. Right. So even putting sort of the sci fi Skynet stuff aside, you know, the economic pressures are unavoidable. And a lot of it has to do with this sort of pitch man rhetoric.

45:20The exact thing we're talking about. Right. Because these things are contingent. It's not like, oh, will it be a bubble or not? It's like how hyped up will the cycle get is a byproduct of how people like Sam go around the world talking about it. Yeah. I want to ask sort of a basic question that I think people have probably raised with you, which is like, why does it matter who Sam Altman is? If what we are talking about is a technology that could have profound implications on national security, the economy, potentially the future of humanity, it doesn't seem obvious to a lot of people why it matters who is running these companies.

46:04because a very nice person who is very honest and very transparent in all their dealings could still release a rogue superintelligence that blows up the world. And a very, you know, manipulative person could release a very aligned model. And so what we should be paying attention to are the models themselves, not the people running the companies that make the models. I'm not saying I believe that, but I'm curious, what do you make of that argument that we are focusing too much on the humans and not enough on the technology? We probably both have thoughts on this. I think I have two. The first of which is it's worth noting that while reasonable minds could perhaps differ on the question you just posed, the answer provided by Sam Altman and the founders of OpenAI was very clear, which is actually part of the way the entire enterprise was structured when it was founded as a nonprofit it was they talked a lot about avoiding an AGI dictatorship.

47:02They really believed that actually the person who gets there first and has the most power over this technology is pivotal. The individual integrity is formative to the way the technology goes and the way it's controlled and the way it's used. The other thought that I have is, in my mind, you raise a valid point, and more significant than any of this is the structures around these individuals. We have a technology emerging that could really affect us all in all of the existential ways you just mentioned. And we don't have the regulatory guardrails to keep an eye on these folks. We are completely ceding the power to these individual companies and their whims, the mud fight between them, the quality control that each of them has or lacks.

47:56I think that, to me, is the big question. And the integrity of an individual figures in that, and it's important, but it reveals the weaknesses in the system. If you have someone who potentially lies all the time, could, in the eyes of many critics, be a danger, the important thing is to have the structures that account for that. There's a great quote that you guys have in the piece from one of his former co-workers who talk about how Sam now has this track record of setting up these elaborate guardrails to keep him in check and then skillfully navigating around them. And it made me wonder if you had seen this piece in the information this week about tensions that are being reported between Sam and his chief financial officer, Sarah Fryer.

48:44She's reportedly expressed doubts that OpenAI will be ready for an IPO this year. And according to the story, Sam has noticeably and awkwardly excluded her from some conversations related to the company's financial plans, kept her out of some key meetings. I read that and I was like, well, this is exactly what you guys are writing about in your piece, right? You sort of bring in somebody whose job it is to look over the finances of the entire company, get it ready for an IPO. But then for whatever reason, we're going to sort of exclude her from some meeting. So anyway, I just sort of feel like we really are seeing the exact pattern that you guys are writing about now repeating in real time.

49:20Yeah. And I mean, just to agree with all of this, I think the thing that Kevin's bringing up about given the power of this, why are we focusing on one personality? Like, I think that's very legit. I think that this is way beyond one person. This is way beyond one personality. It's not like the point of the piece is Sam shouldn't be AGI dictator. So Elon should or Demis should or whatever. Right. It's to point out the fact that we're having a discussion about AGI dictators at all is insane. These guys know it's insane. And yet this seems to be the race that they see themselves being in. When he was fired, he was brought back in part because I think no one could really imagine an open AI without Sam Altman.

50:00Do you think that's still the case? I don't think it's unimaginable anymore. I think that part of reaching the scale that they've reached is that you can have a Steve Jobs figure be replaced by a Tim Cook figure. It seems like it's inseparable from reaching this scale that that becomes at least a possibility in people's minds. Right, Ron? I mean, does that strike you that way? Absolutely. I think the landscape has changed substantially over the period of time we were reporting this story. The fact that gradually more and more people were talking openly about this critique is very telling. We report in the piece that there are periodic spasms of senior executives at OpenAI talking about succession again.

50:48Of course, naturally, the company denies this. But also very interesting that in recent forms of that discussion, there has been talk about Fiji SEMO being sort of the first potential successor candidate who could slot into any ideas of that type that circulate. Between our asking about that and the piece coming out, obviously, SEMO has now gone on leave for medical reasons. There's a lot of reshuffling. We see it in the Sarah Fryer case. I think you're right to link it to that quote that's in the article about constraints being sidelined. And yet, I think these doubts and questions persist and are now much more out in the open.

51:35On the leadership question, it just strikes me that for somebody who I assume wants to stay CEO for a long time, it's interesting to me that he's hired so many former public company CEOs to be his top lieutenants, right? It's like he has the former CEO of Instacart there. He has the former CEO of Nextdoor there. He has the former CEO of Slack there. So you're bringing a lot of really sort of sharp and pointy elbows into the room when you do something like that. I'm trying to tell Sam that there's danger here. pro tip um if you're listening sam the you know there are people in this piece talking about earlier tracks of sam altman's career where they feel he was deliberately avoiding that actually part of what underpinned the terrible terrible fumbling of the firing effort was a feeling that sam had kind of stacked the board with as one former member put it uh jv people, you know, certainly if we're being more charitable than that, people who were unprepared for the ruthless corporate warfare that ensued.

52:39And, you know, I think one thing that has accompanied the emergence of this as a more openly discussed critique is that there's more people around this company, more stakeholders wanting, you know, professionalizing influences in the mix. I have to ask about one detail that I loved of the piece, which is that the first time that Sam Altman and Dario Amadei were scheduled to meet. They were going to meet at an Indian restaurant for dinner. This was back in, I guess, 2015. And Sam texted him and said that his Uber had gotten in a crash and he was going to be 10 minutes late to dinner. Now, you did not editorialize on that piece, but knowing you both, I'm sure that you went back through the Uber FOIA requests and found the logs of Sam Altman Uber ride that night.

53:31Is it your belief that Sam Altman's Uber actually got in a crash? I think we're just going to leave that as non-editorialized and let it stand right there by itself. I mean, we also, I will say, had this conversation and really liked just presenting that uninflected for consideration. Okay, if you are the Uber driver who was driving Sam Altman to dinner with Dario Amadei and you are listening to this show, we do want to hear from you. We do want to hear your side. Hard Fork at NYTimes.com. We will get to the bottom of this. We will. Well, it's a great piece. People should go read it. Please do not investigate any other AI companies before my book comes out.

54:21It was a very stressful week for me. Yeah, why don't you guys take a nice long spring-summer break before you get back? Yeah, look into some politicians or Hollywood executives or something. We'll send you some names. Luckily, it takes us as long to write a piece as it takes you to write a book. So I think... Exactly. You'll beat us if we do anything else. There's two of you. It should be faster. Totally. Ronan, Andrew, thanks so much for coming. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys. Your hats are in the mail.

54:50When we come back, what our Spanish language friends would call una cosa buena. Did you just Google that? No. You clotted it? Yes. Okay. Okay.

55:30This podcast is supported by Atlassian Rovo, AI that takes your team from AI novice to AI native. What if AI handled the busy work for you? Updating JIRA tickets, drafting campaign briefs in Confluence, writing project updates, all without you lifting a finger. Meet Rovo, AI that works where your team already works, using your company's data and permissions to take action. Get started with Rovo at rovo.com. I'm Winnalou. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games. And I love horror movies. I love my dog. And I love trying to trick you. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds.

56:14A fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. them. New York Times games are made by people like the ones you just heard from. Go to NYTimes.com slash games to start playing today. Well, Casey, it's been a pretty heavy show today. So we thought we wanted to end on a positive note with our segment called One Good Thing. One Good Thing, of course, our segment where we each talk about one thing that's been tickling our fancy lately. Kevin, why don't you go first this time? Okay, Casey, I am in love with this space mission. Yes. The NASA Artemis 2 mission. I have been totally and earnestly obsessed.

57:04My wife was like, you're sure talking about this space mission a lot. I have been glued to this thing. And I have been filled with a childlike glee and wonder that I did not know I still had the capacity to feel. Now, what exactly are they doing on this mission? Orbiting the moon. They are going further than any humans have gone from Earth before. 252 ,756 miles from Earth. And if you're wondering how many miles is that? Well, the New York Times had a helpful comparison list. And what did they find? You would need a chain of 2.37 billion of Nathan's famous hot dogs to cover the distance that this spacecraft has gone from Earth.

57:50That's great. Something we can all easily visualize. Thank you for that comparison. Casey, I am learning things that I never expected to learn. I've been watching this with my kid. I have become completely obsessed with concepts and terms that I did not know a week ago, including corona structure, the Terminator line, which I know you're wondering, that sounds scary. Yeah. It's actually the line that separates the sunlit side of the moon from the side that is dark. Oh. I also learned that we don't call it the dark side of the moon. That's not the preferred astronomical term. What do we call it?

58:26The far side of the moon. The far side of the moon. I am obsessed with all of these astronauts. There are four of them up there. Victor, Christina, Jeremy, Reed. This is my Mount Rushmore. I love these people who I've never met. They are adorable. They are incredibly brave. And I think we should go to the moon every single year. I think we should give NASA whatever budget it needs to do because this has reignited my faith in humanity. Absolutely. You know, I also saw somebody on social media was posting that because the mission specialist, Christina Koch, had communicated with Houston's Jenny Gibbons during the mission, this mission actually passed the Bechdel test, which you don't often see on these missions.

59:10So I thought that was cool. Somebody pointed out, they said, the coolest thing about going on one of these missions, Kevin, would be leaving Florida at 5 ,000 miles an hour. So that resonated with me as well. Okay, you're more interested in the jokes. I am filled with childlike wonder over here, and I just think this is the coolest thing imaginable. It is very cool. Well, you know, recently I had an opportunity to go stargazing. I'm not sure if you've been stargazing recently. I was up on Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. Oh, flex. And we had a really cool telescope there with our guide. And I got to stare at the face of the moon.

59:47And it inspired a childlike sense of wonder in me as well. But it did not make me want to go there because it looked quite bleak, actually. You wouldn't go to the moon? No, there's no Wi-Fi.

59:59okay casey what is your one good thing this week today kevin i want to talk about the only thing that can compete with the moon when it comes to inspiring childlike wonder in a person and that is a weather app okay i'm listening so recently i was reading about these entrepreneurs adam grossman josh reyes and dan bruten and they are the team behind acme weather which you probably have not heard of yet, but I bet you've heard of Dark Sky. Yes. Dark Sky was, by consensus, the best weather app on iOS. And while it rained during the 2010s, and I'm using rained in the sort of... The non-meteorological sense.

1:00:38The non-meteorological sense. It would tell you whenever it rained. And now I am using it in the meteorological sense. Very good app. All right, Pete. Yeah, this app was bought by Apple in 2020, which was like kind of a head scratcher. Apple already had a weather app. It was fine. And then Apple sort of integrated some of its forecasts and some of its other features into its weather app and then shut Dark Sky down in 2022. And this made people really sad because I think a lot of us feel, myself included, like the Apple weather app has never lived up to what Dark Sky was in its heyday. It's like a prediction mark.

1:01:08It's like, you know, maybe it's going to rain. Exactly. Well, so these guys get back together and they say, Frick it, we're doing weather apps again, and they make Acme Weather. And so you can download this now for iOS. It is apparently coming later to Android. And I know what you're thinking, Kevin, which is what could you possibly build in 2026 in a weather app that could differentiate it from all the other weather apps that are already on the market, right? Yes. Are you wondering this? I am wondering this. Well, let me tell you a few things. Number one, they don't just tell you the weather, They show you a range of possibilities and a line chart.

1:01:44So most of the time, it'll be like, yeah, it's going to be 63 degrees in San Francisco today. But every once in a while, there's a lot of volatility in all the different signals that they use to predict the weather. And then you say, OK, I don't actually know what I'm walking into today. I better bring a couple of layers. This is the weather app for rationalists and other believers in Bayesian statistics. Exactly. Some of the other things that this app does, they will send you a push notification if they think there's going to be lightning in your neighborhood. OK. They will also do that when they think a sunset is going to be beautiful wherever you happen to be.

1:02:16They'll send you an umbrella reminder if it's going to precipitate in the next 12 hours, and they'll send you a sunscreen alert when the UV index is high. But I'm saving my last two favorites for the end. Number one, they will send you an alert when the aurora borealis may be visible where you are. That's beautiful. I haven't gotten that notification yet, but I wake up every day hoping I'm going to get my aurora borealis notification. You've got to go to Scandinavia, I think. number two, and this is just in time for Pride, they will tell you when there is a rainbow in your neighborhood. Are you kidding me?

1:02:48This is such a good idea for a weather app. Who does not want to be sitting at your wage slave job, you haven't been outside in like seven and a half hours, and then Acme Weather tells you, hey, guess what? There's a rainbow in your neighborhood. You're going to book it outdoors, and you are going to behold the majesty of creation, Kevin. How are they possibly collecting that data? Well, interestingly, they're taking this Waze-like approach where they're inviting their community to submit reports. And so if a bunch of people say, hey, rainbow in my neighborhood, they're going to go out and send out a notification.

1:03:19So now look, this app does cost$25 a year. And I know, you know, probably most people out there are perfectly content with the free weather app on their phone. That is fine for you. But as somebody who loves cool things, new ideas, people having fun, I just wanted to shout out Acme Weather because I think it's a really cool thing. Now, what is the likelihood that this app will be purchased by Apple and then shut down. I mean, if that happens, I hope these guys get paid again because somebody has to move the weather app industry forward, and these are the folks who are doing it. I love that. Like, Grandpa, how did you make your fortune?

1:03:52Well, I built 17 weather apps that were identical and then sold them all to Apple. I just also think it's inspiring that at a time when some companies are like, we're going to make a system that is going to force the world to rewrite all software, there are other guys who are like, what if there's a rainbow in my neighborhood. I want to find out about that. And those are the people that I want to highlight on today's show, Kevin. Okay, well, download Acme Weather Before the Heat Death of the Universe Renders Weather Irrelevant. And tell us whether you liked it. That was a good thing. Thank you.

1:04:22Thank you for alerting me to this wonderful rainbow detector. Well, thank you for alerting me to the existence of the moon. I know you weren't a big believer in the moon before, but hopefully I've convinced you today. Well, somebody told me something about a soundstage and, you know, maybe the landing was faked, So I've just been curious. I think, you know, we're the only podcasters who actually believe in the moon. Yeah, that's our competitive advantage. Hard fork, where we believe that people have been to the moon.

1:05:15This podcast is supported by Atlassian Rovo, AI that takes your team from AI novice to AI native. What if AI handled the busy work for you? Updating JIRA tickets, drafting campaign briefs in Confluence, writing project updates, all without you lifting a finger. Meet Rovo, AI that works where your team already works, using your company's data and permissions to take action. Get started with Rovo at rovo.com. Before we go, we are saying goodbye this week to our wonderful executive producer, Jen Poyant. Jen has been with the show for years, since almost the very beginning, and she's been a critical force in helping us make the show and conceive the show.

1:06:04So Jen is leaving the New York Times for a new adventure, but we wanted to just give her a special shout out and say thank you from the entire Hard Fork team for all of the amazing work you've done. It's true. Jen has been a friend and mentor to us both, and we will miss her terribly, but she will always be part of the Hard Fork family, which means she has to bring a dish to the potluck. Thanks, Jen. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Vieran Pavich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant.

1:06:41Original music by Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, and Dahlia Haddad. As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Send us your zero-day critical security vulnerabilities. Actually, please don't.