Goodbye TikTok, Ni Hao RedNote? + A.I.'s Environmental Impact + Meta's Masculine Energy

26:10You know, Facebook is for boomers and Gen X. Instagram is for millennials. And until now, Gen Z has been the TikTok generation. And if Meta can sort of, you know, suck up those users, it can sort of extend its dominance for another generation. But I think that the past week has made me less sure that that's going to be the outcome here. Because what we have seen on TikTok as this ban is approached is not people saying, oh, everyone move over to Instagram Reels. It's saying, let's move over to this obscure Chinese language app that no one's ever heard of. That's how badly we don't want to be on Instagram.

26:44I think part of the Gen Z identity is about not just embracing TikTok as a platform, but rejecting the platforms that people older than you use. And so I think it's equally plausible that those younger users do not go to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, that they instead go to some new app that may have most of the features of TikTok, but is different in some way. Maybe we're finally going to get a new American social media app. You know, I would love to believe everything that you're saying, and I think that it absolutely could come to pass. But I also think it's true that most members of Gen Z who have TikTok on their phone probably have Instagram as well.

27:25And it's just going to be really hard for them to avoid taking a look at that as they look elsewhere to get their fix. But at the same time, we're also seeing sort of separately from all of this, a boom in the Fediverse and people building on protocols. And that is rooted in the exact same frustration with these apps that are controlled by billionaires and giant faceless corporations. So I agree with you. There is a lot of frustration among all sorts of Americans on that point. And so who knows, maybe we do get an American-owned alternative to TikTok that is not YouTube or Meta.

28:01When we come back, we answer one of the most common questions we get from listeners. What is the environmental impact of AI?

28:17Well, Casey, for basically the entire time we have been making this podcast, we have gotten emails from listeners who want us to talk about the environmental impact of AI. Yeah, this might be the question that we've gotten the most that we have not yet devoted a segment to. Yeah, and I would say my own reluctance to talk about this topic on the show so far has been some insecurity on my part about, like, not being an expert in climate science or the relevant information here. But also just, like, it is very hard to get good and authoritative data about this subject in particular. It is just not something that there is a large body of reliable literature about.

28:56And the companies that have the best data, by and large, are not disclosing any of that data. And so that means that a lot of what we talk about when we talk about the environmental impact of AI is based on estimates that may or may not be close to the mark. Yeah, but I'm sure you have observed, as I have, that the issues around the environment and AI have only gotten more important to people. This really came to a head last week when the wildfires started burning in Los Angeles. I saw so many people posting on social media about what they viewed as a link between AI use and the wildfires. And I'll just read you one meme I saw in my feed that was liked and shared millions of times.

29:38This was posted by a guy named Matt Bernstein, and I'll just read it to you. It said, one search on chat GPT uses 10 times the amount of energy as a Google search. Training one AI model produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 300 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco and five times the lifetime emissions of a car. We don't need AI art. We don't need AI grocery lists. We don't need AI self-driving cars. We don't need ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or Dali or whatever revolutionary technology already exists inside our own human brains. We need the Earth. And then below this meme was a picture of a blazing fire.

30:18So clearly this idea has taken root in culture, that there is some kind of link between the disasters that we are seeing in places like Los Angeles and the use of AI for basic everyday tasks. Yeah. And I think today we want to see what we can find out about how true some of the ideas in that post are. Yeah. So to shed some light on this very hot topic of AI and energy use, I realized that I just used light and heat. That was not intentional. But we're going to hope we shed more light than heat in this discussion, Kevin. Yes. Today we are talking with Dr. Sasha Luccioni. She is an AI researcher and the climate lead at Hugging Face, which is an AI company that offers tools to developers for building AI models.

31:05She has been researching and talking about AI's environmental impact for many years and also developing tools to help developers understand the impacts of their own systems on the environment. Yes, and Kevin, this might be a good time to dust off my shiny new disclosure, because when we talk about AI issues, I will sometimes remind people that my boyfriend is a software engineer at an AI company called Anthropic. My full ethics disclosure is that platformer.news.ethics. And my fast disclosure is that I work at the New York Times company, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over issues of copyright violations.

31:35Perfect. All right. Let's bring in Sasha Luciani.

31:44Sasha Luciani, welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me. So I'm very excited to have this conversation. This is one we've been looking forward to for a while and are frankly overdue in having. And I want to start by reading you an email that we recently got from a listener. This comes from a listener named T. Morris, and it says the following. As a tech content marketer, I feel increasingly conflicted about using AI. On the one hand, it's been an amazing writing partner for big tasks like brainstorming and editing tech articles and smaller copywriting tasks like drafting social media posts. On the other hand, I see climate disasters like the North Carolina floods and LA fires linked with the amount of water and natural resources it takes to sustain AI infrastructure and feel myself rationing my AI use, questioning whether the time saved is worth the environmental tradeoffs.

32:37How do I navigate this new world where AI is everywhere while staying true to my environmental values? So, Sasha, we'll dive into some of the specifics in just a minute, but I want to just start with this question from our listener. What advice would you give T. Morris? I'm generally very skeptical of individual culpability when it comes to the climate crisis. Yes, of course, we all contribute, but I think that we're all also part of systems and we have professions that require usage of technologies. You know, some people drive for a living and, you know, we can't spend our time feeling bad. I'm much more of a fan of, well, requiring accountability from companies and requiring transparency because I think that especially around climate change.

33:23But also a lot of aspects of society, we just don't have the numbers to make informed decisions. And that doesn't mean you need to care, but you should have the information necessary for caring. So I'm more about like ask for accountability, ask for transparency when using these technologies instead of like kind of psyching yourself out about them. Got it. So I thought one way to sort of frame this discussion would be to split it into essentially two parts, the micro and the macro. Micro being this question of like, what do we know about the environmental impact of AI at the level of the individual user, the individual question that you might ask to chat GPT or Gemini or Claude and getting a response to that.

34:05And then macro being this larger question of like, what is the AI sector's energy footprint more broadly? What do we know about where all the energy is coming from to run these very powerful models? And what can we do as sort of a society and as big corporations to position ourselves better for the future? And with your permission, Sasha, I want to start with the microbe. So one of the statistics that people will often throw out when talking about the energy demands of AI is this figure that a chat GPT query or something like it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 times more energy than a traditional web query on something like Google.

34:44Now, I asked Google about this figure, and they wouldn't say exactly how much energy it takes to query Gemini versus to run a traditional web search. But they did say that those numbers are much larger than what they've seen internally. But Sasha, where did that figure come from? And what do we know about how accurate it is? I think the initial Google search query is actually pretty old. And it was part of a study to like greening the web kind of type situation. And they made an estimate. And once again, they didn't really have the numbers, but they tried to extrapolate. And then for CHGPT, it was a similar kind of assuming that somebody is querying a model that is running on this type of hardware and assuming that the latency is X and blah, blah, blah, and they kind of extrapolated that.

35:25There are other models that do similar things. So maybe even if you don't know exactly ChaiGPT, inherently you have other models that will do similar tasks. And so you can get a range. And I think that that range is more interesting than trying to chase down the exact number and compare the two. And also it's probably not a single number anyway. And so that's why it's so hard to pin down this number. And that's why it's going to be always possible for them to say, oh, no, that's not the number. That's not the exact number. Right. And I think that your point earlier that one of the things that we need on this subject is just a lot more transparency is really well taken.

35:59I know that Google has folks who work on climate issues, but I'm curious as you look across the industry, maybe at some of the newer, smaller AI labs or just, I don't know, companies other than Google. Do you get the sense that people are paying attention to this, that they are taking these sort of measurements, that they even have a sense of like the per query energy usage of one of their products? Definitely, because unlike Google or Microsoft or any big tech companies, usually smaller companies are a lot more compute restrained. So they're doing more with less because they have to. They don't always come at it from a sustainability perspective.

36:36They're not like, oh, yeah, we want to protect the planet. it. But there is a part of that. It's like frugality. It's like we want to be more efficient because we only have 100 GPUs to work with. Right. I mean, and this seems like maybe sort of one positive thing that I'm hearing so far is that it sounds like the incentives for all of these companies are to get the amount of compute and energy that they are using over time down as quickly as they can. Another claim that you often hear from people who are worried about the environmental impacts of using AI on a micro or personal level is about water use.

37:10There's this statistic, I'm sure you've seen it around, that using an LLM is like pouring out a bottle of water or half a liter of water I've seen going around. Where did that figure come from and why do these AI models need water and is that statistic true? So that paper is kind of, once again, an extrapolation. It takes some of the work that I did about an open source model where we measured how many kilowatt hours of energy were being used to query it. And essentially what happens in data centers is that they have an amount, like a liter of water per kilowatt hour of energy. I mean, it's like a water efficiency, they call it water use efficiency.

37:48And essentially, depending on where your data set is. Sorry, why do they need water in the data centers? Mostly for the cooling. This hardware heats up. I don't know if you've ever visited a data center. If you can, I highly recommend it. It is like an overwhelming experience. The noise, the heat, And just like the general like buzz of electricity is pretty overwhelming. Anyway, so you need a lot of a lot of cooling. And essentially how that's usually done is with water cooling, like you pump in cool water and there's a bunch of pipes and it goes through all of the hardware. And then it either a part of it evaporates completely and a part of it has to be cooled down before either reused or put back into into nature or whatnot.

38:25And so that whole process is hugely water consumptive. And of course, it's not like not all the water evaporates, but a fair amount of it does just because the hardware heats up so much. But once again, it's so I go back and forth on this a lot, like whether putting out statistics like this on that are based on estimates or not is, I guess, useful for the conversation. Because on one hand, it's really easy for the companies to say, no, you guys are you guys are tripping. That's not at all the the true number, which, you know, then it kind of cuts the conversation. And on the other hand, they do become like urban legend.

38:55And so now I hear this 500 milliliter per conversation number a lot. And it's like, well, actually, it'll depend on so many different things. So it's definitely not systematically 500 milliliters, but it is a non-negligible amount of water. And depending on where the data center is located, that can become an issue. So we've seen places where the data centers have put a strain on, like, the towns around them that have water shortages because the water is being pumped into a new data center that has been, you know, powered up. So when you, and I, you know, you said earlier, understandably, that you're not a huge fan of thinking about these issues at the individual level.

39:33I'm still curious when you are considering your own personal use of AI, where water usage fits into things. Like, is that for you a reason to send fewer queries to ChatGPT or an equivalent? I'm in general such a, like, I don't use AI that often, I mean, generative AI that often. The one use case that I found was really kind of something that actually is useful in my life is when I write an article or a research paper, like, putting in the abstract and getting a fun title. Like, I'm so bad at generating fun titles, but chat to tpt is really good. And, you know, it can come up with like puns and stuff like that.

40:07But what really kills me is like people who switch to generative AI for things that don't really need it. Like my pet peeve example is calculators. People use ChatGPT as a calculator now. And that's really like, it's really terrible. Like you really don't need it. Not only is it bad at arithmetic, like it's literally not made to do math, but it's also like orders of magnitude, more energy and a crazy amount of water for something that doesn't need water. Well, I have to say, I'm going to admit something, which is I've talked before on the show about how I use this app called Raycast, which is plugged into OpenAI's model.

40:43And I can just summon it on my keyboard with command space. And I do probably ask it four or five questions a day. And I am definitely using it for things I can Google. Like, you know, one of my toxic traits is I'm curious how old people are. And so sometimes I'll just be like, how old is Billy Crystal or whatever. And do you check the answers and they're all accurate? It's not that I check the answers. It's that I don't really care that much. So when the LLM says, you know, that Billy Crystal is, you know, I don't know, 70 or whatever he is, I'm like, yeah, that's the right ballpark, you know, and then I move on.

41:13I'm realizing that I sound very silly as I'm saying this, but I'm saying it because I suspect other people may be doing the same thing. And I think there is a case that, you know what, maybe I should actually, like, Google that in part for environmental reasons. I want to just sort of embody the other side of this, because what I'm hearing from you is like generative AI is not useful enough in many cases to justify the energy costs of engaging with an LLM. And I'm a person who uses AI every day. I generally find it quite useful in my life. I use it to accomplish a lot of tasks that I could not use equivalent tools for.

41:51I don't just run like how old is Billy Crystal searches over and over again. To be clear, I only ran it once. And I would say that my own usage of this is to do new things that I couldn't do before, mostly. And I think if people don't find generative AI useful, they shouldn't use it. But if people do find it useful but are worried about the environmental costs, I'm just not entirely convinced that we're thinking about the costs of AI in the sense of energy at the right scale. I recently was reading a Substack post by a guy named Andy Masley, where he basically broke down the best data and estimates we have about the environmental costs of using AI.

42:33And he compared it to some other activities like sending emails or streaming a video on Netflix or driving a car a very short distance. And basically what he found is that compared to all these other activities, the energy required to generate an answer on chat GPT or a similar system is just infinitesimally small. That if we are worried about our own personal environmental footprint, we could do much more to help the environment by cutting out meat from our diets or by taking fewer trips in cars or on airplanes. And basically, the argument that he made that I am tempted by is that all of this sort of talk about personal responsibility is just neglecting to look at AI use in the context of all the other things that we do in our lives that require energy.

43:21And I'm wondering, Sasha, what you make of that argument. I mean, it kind of builds upon what I said at the beginning. But like, in general, when you talk to people around the issue of climate change and mitigation, it's like we're bound by the structures in which we operate and live and, you know, the constraints that we have. So, of course, I'm not going to be like, oh, yeah, don't take that plane to take a well-deserved vacation and, you know, spend your time worrying about climate change because that's not a productive state of mind. But on the other hand, we can make decisions with the environment in our minds.

43:54So, for example, like nowadays, a lot of people have chat GPT open as the de facto source of information on the Internet. And I do think that, yes, of course, little by little, that the individual like energy consumption of each query is not that much. But if we start using it as literally like a rubber duck and our bouncing board and our companion and then people also will use chat GPT to build tools. Right. Nowadays, people are building like therapists and and whatnot, companions using. And then like that incrementally becomes a deal. Personally, I try to focus on like a like a specific task you want to do, for example, searching the Internet or answering a question and then comparing like what you would use, like option A and option B.

44:33And then what's the difference? And then it's up to you to decide whether that difference is worth it based on the advantage that the technology gives you. But I don't think it makes sense to compare like meat and email or Netflix and taking your car because I feel like they're like incomparable actions. Right. Like people aren't choosing between like, well, should I drive to work today or should I ask Chachi? Yeah, exactly. So I feel that like I understand where he's coming from in his argumentative, but I don't feel that that helps us make choices any better. It kind of makes us feel bad all around.

45:05So, Sasha, can I try to sort of summarize what I'm hearing from you on the point of individual use, the sort of micro question about the environmental impact of AI? What I'm hearing you say, I believe, is that the individual costs of using LLMs may not move the needle on climate one way or the other, but that people should be conscious of what they are using AI for and maybe use the smallest model that will allow them to get the task done that they are looking to do. and that maybe we shouldn't be tearing our hair out over people using ChatGPT if they're using it to do stuff that is genuinely useful to them.

45:47Is that an accurate reflection of your sentiment? It's a great reflection. And I think that often we forget our power as consumers and users of technology. And I think that putting pressure on companies and being like, hey, we care. We want this number. Stop like bullshitting us. Like you have the number somewhere of the average energy. You know, even if it's not a single number, if it's a range, give us the range. and then we'll make our informed decisions because people aren't more and more aware of relative comparisons, like a mile driven in a car or a stake or whatever. We need to add, even if it's a range AI, to those options that people have so that they can actually make informed decisions.

46:24We should stop just feeding them shit and keeping them in the dark. Right. Okay. So that is the sort of micro picture of the AI energy story. Now let's talk about the macro. There was recently a report just last month from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory about the power that is currently needed to run the data centers in this country and the power that will soon be needed as the AI boom sparks demand for more and more of these data centers. This report said that between 2018 and 2023, the power to run data centers around the U.S. went from 1.9 % of total annual electricity consumption to 4.4%, more than double.

47:09And this report estimated that the energy demands of data centers, of which AI is a major part, will continue to increase over the next few years and could, by 2028, make up between 6.7 % and 12 % of total U.S. electricity consumption. So, Sasha, just let's zoom out a little bit and talk about the energy needs of the AI industry as a whole. Where are we? Do these companies know where they are going to get all this energy to build these incredibly powerful AI models? Yes and no. I mean, we currently have a certain infrastructure, but the problem is the growth of the infrastructure is kicking into high gear.

47:46And so what's interesting is that the big tech companies are the largest purchasers of renewable energy credits, which are kind of like offsets for energy. And also they make a lot of power purchase agreements, which are essentially ways of kind of promising to buy energy, especially renewable energy, into the future. So they've been kind of, I'll give them that, that they've been actually on top of things. But then this year, I mean, this past year, both Google and Microsoft actually put out reports saying that they're not meeting their own sustainability targets. Like they dropped the ball on their own like energy and carbon goals because of AI, because they were not ready themselves for the amount of energy that they would need and where that energy is coming from.

48:27Like the renewable energy offsetting things weren't recovering. And so I think that the latest and greatest in the trends in terms of energy generation has been nuclear. All the big tech companies have signed nuclear agreements, like power purchase agreements, in the last couple of months. And the general messaging is that that's going to solve the issue in terms of energy demand growth. And when Microsoft and Google said, like, hey, we're not going to make our targets, was it nuclear that they were pointing to? Did they say, don't worry, we're going to fix this, we have a new strategy? Or did they say, we might just never hit these targets because our values have changed?

49:08So they were kind of like, well, these were very ambitious targets that we set back in 2018 or 2019. And, you know, like, oh, technology moves at such a fast pace. But no, nuclear actually entered the chat relatively recently. I think that the reports came out around May of last year, of 2024. And then like a couple of months later, it was Microsoft announced that they are recommissioning Three Mile Island. Google signed a partnership with I don't remember what nuclear like generator. And they're also Kairos. Yeah, exactly. And so they're saying that, well, this is the new direction we're going.

49:41Because the thing is, I mean, sadly, like building out renewable energy infrastructure does take time. And also the problem with data centers and renewable energy is that data centers need energy 24-7 and the cycles aren't necessarily like predictable as like heating and cooling, for example. You know, when the temperature drops, people will turn on their heating systems. Like you have these models that have worked pretty well historically, but for data centers, they don't work. And renewable energy tends to vary. You know, if there's wind, if there's sun. And so there are a lot of challenges.

50:14You can't just like yeet a bunch of solar panels and expect them to respond to the demand of your data centers. It's much more complicated. And so that's why nuclear has emerged as a potential solution. So my understanding, Sasha, is that a lot of the big AI companies are now just sort of racing to get as much energy capacity as they can. And that one of the worries is that they are sort of tapping out the infrastructure for clean or renewable energy. And so they are starting to go into these dirtier forms of energy that we know have these harmful environmental costs because there just isn't enough renewable energy and adding more takes time, as you said.

50:52Yeah. And also the thing is with data centers is that like there are very concentrated, very intense energy sinks. So making that connection, like I was talking to some energy grid operators in Paris and they were saying like even if we did have the capacity, like the actual megawatt hours, distributing it in a way that all of that extra capacity goes towards the data center in whatever like rural area they build it in is a challenge in itself. Hmm. One argument, I was talking with someone the other day who works at an AI company, and one of the arguments that they made for why we shouldn't worry so much about the energy costs associated with AI is that basically our electrical grid in America has been in desperate need of modernization.

51:39that we have this sort of creaky old electrical grid that has not been growing nearly as quickly as it needs to. And that basically because AI now exists and demands all of this energy, we are starting to do things that we probably should have done a long time ago as far as investing in new sources of energy, in these mini nuclear reactors, in trying to scale up things like solar and wind power. And so, yes, these models are demanding a lot of energy, but they are sort of forcing us to modernize our infrastructure and our energy grid in ways that will benefit us as a country down the line. What do you make of that argument?

52:18Well, so what's interesting about the United States particularly is that it's not a single energy grid. There's a lot of energy providers in the States. There's a really nifty website called Electricity Map, and they map out electricity. And what's interesting, when you zoom in on the U.S., it's like a patchwork. there's some states that have like 12 different grids and then there's some actually like multiple states have a single grid. What's interesting is that, I mean, for example, Canada is one per province. In Europe, it might be one per country, like France has a single one. And so it's, yeah, they're probably right to an extent, but modernizing the U.S.

52:52energy-like system network of grids is actually really difficult because it's so heterogeneous. And because, you know, even if you update one part of the grid, that doesn't mean like, for example, smaller energy grids don't have that much capacity and the bigger ones will take time to update. So I think it's like, yes, in theory, it would be good to overhaul the U.S. energy grid. But in practice, it's a lot of small problems that are harder to solve. One other thing I've heard from people who work in the AI industry or are not as worried about the environmental impact of AI is that, yes, this stuff costs energy.

53:28Yes, we need to find new sources of energy. But ultimately, AI is going to be more of help in addressing the climate crisis, then it will hurt. What do you make of that argument? Is that just self-serving? I don't think it's self-serving, but I think it's kind of a false dichotomy because the AI systems that are the most energy intensive, like large language models, are the ones that have yet to prove their utility in fighting climate change. I think that the issue here is that we're using these big models for tasks that are not helping the fight against climate change. And compared to that, the models that are helping climate change aren't the ones that are the issue.

54:06And so it's like the problem with AI being an umbrella term kind of makes it very, very hard to have this discussion. But it's like essentially large language models are not solving the climate crisis anytime soon. And the models that are helping are not the ones that are contributing like most of the energy and carbon issues that we're seeing. All right. One more argument that I want to have you address, which is about the efficiency of AI over time. We've heard from companies that they are making their models much more efficient because they are creating these algorithmic breakthroughs, doing things like model distillation.

54:42The chips themselves are also becoming much more energy efficient. And so there's this argument that you'll hear from folks in the industry that actually we're running on outdated information when we say that AI is a risk to the climate because the energy needs are scaling down over time per use and that actually we're just worried because our information isn't up to date. So do you think about efficiency in those terms or how should we think about that? So efficiency is interesting because I think that like a lot of what people talk about when they talk about like technological progress is some form of efficiency.

55:21It's like, oh, we're using less time. We're using less, I don't know, fuel. We're using less energy, for example. And I think in the AI we are seeing this. But what's interesting, I've been I've been really going down the rabbit hole in terms of like macroeconomic literature on this. Like there's this really interesting paradox. It's called Jevons paradox. what Jevons observed in like the 19th century was that we're actually still using more and more coal despite using it more efficiently. And so they've like this kind of phenomenon has been observed a lot with different kinds of efficiency gains, whether it be time, whether it be, you know, for example, cars, like now that we can drive farther on the same amount of fuel, we'll actually go to more places.

55:59And so I think what we're seeing a lot is in AI is this kind of rebound effect that, yeah, we can do more AI for the same amount of computer money, but that means we're going to put AI into even more things. And so those efficiency gains are kind of lost because now we're using LLMs for things that we didn't use LLMs for before. Casey, do you want to try repeating back what we've heard about the macro picture when it comes to AI and energy? Well, the macro picture of AI and energy is that the construction of data centers does actually put a strain on the grid. We're seeing many more of them. And that even as individual usage of AI gets more efficient, it seems likely that we'll just use a lot more of it.

56:49And so this is one that it seems like we do have to watch and take the environmental claim seriously. That's what I feel like I heard. Does that sound right? Yes, it does. I think you summed it up really well. Got it. And I think what we can agree on, whether or not we think that the individual or the macro use of AI across the economy is dangerous for the environment, is that I think AI companies should be required to disclose a lot more data about the energy use of their models. It just seems like the data we have, a lot of it is based on estimates from the outside. A lot of it is outdated. A lot of it has sort of gone through this game of telephone where all of a sudden, every time people use ChatGPT, they think they're like burning down a forest.

57:34And it seems like this could all be solved by just having much better and more transparent data from the AI companies themselves about how much energy they're using. Agreed, and giving users more agency when it comes to generative AI. and even having a toggle when it comes to whatever AI-generated summaries in Google, just giving people a little bit more control over how they use. We don't want to stop using Google. Most people don't. So let us use Google in a way that is coherent with our values or the things that we want to optimize for. Well, Sasha, thank you so much for enlightening us on this subject.

58:09It is one I imagine we will return to because I don't think this debate is going away anytime soon. but I really appreciate your expertise and your time. Thank you for the great questions.

58:21When we come back, put on your gold chains, insert your zins, and let's do some jujitsu. We're talking about masculinity in the tech industry.

58:44This is your favorite.

58:54Well, Kevin, did you see the Mark Zuckerberg interview with Joe Rogan? I did, and I assume that that's why we're sitting here in our oversized baggy T-shirts and our gold chains. That's right, yes. Thank you for agreeing to this costume change. listeners should know that we are wearing very boxy black t-shirts right now and gold chains to try to get us into the mindset of what I'm hoping we can do today. Yeah. Should we pop a Zin too? If you have one on you, go for it. I've got four. I've got upper deckies here, but if you want one, I'm happy to provide. Upper deckies? You ever heard of upper deckies?

59:26No. Dog. What's an upper deckie? Let me teach you something about straight culture. Please do. You know, you're always enlightening me about gay culture. Yeah, upper deckies are when you put a Zin nicotine pouch in your upper lip. That is perfect, Kevin. That is exactly the right spirit that I want to take into this segment. So you watched the Mark Zuckerberg interview on Joe Rogan. I did. And what did you think? I thought it was very long. That was my main thing, was this meeting could have been an email. Well, I think that's a fair point, Kevin. But to me, I was so pleased to hear it because finally, someone in Silicon Valley was willing to say what we've all been thinking for years now, which is that this town does not have enough masculine energy.

1:00:08You know what I mean? Kevin, sometimes I will visit a company in Silicon Valley and see as many as one female executive. And finally, people like Mark Zuckerberg are starting to ask, when did things get this out of control? And I know you've thought the same thing. You've said that to me off mic. I don't think I have, but go on. Now, some people get confused because the most recent time that Meta shared numbers, it had about two men at the company for every one woman. But this just highlights how powerful feminine energy is, Kevin. What Zuckerberg is saying is that to counteract the presence of even one woman at Meta, at least three men are needed to restore balance.

1:00:50Now, just to give listeners a bit more of a sense of what we're talking about, I think we should play Mark Zuckerberg talking about masculine energy on the Joe Rogan experience. Let's do it. I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the kind of the spectrum where, you know, it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to like get rid of it completely. It's like, no, like it's both of these things are good, right? It's like, you want like feminine energy, you want masculine energy. Like I think that that's like you're going to have parts of society that have more of one or the other.

1:01:22I think that that's all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more much more masculine culture. there is something about being punched in the face that makes you think my culture has been neutered you know what i mean so uh yes i did hear this part of the interview this went a viral uh everyone on my feeds has been talking about this uh this these comments that mark zuckerberg made about masculine energy being missing from many of our greatest corporations and um this is sort of in the context of all the moves that he's been making to try to make meta more palatable to people on the right, including the incoming Trump administration.

1:02:19And this was sort of him saying to Joe Rogan in a way that people mercilessly mocked, the real problem in corporate America is that we've been letting this feminine energy take over and we need to kind of assert masculine energy and that's our path back to greatness. Exactly, Kevin. And so as we so often try to do on this show, I've spent all week thinking, how can we be part of the solution here? And so I have come up with a list of ideas that we can bring to the Meta Corporation to help them restore masculine energy to Meta. Oh, boy. We're going to give Meta a masculine makeover, and I would love to share some of the ideas that I have with you right now.

1:02:55Please. Number one, modify the Facebook like button to display a bulging vein reflecting long hours spent in the gym. What do you think? I like it. Is that something else? whenever you tap at your phone grunts. Number two, let's just say the poke is going to work a little differently now, but I can't say how on this podcast. Number three, transform every conference room at Meta into an octagon. Kevin, remind workers at every meeting that work is a combat zone and Mark Zuckerberg can strike at any time. I like this. We're also changing the name of the finance department to MMA, Mixed Martial Accounting.

1:03:35number four meta acquires 4chan it's the largest repository of disturbed 17 year olds in the world kevin and they could be part of the solution too now the obvious thing to do would be to let them run the human resources department but i'm proposing that meta goes further and puts them in charge of content moderation that'd be some masculine energy i sure would number five a little more of these beta team building activities like making pottery and volunteering kevin Instead, we're going on a wild boar hunt. Yes. As Mark shared on the Joe Rogan experience, one of the greatest challenges in his life is that his ranch in Kauai is absolutely beset by an invasive species of wild boars.

1:04:13And for years now, Zuckerberg has been spending his downtime hunting them with bow and arrows. In fact, do we have a clip of that? Well, my favorite is bow, bow and arrow. I mean, that's, I think, like the most, that feels like the most kind of sporting version of it. Yeah, if you want to put it that way. Yeah. I mean, if you're just trying to get meat, it's not the most effective. The most effective is certainly a rifle. If you work at Meta, I think this should be your problem, too. Whether you want to use a bow and arrow or a rifle, report to the Zuckerberg Ranch for further instructions. Now, do we know what happens if you are a Meta employee and you actually bring a hunting bow into the office?

1:04:50That's actually one of the main ways to get promoted now. Number six! Replace the water at Meta's data centers with Mountain Dew Code Red. Oh, I like this one. Me too. Number seven, in the 2019 film Joker, Kevin, Joaquin Phoenix's character does a famous dance down a set of stairs to signify that he is fully transformed into the Joker. My proposal, we bring those steps to the Metta campus in Menlo Park. You have a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg? Guess what, Kevin? You have to walk up the Joker steps. I like that. Because Mark is the Joker now. Number eight, in what many people perceived as a cruel and pointless attack on trans people, Metta instructed managers to remove tampons from the male restrooms at their campuses.

1:05:26But this is a half measure, Kevin, because let's face it, real men don't use toilet paper. Get rid of it. Yeah. Are we doing bidets or are we just going raw dog? Bidets, are you kidding me? There will not be one French thing in those restaurants as long as I'm suggesting ideas. Okay. Number nine, employees will now get one extra day off a year to do one of the following three activities. Mow the lawn, watch the game, or hang with the boys. Which one of those would you pick, Kevin? Hang with the boys, for sure. Do you even have any boys? Come on. I've got you. That's true. We can hang together on our day off.

1:05:59Now, I have one last suggestion to bring up the masculine energy at Meta Kevin, and it goes like this. We're going to have a hackathon for women. Doesn't that sound nice? Yeah. Yeah. And at the end, we're going to take all the best ideas from their hackathon and give them to Meta's male executives. Because what kind of energy is more masculine than taking credit for a woman's idea? Anyway, just my thoughts, Kevin. Do you have any ideas as well? No, I think that basically covers it. I think with these changes, the Meta Corporation will be fully, what's the opposite of emasculated? It will be enmanulated.

1:06:34Enmanulated. And we will have a glorious future run by men. You know, there used to be a time at Meta when people like Sheryl Sandberg had a seat at the table and famously told women there to lean in. Yeah. What's happening with that now? I'm being given word that they're being asked to lean out, actually. Maybe all the way out. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that he was going to cut 5 % of what he called the low performers at the company. And that is sort of the ultimate lean out is a layoff. Yeah, I did see some meta employees posting that they were the way they were going to avoid getting laid off is by getting extremely jacked.

1:07:12So that's an idea there. I mean, that is now something that we can respect in culture, as we can say, if you have visible muscles, maybe you belong around. here. Casey, how do you, I have to ask, since we are in the Zuckerberg uniform now, minus the$900 ,000 watch, this is just my Apple watch. How do you feel? Do you feel more masculine sitting in the studio today? I am having an almost uncontrollable desire to just wrestle you to the ground and force you to submit. How are you feeling? I'm feeling, I'm feeling like I'm, I'm a little insecure, honestly. Really? Yeah. Why? Because I don't think I can pull this off.

1:07:52You can absolutely pull it off. Everyone looks good in a black t-shirt and a gold chain. Yeah? Including me. Yes. I'm not a big man jewelry guy. You know what? I haven't been either. But then for our anniversary, my boyfriend and I got little chains. Yeah? Isn't that so cute? That is cute. Yeah. And manly in kind of a different way. Yeah. In kind of like a gay manly way. This is what I love. You start up, you talk about something super manly but then you get into it in any degree of detail and you realize, no, it's masculine and feminine energy together in the same place. Isn't that beautiful?

1:08:22Now, Casey, the one serious thing that I do want to say about this is that it clicked for me when I heard Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan talking about masculinity and masculine energy, that this is what Founder Mode was. You can look back at our shows that we did about Founder Mode last year, and to my recollection, not one of the people in Silicon Valley calling for the return of Founder mode was a woman. And I believe that that is because founder mode was an elaborate way of saying, we're big boys and we would like to run our companies like big boys. Yeah. And I mean, look, I don't want to completely dismiss the idea that people should get in touch with masculine energy.

1:09:02That is a fine thing to do, I think, no matter who you are. I get really concerned when somebody who employs tens of thousands of people starts talking about this in the context of corporate culture and amid a series of initiatives that includes killing off the DEI program and firing your quote-unquote low performers. Like a clear message is being sent and the message is not women are welcome at Meta. One thing that also struck me as I was listening to Mark Zuckerberg is that it also reminded me of a conversation that Jeff Bezos had at the Dealbook Conference just a few weeks ago that I heard where I was actually surprised.

1:09:44You know, Jeff Bezos was sort of the original sort of tech founder who kind of got super masculine, right? He turned from this like scrawny nerd into this like jacked dude who lifts weights and, you know, has these sort of bulging muscles and, you know, sort of embraced a masculine aesthetic, I think earlier than a lot of other tech executives. But I was also struck by his comments at DealBook where he basically talked about his feelings a lot and how he had started becoming more emotionally open at work about feeling scared or feeling vulnerable. And it just really struck me that like, that is a person who is actually comfortable with masculinity when you can talk about emotions in the context of a business meeting and you could talk about them on stage at a business conference.

1:10:29This sort of like LARPing that Mark Zuckerberg is doing where he is pretending to be super masculine all of a sudden and like enjoy bow hunting and hanging out with the bros. Like it just feels very insecure to me and very like very much like this is a person who has not yet actually become at peace with his own self. Yeah, I think that there is something to that. I can't even make a joke about that because it's actually kind of terrifying to be 40 and sort of still be trying to work out, hmm, what are my values? And could I just replace them wholesale almost overnight with a different set. That's kind of a scary proposition for somebody who runs a set of platforms used by billions of people.

1:11:09Yes. And I hope that whatever Mark Zuckerberg is looking for, he finds it. And I hope that it does not come at the expense of a lot of boars who might needlessly die.

1:11:34Thank you.

1:12:04the link in our show notes. Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn We're edited this week by Rachel Dry We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love Today's show was engineered by Brad Fisher Original music by Rowan Nemisto and Dan Powell Our executive producer is Jen Poyant Our audience editor is Nel Galogli Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard fork Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Send us your ideas for how to make Hard Fork's masculine energy more palpable.

1:12:46What if we had a third male co-host? Oh, no.

1:13:02Thank you.