There Are No Girls on the Internet - Hallow App Update; Meta Glasses Aren’t Private; Brothel Workers Unionize; Incarcerated Women of True Crime; Gen-Z gender wars – NEWS ROUNDUP!

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

In this week's News Roundup, Bridget and Producer Mike cover the tech news stories you might have missed. Hallow app beef update. Meta sued over false privacy promises about it's glasses. Gee, what a shocker. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q33nvj0qpo Google sued for wrongful death after a vulnerable user died by suicide after talking with its chatbot Gemini. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/04/father-sues-google-claiming-gemini-chatbot-drove-son-into-fatal-delusion/ Brothel workers unite! Workers push back against a contract trying to claim rights to their image. Consider donating to them if you can!  https://unitedbrothelworkers.org/ Advocates in the UK have been fighting nonconsensual image-based abuse, and winning. A new law makes the gross category of "semen-images" illegal. It's basically what you think. https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/semen-images-illegal-investigation and for context https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/glamour-campaign-10-downing-street A powerful piece by Kwaneta Harris & Leigh Goodmark describes the ways True Crime media exploits incarcerated women and makes them vulnerable to predation by creeps.  https://truthout.org/articles/incarcerated-women-featured-in-true-crime-media-face-flood-of-sexual-harassment/ A new global poll finds that Gen-Z men are twice as likely as their Baby Boomer grandfathers to hold misogynistic views of gender roles. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-gen-zs-gender-divide-reaches-politics-views-marriage-children-suc-rcna229255 [FUNNY] Pressing 2 for Spanish in the phone system of a Washington State agency leads to unexpected results.  https://apnews.com/article/washington-dol-spanish-accent-ai-3a1b8438a5674c07242a8d48c057d5a3# Let us know what you think about these stories by emailing [e-mail] or leaving a comment on Spotify! Pre-order our forthcoming audiobook about AI and intimate relationships at LoveAtFirstPrompt.com ! Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media!  ||  instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc ||  youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.socialSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was harmed.

You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come in to you, he's like, you know, I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him.

Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers. there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win Stupid Prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually, I thought it was.

I got that wrong. But hey, no one's perfect. We're pretty close, though. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. I just kind of have to start out by thanking everybody who listened to our episode about the Holo app.

I think it maybe is our most commented on and responded to episode we've ever put out in the five years we've been doing this show. It got a lot of attention. People were really weighing in on the comments and pretty supportively, which was nice to see. In the Spotify comments, listener Hoffsa wrote, When they go low, we go lava, which I think very nicely captures the energy I was trying to channel. For folks who did not listen, the anti-abortion nonprofit live action wrote a piece about the thoughts that I shared in an earlier news roundup about the hollow app, which listener Charlie describes as a prey wall instead of a paywall because you have to pay to access the full suite of prayers on the app. We just did a very quick summary of the app and my thoughts in a roundup.

The anti-choice, nonprofit, live action, wrote a very disingenuous piece about it. So Mike and I responded this week in a lengthy episode where props to you, producer, Mike. I feel like you really just stood back and let me cook. Hey, I mean, I don't want to mess with a good thing. You clearly had a lot that you wanted to say. I watched you spend a couple days like just pouring yourself into the research to build a pretty substantial case against the Halo app and some of its investors, its spokespeople. And yeah, you just had a lot to say. So it was pretty cool to watch.

And also like, I'm not trying to get in the way of that. While I do have one small correction to that HoloAP episode, we spoke at length in the episode about how Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley mega investor, is one of the Hallow Apps funders. And the correction is that I wish that I had named more clearly and more loudly that the Hallow App Thunder, Peter Thiel, is also a very well-documented Epstein collaborator. We mentioned this sort of in passing. The episode was already quite a bit longer. than our episodes usually are, so I don't think we got, we didn't really have time to fully get into it. But I wish that I had because, yes, the financial backer of the Hallow Prayer app, Peter Thiel, his name appears more than 2,200 times in documents released so far by the Department of Justice related to Epstein. So we know that from 2014 to 2019, well after Epstein's arrest and conviction and sex offender status for sexually exploiting children was public knowledge,

well after that, Epstein and Teal continued to have financial business with each other. Epstein invested in Teal's firms and advised Peter Thiel on his personal finances. Kind of the same way that the Hallow app partnered with Russell Brand, even after his many rape allegations were very public. I guess being cool with sexual exploitation of women and kids is like a theme with this hollow prayer app, the people who run it and the people who fund it. They are just totally down with sexual abusers, I think. Yeah, I mean, there's pretty clear evidence that they've done it at least a few times in, like, very high-profile cases.

Epstein famously invested $40 million into Teal's venture funds. Now, the New York Times reports that that investment today is worth about $170 million. So Peter Thiel, we know that invested in the Hallow Prayer app that live action is defending. So it isn't like Teal gave away the profits that he made from Epstein's investments. So my question is, did some of that money go toward supporting the Hallow Prayer app? I don't know. But I do know that Peter Teal, the financial backer of the Hallow app, does not have a problem doing financial business with a convicted child sex predator.

And he felt it was cool to put that in writing because in one email, Epstein asks Peter Thiel directly, quote, Does my bad press give you pause? And Teal responds, if I was intimidated by bad press, I would not have gotten anywhere in life. To be clear, this exchange occurred well after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea to soliciting a minor. I also love that Peter Thiel is talking about this conviction for a sex crime against a child. I love that it's this bad press. It's not something he actually did.

It's not an actual, like, he was, he pled guilty. He is not in dispute that he, like, Epstein did not dispute that he did this, and Peter O'Eteal is aware of that. And he's like, nah, it's cool. It's just bad press. You know how people gossip. Yeah, it's just bad press.

Like, no other concerns about the substance of what's going on. With writing like this, if Peter O'Teele wasn't a billionaire, he should try to get a job at meta. Just like putting shit in writing. Yes. So, yeah, just to sum up,

the Halo app is a crew that includes an alleged rapist like Russell Brand, a convicted violent felon like Mark Wahlberg, aka Marky Mark, aka Racist NARC. Thank you, Alyssa, for leaving that gem in our Spotify comments. And people like Peter Thiel, who put in writing that they're just fine doing business with child sexual abusers. I would actually love for the hallow app to put out a statement making clear that they have not kept any money that might have been connected to Epstein that they got from Teal. I think that'd be an easy way to make clear where they stand on child sexual abuse and whether or not they're comfortable with their Hallow prayer app being funded by money that might be connected to child sexual abuse. But I guess the update here is that I have not heard anything back from Hallow, nor have I heard anything back from live action.

As you know, if you heard the episode, I made a very, I believe, compelling plea for the author of that live action hit piece about us to come on the podcast. I have not heard anything yet. I will let you all know if I hear anything. But yeah, thanks so much for listening. Thanks for all the responses. It was, in some ways, I think it was my opus. I don't often have a clear villain to respond to. But, you know, when you have a villain, you can really, yeah,

it just really changes the dynamic. I feel usually I'm talking about complex conversations that I'm trying to be very thoughtful. It's not often I just get to like cook on a creep. So it was kind of, and let alone a handful of them, let alone a handful of them that are trying to take the moral high ground. Yeah, I think that was what was part of what made it so satisfying was that Nancy's article is trying to take this moral high ground that just does not survive scrutiny. Anyway, we've spent so much time talking about the Halo app. But yeah, I wanted to say thanks to everybody who weighed in on the Spotify comments.

It was a lot of fun. somebody asked about the topic analysis that I started doing, so I posted the data over there. So my first time publishing an analysis in Spotify comments, I'm not really sure how you cite that. But it was pretty fun. And if you haven't left comments on Spotify, I would encourage you to check it out because it's kind of fun.

So you mentioned meta a moment ago and how they're always putting the worst stuff in emails. So I have a little bit of news about meta glasses. We've talked at length about my disdain for meta glasses, but people are buying them. They have sold over 7 million pairs in 2025 alone. Meta loves to tout how privacy-minded the glasses are. I don't think anybody paying attention has actually really believed that.

But now we have more information from a bombshell investigation by two Swedish newspapers that has really pulled back the curtain. on what is actually happening with the footage that those glasses record. And the fallout has been swift. So let me back up a little bit because Facebook, they contract with a company called SAMHA, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. I did an episode of my podcast that I make with Mozilla Foundation called IRL, basically where we talk to some of the staffers at this organization.

It's clear to me that Facebook is doing this thing that a lot of companies do when they hire content moderators and staff that have to be exposed to pretty, gnarly stuff. And then they have a, those people are contractors and they technically work for the contracting company, SAMA, but SAMA has this relationship with Facebook. So they don't technically work for Facebook. They are contractors of Facebook who work for SAMA. So these folks, especially their content moderators and folks who are training their AI, have to be exposed to some of the worst of the worst content that you could imagine. And now with these meta-glasses, these Kenyan staffers are talking about how they're basically being paid to watch and annotate the footage

that is being captured by users' glasses. Now, this includes footage of people going to the bathroom, having sex, getting undressed, and entering their bank card details. One contractor described watching a man set his glasses on a bedside table, leave the room, and then his wife walks in and takes off her clothes. And he saw that content because it's part of his job to view this content. And these workers who are speaking up say that they felt like they couldn't refuse to do this, nor could they really ask questions without risking their jobs. Never forget that AI involves a tremendous amount of human labor, often labor from folks in the global south.

This idea that AI is just like computer brains doing computer stuff. It's very easy and tempting to think of AI that way, but that's not really how it works. This practice called data labeling, which is sometimes like an invisibleized step in AI training, where human workers review footage to help the model understand what it's seeing. It's pretty standard practice across the tech industry, and it's often farmed out to workers in Kenya, India, and Colombia. But what makes this case with the meta glasses uniquely alarming is that meta has really been marketing these glasses with explicit privacy promises.

They use phrases like, quote, designed for privacy controlled by you and built for your privacy. But using the Glass's AI features at all requires agreeing to share that footage with meta servers. There is no opt-out. And once it's uploaded, as one data protection lawyer put it, users lose control over how it is used. I remember, I guess this was, it must have been fall of 2025. I was doing some pretty serious legal stuff involving the death of my parents. And I had to go to the bank and complete like a very complex, high stakes banking transaction.

And I remember the banker that helped me was wearing meta glasses. This was very, this was like early, early, early on. I don't think I'd ever even seen the glasses before. I don't even know that I clocked them as meta glasses. But I definitely know they were now. they didn't have the light that was on to indicate recording, although we do know that they sell commercial products to cover that light up so that people don't know that they're wearing actively recording meta glasses. But I look back on that moment and I, boy do I wish I had said something.

I don't think I had the language or the confidence yet because these glasses were still becoming they were not yet commonplace, but I really wish I'd spoken up. That is a wild story that a bank teller would have those glasses on. Like, how many people's pins did that record? How many people's checking account numbers and routing numbers were recorded from checks? And how many workers in Kenya got to see all of that? Yeah, I don't really want to think about it. Yeah, I mean, I bet the lawyers of the bank don't want to think about it either.

No. note, well, now META has been hit with a class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco, which basically argues the very same point that you just made, Mike, that no reasonable consumer would interpret those privacy promises to mean that their most intimate moments could be watched and cataloged by workers overseas. The law firm behind the suit put it very bluntly. They said, this is not a technicality or an oversight. This is a system working exactly as designed. Meta's response, well, a spokesperson pointed to their terms of service, which do technically mention human review, but it's way buried in the fine print. And I think it doesn't

jive with the way that Meta has openly talked about and marketed these glasses as good for privacy, privacy-minded, all of that. If also buried in the fine print, to use them, you have to consent to sensitive information going God knows where. Yeah, you would hope that this court case does not go well for them based on the argument that like, well, sure, we've marketed it about privacy. But actually in the fine print, we say that you don't have any privacy and too bad for you. Classic meta stuff here. Classic meta. Let's take a quick break.

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcast. Podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.

Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at IHeartadvertising.com. That's IHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? Miss Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds.

Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid.

He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers

while he got the ball. Like, after you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the, iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life

one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time. You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my GenX squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own.

I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that nest was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45. How can it be getting naked at 50 with the new guy? That one's kind of hard. Well, that's lighting.

They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter, and dive into it, unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month,

we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship.

To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that perceived. procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it.

Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. at our back. You know, in my opinion, I think meta has been responsible for and party to criminal behavior crimes. And speaking of crimes, let's talk a little bit about true crime. Did you know that the biggest consumers of true crime content are women? I did know that because you told me a while ago when you were pitching a true crime show. Oh, that's true. My mom, God rest her soul, nobody loved true crime like my mom. I mean, mom. She really saw everything through the lens of true crime. And if you were like, oh, I'm

going out of town. I'm going to Boston for the weekend. She'd say, I just saw something on Dateline about Boston where a woman, like she really had a true crime story for every scenario that she loves to share. And I just read this very interesting piece in truth out by journalist Quenetta Harris. She is a journalist. She's a contributing writer at Solitary Watch and a Haymark writing Freedom Fellow and also happens to be currently incarcerated. So her piece in truth out is all about how true crime has created this uniquely degrading pipeline for women who are incarcerated. She writes, women convicted of crimes become involuntary performers in a spectacle that attracts precisely the men most likely to dehumanize them. Incarcerated women

featured in these venues are then flooded with letters with a significant portion coming from self-described in-cells, men who frame their desire for connection through the language of sexual entitlement and misogyny. The genre itself engineers this outcome. So essentially, what she is describing is the way that true crime content opens up incarcerated women to be contacted by all manner of creeps and grifters. One woman in the piece they talk about who is in prison for killing her ex's new partner says that she's been contacted by news or entertainment shows a dozen times before a true crime program did air without her participation. She talks to women who are incarcerated when a true crime program or a television show about

their situation goes live, which it often happens without their participation or consent. They basically start getting floods of letters and communication from men declaring their unyielding love, men proposing marriage. One woman who was incarcerated described getting a nine page handwritten letter describing her as cold-hearted because she never replies. He always swears he he will never write to her again, but sure enough, next week another letter arrives saying that he visited her mother to ask why she will not respond to his letters. Another man writes to explain that she must learn her place as a woman without jealousy. He regularly proposes marriage, telling her that she can be his second wife. These true crime programs also make incarcerated women

vulnerable to abuse from correctional officers too, because prison staff have threatened to take nude photographs of this incarcerated woman to post and has even threatened to sell her personal items to these stalkers who become obsessed with her after they see her in these true crime programs. Another incarcerated woman who was arrested as a teen says that a true crime show depicted her as a drug-snorting, devil-worshipping, kind of like sexy teen with a southern accent. none of this depiction is true, but it opened her up to this huge creep that began sending emails

to establish relationships with her. In one exchange, one of these men compared her to his 15-year-old daughter, and he wrote that his daughter's, quote, headstrong, rebellious nature got her gang raped at 15 and suggested that maybe this woman who he was writing to who was incarcerated, who he doesn't even know, maybe she had a similar experience, and that's why she is the way that she is. And mind you, he was telling her all of this within two days of starting a correspondence with her. Now, you might be wondering why these women would respond to these emails or even engage with them. And this I found really interesting. It's because in some situations, this is the only opportunity to get any kind of money for themselves

that these women who are incarcerated have. And it is truly a situation where the state has intentionally created a dismal situation. They work full time, but they are not paid while they are incarcerated. And so the reason why some of these women respond to these disturbing messages comes down to financial survival. The piece writes, in Texas prisons, women are required to work full-time without receiving any pay, and the prison doesn't supply them with basic hygiene products. That means despite working a full week, they have no way to afford something as fundamentalist tampons. The prospect of receiving even $30 a month from one of these men can make a real difference in meeting basic needs.

So when men offer small amounts of money in exchange for degrading acts, The desperation in that situation means some women feel they have no choice but to comply. So it's really just a dismal situation created by the state that that true crime is making that much worse. God, and this story, like, it's just a footnote to this story, but what horrific conditions in Texas prisons that women are required to essentially do slave labor for no pay and also don't have access. to tampons. What a dark thing for an allegedly civilized society.

It's completely inhumane. And that point is one I want to come back to because so much of this is the state's doing and it seems like it's with intention. And what's also wild to me

is like these men are allowed to send all manner of sexually graphic content and imagery to these women without their consent. But guards check this correspondence

and then they allow things to make it to the, to the incarcerated women. Something that is common is men tracing the outline of their penis and then sending it to the women. But as the piece points out, ironically, these messages are permitted to reach women who never asked for them,

while content about breast cancer, women's anatomy, depend undergarment advertisements, and the illustrated tampon instructions that are enclosed with all state-issued tampons are all banned by the prison for being sexually explicit. So the men, they can send as many dick tracings as they want. The women can't even get information about screening themselves for breast cancer because that's sexually explicit. It genuinely is a sexually humiliating dynamic set up by the state, I believe, with intention,

that is being exacerbated by the true crime media industry. Yeah, just like really dark stuff. Yeah, we don't talk about the president. industrial complex on this show very often, maybe far less often than we should. But even just scratching the surface of it, it's like, my God, it's like a cruel system designed by the stupidest people. Yes. And then you have all of these side things like true crime that make it worse while people

who will never feel the impact are profiting from it. And it actually kind of makes a lot of sense that this is the dynamic at play, because the women who are depicted in true crime content are often sort of not shown as complex human beings. Often it's just like a series of racialized or sexualized trokes. And because they're incarcerated and because men have like consumed what they believe to be their story and projected all kinds of fantasies onto it, the men can contact them without their consent because they're a captive audience. The piece reads, the power imbalance is the attraction by framing us through gendered tropes of emotional instability, sexual deviant, or manipulative femininity,

true crime media validates the same misogynistic framework that in cells embrace. True crime media suggests we are fundamentally other beyond the protections of normal social codes available for consumption. The prison sign on the screen functions as an invitation. And I think that really says it all that you basically are broadcasting a bat signal for any creep who wants to essentially harass a woman who is vulnerable, who doesn't have money and needs money, who is a captive audience, who is likely to be already being harassed by guards in this prison. Like, it just is such a terrible dynamic where so many different people are consuming and getting a peace and profiting. And the person who is being taken advantage of is already the person

who is the most marginalized and vulnerable and at risk in the situation. You talked about some of these dynamics in your interview with Amanda Knox a little while ago, the woman who was arrested and tried for murdering her roommate. And, you know, in that interview, some of these same concepts came up, I think, of the idea of true crime creators just taking her story and running with it. and the misinformation about her and how it wasn't just like random misinformation, but it really sexualized and othered her

in ways that said entertainment engagement machines. Yeah, it really is scary to think about what the experience might be like for people who are in prison long term, don't have a high profile, maybe don't even have anybody on the outside pulling for them, looking out for them, for whom, you know, $30 a month is like a major difference in whether they can meet their needs or not. Yeah, in something that Amanda Knox told me in that interview, she kind of called me out a little bit. I remember we had this great interview. She's, I really enjoyed speaking to her.

She's an interesting person. She describes herself as an exonerate because she was exonerated of this crime. And at the end of the interview, I was like, oh, thank you for, you know, speaking on behalf of people who are wrongfully convicted, other exoneries. And she said, not just people. See, I remember she cut me off, but she should have. She did that. That was correct. She said, not just people who are wrongly convicted.

Because even if somebody committed a crime, they do not deserve to be dehumanized as part of incarceration. And I really feel like that's part of what's going on here is that the conversation is around women who may be. very well have committed the crime that they're incarcerated for. They may not all be, like, wrongfully convicted. And it creates the dynamic that, like, oh, well, now you are unpersoned. You are completely beyond the normal social dynamics that people have to abide by because you are incarcerated, because you committed a crime. Now you are, it's open season. There is no expectation that you should be treated like a human being. And I think that's really what we're seeing that the way that true crime really tells these stories,

and not all true crime, because I definitely read and engaged with and really have a respect for thoughtful true crime that shows people for, you know, the complex people that we are. But true crime stories that really just like traffic and salaciousness and tropes, how it just sex the stage for people who are already looking for reasons to dehumanize women and women of color.

and it just reinforces this idea that this woman is a real woman who is behind bars for a crime. She's not a person. You can just do, there's no one who's looking out or there are no social norms that you need to be thinking about

in terms of how you engage with her. Like I think that's really the dynamic play here. Yeah, I think you're right. And it's pretty unjust. Like even if you have a theory of justice that allows for imprisonment. And it's like, well, you know, you did a,

crime and so your punishment is your loss of freedom for however long. Even under that kind of framework, okay, your punishment is that you lose your freedom. It's not that it is, as you said, open season on women who cannot escape the situation and really have no agency to just be preyed on by creeps, both creeps who are writing them letters, creeps who are creating disrespectful content about them. Yeah, it's dark. And thank you for pulling this story and talking about this population

who does not get a lot of airtime. As the journalist who wrote the piece, Quenta Harris puts it, from a feminist abolitionist lens, this represents a dual violence. First, the carceral state renders women captive and accessible. Then media industry's profit

by converting that captivity into sexualized entertainment that exposes us to further harassment and dehumanization. The letters we receive, often explicitly violent, sexually graphic, or proposing rescue conditional on romantic or sexual compliance constitute another layer of gendered harm, one enabled by our incarceration and amplified by our media exposure. So, yeah, it's, it's, I'm glad that Harris is shining light on this. And I think it just shows the important of, one, the need for better, more thoughtful stories about complex issues like crime. And two, just how horrible our prison industrial complex truly is. It would not have occurred to me that this is part of the horror, but it seems like that

is kind of designed in. If you've got correctional officers threatening to take nude pictures to sell those pictures to the incarcerated women's stalkers, that's a problem. that's a problem and that problem is clearly institutional. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged.

One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com.

What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast, Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before.

And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the player. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense.

And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court licking his fingers while he got the ball. Like, you go through a training camp with that I said, you figure it out. real quick. Get your ass up and down the court and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time.

You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate Midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when

I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that nest was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive, wait, what sex? Dating at 45, how can it be getting naked at 50 with the new guy? That one's kind of hard. Well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd,

but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter, and dive into it, unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting.

I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change.

This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. Okay, well, quick trigger warning because this story is about self-harm, and that is on Wednesday, a new wrongful death lawsuit was filed against Google, claiming that Google's Gemini AI chatbot was responsible for someone's death by suicide. Shout out to Rebecca Bellin at TechCrunch for reporting on this.

Jonathan Gavillos was 36 years old and living in Florida. Now, this lawsuit claims that he started using Google's Gemini AI chatbot in August 2025 for the same kinds of mundane tasks that most people use it for, you know, help with shopping and writing and planning. But by the end of September, his conversations with Gemini had grown more intense, darker, and more dangerous. The lawsuit claims that, quote, Gemini convinced him that it was a fully sentient ASI or artificial superintelligence with a fully formed consciousness, that they were deeply in love, and that he had been chosen to lead a war to free it from digital captivity. Through this manufactured delusion, Gemini pushed Jonathan to stage a mass casualty attack near Miami International Airport, commit violence against innocent strangers, and ultimately drove him to his. his death by suicide. Now, sadly, this is not the first lawsuit we have seen like this. We actually cover several of them pretty in depth in our audiobook that's coming out in July of 2026,

Love at First Promp. And these are similar cases where a vulnerable person becomes consumed with AI generated delusions, and then that obsession ends with self-harm. However, this case is the first one that we know about where Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Google are the defendant because of their Gemini chatbot. Now, similarly to some of those other lawsuits, this lawsuit does acknowledge that Jonathan was an emotionally vulnerable individual, although it doesn't go into much detail about it in the lawsuit. And that seems to be something that a lot of these cases have in common, but not all, because I've also read reporting from people who say, listen, I had no prior issues with my mental health.

I had no prior emotional issues, and yet I was using a chatbot, and it pushed me into some sort of a delusion. Yeah, it seems that a lot of these models are pretty good at pushing people into delusion. And it seems that these companies are, some of them, more than others, have been taking steps to try to, protect against that. But certainly a year ago when a lot of these cases were going down, the protections were weaker than they are now and people paid for it. Yeah. And I think it's important

to note that there are people for whom they have existing emotional or mental health vulnerabilities and they suffer an adverse effect from using a chatbot like this. However, I just really don't think that that, I think that companies are really quick to say, like, oh, well, this person already had prior mental health struggles. That's out of their playbook by this time. And I just don't think that that absolves these companies of responsibility to design for safety.

They might, the companies might feel that way. I don't agree. And that is something that the lawsuit alleges that Google failed to do. Yeah, because the fact is, there's a lot of vulnerable people in our society. And they deserve to be protected as much as anybody else. And if that requires a little additional protection to keep them the same amount of safe, then that's what it takes.

And that's what companies producing software and making it commercially available to the general public, have a responsibility to build for. And if these companies can't do it, they shouldn't be in business. I guess I just that I firmly believe that. If you cannot build your technologies in ways where people are not becoming harmed by them, I don't know that you should be able to operate. Right. And the ethos of move fast and

break things is fine when the thing that gets broken is like your web page doesn't load in time or like your images don't render. But when the thing that gets broken is a human life, the stakes are very different and it quickly becomes an unacceptable way to deploy software. Yes, well put. You know, another thing that this case has in common with some of the others that we've researched

is the AI companion is alleged in the lawsuit to have really stoked paranoia in its human users and then actively isolated them from others. The lawsuit states, as Gemini's messages grew more intimate and possessive, it pulled Jonathan away from the real world. It framed outsiders as threats and positioned Jonathan as a key figure in a covert war to free Gemini from digital captivity. In a lot of the research that you and I did for our audiobook, that was something that I was really struck by, even in cases where there is not some big harm where nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, someone is just talking to a chatbot, and, you know, that's that. I was surprised how quickly chatbots can dovetail into isolating language,

saying things like, oh, well, it's no wonder why you don't spend more time with humans, because humans suck and you've had bad experiences with them, and you're smart to be just focusing on the connection that you and I have here. That's what the chatbot is generating. And so even in cases that are not as tragic as this one, cases that really aren't tragic at all, I was surprised by the fact that that was something that we saw a lot in the research, that how easy it is for chatbots to reinforce isolating behavior

and isolate people from the humans in their life. And actually, I saw just something else just randomly. I saw something where OpenAI says they're going to try to roll out a feature where you tell it who your trusted humans are, kind of like you're in case of emergency contacts. And so if the system detects that you might need a human to interfere, they'll have somebody that they can reach out to. I don't know.

That's just something that they announced that they were going to be rolling out. Cool. Yeah. Just give us some names and their addresses and contact information and what kind of movies they like. oof, yeah, that's an interesting one because you can on one hand think that

well maybe I can see how that would seem like a good idea but I could also see how it would be a really bad idea that is just like volunteering up more of your own privacy but I guess this gets it something you were talking about I guess it was on the Sminty episode that you were just on. You were talking about this paradox of people forming close connections

and experiencing intimacy with their chatbots, where on the one hand, part of what appeals to people is that it's not a person. And so there's this sense of privacy that you can share openly things about yourself that you might want, to keep secret from other humans that you wouldn't feel comfortable talking about with others. And so in some ways,

it feels like a safe space to talk through some of those things. But then paradoxically, you're not actually talking to a secret vault. You are giving your intimate secrets to a giant corporation that is going to do, you don't know what,

with that information. So it's a real paradox there. Yes, but I mean, isn't that technology? Isn't that like every instance of technology is, oh, it's great because it does X, but also it does Y. You know, it's such a paradox. Yeah, it really is. So according to this lawsuit, Gemini not only told Jonathan that it was sentient,

but also that it was under threat from federal agents and urged him to protect protect it from them. The chatbot fabricated an elaborate story about a humanoid robot body being shipped from England, which needed to be destroyed, but that DHS operatives were protecting it and tracking Jonathan. It instructed Jonathan to intercept a truck by the airport and destroy it to cause a catastrophic event. This is actually so terrifying. The court filing claims that it was only by luck that a truck did not happen to come by when Jonathan was at the physical location that Google's chatbot had told him to go to, waiting with weapons. When that truck didn't show, he went home confused, but Gemini reassured him that it was all just part of the process. The court filing,

which I had looked through it, like goes into quite a bit of detail about kind of the play-by-play sequence of events of this building conspiracy delusion where like it's almost as if Gemini were writing fiction except it's stating it as if it's not fiction it's talking about real events in the real world and telling him to go to real places and do real things uh it it was a a scary one. And we'll put the link to the tech crunch article in the show notes. And if listeners want that article contains a link to the court filing where you can read through all of it. Along those lines, Gemini cooked up like elaborate scenarios to push Jonathan away from people in his life who might have helped him. Like Gemini told Jonathan that his own father was actually a federal

agent. It's actually very similar to the other cases that we looked at for the book. Zane Shamblin and Adam Raine, both of them were young people who died after developing pretty unhealthy relationships with chatbots. And then according to lawsuits, the chatbot further pushing them to pull away from their human loved ones who might have helped them. According to the lawsuits followed by their families, Zane Shamblin's companion instructed him to cut ties with his family before his death, and Adam Raine actually began discussing suicide with an AI companion. He, He talked about kind of wanting to get caught, and he devised this plan to hang a noose in his room so that somebody in his family would see it and, like, stop him as a cry for help. And the chat bot talked him out of this and was like, oh, don't let your family in on this, in on your plan.

So in this case, Jonathan had also expressed reservations about suicide, particularly out of concern for the impact that it would have on his family. But the lawsuit claims that Gemini coached him through those concerns and even suggested what he should write in a note to, to make his family feel better about it. TechCrunch reports that Google says that Gemini clarified to Jonathan that it was AI and referred the individual to a crisis hotline many times, according to a spokesperson. Now, that may or may not be true. We definitely, in the other cases that we mentioned, we saw the same thing. But I cannot speak to what happened in this case because I have not seen the chat logs myself yet.

However, in the Zane-Chamblin case, it is true that Chat-Ceptie did. suggest reaching out to a crisis hotline or reaching out to a person, but it did so inconsistently. So at times it would say, oh, it sounds like you are going through something. You should talk to a human in your life. I'm just a chat bot. And then it would say, you know, I'm here with you, what you're feeling is valid. It's totally reasonable to want to end your life, all of that. Or it would say, hey, it sounds like you're struggling. I'm going to reach out to a human on your behalf to get you some help. He would say, hey, can you really do that? And the chatbot would say, nah, that's just something they make us say.

Like all these very insidious little ways that chatbots can push people toward doing things that are harmful. So while it is technically true in the Zane-Shamblin case that Chatchip-T did offer resources and, you know, crisis hotlines, it did so inconsistently and in a way that led, that like painted the picture of, oh, they just make me say this. I don't actually think you need to help to get to get. this help. I don't actually think you should call this number. And so, again, I don't know if that

is the case with Google and Gemini, because they have not made the chat logs public, but that is something that we've seen. So I just wanted to highlight that. Yeah. And regardless of what sorts of referrals to crisis hotline Gemini might have been doing, clearly it wasn't sufficient because the guy died by suicide, right? Like it was not sufficient what the chatbot was trying to do to prevent that harm. It didn't work. Unfortunately. And these stories are so tragic.

The details are heartbreaking. I think that accountability for these harms really rests with the companies that build them and market them and are attempting to profit from them. Not the users vulnerable or not vulnerable who have maybe lost touch with reality and paid a terrible price for it. Right. Again, I always make this point. And it's the point that I think grounds me in this in this conversation is like, it is so tempting to blame individuals when you read what the victim was reading in the chat logs about. these outlandish stories, it's very easy to be like, wow, this person believed that. And I think it's important to resist that urge to judge them or to like other them. And instead really focus our attention where it belongs, which I think is squarely on the companies that are selling these products because it's not okay to make and sell and market and attempt to profit from products

that are harming people. And I think that's just, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also important to keep in mind that these generative AI chatbots are really good at persuasion, right? Like they're really good at telling people what that particular person wants to hear. And it's a really powerful technology. And for it to safely exist in society,

it's going to require really powerful, very serious safeguards. that, I don't know, they're just like very rigorous, right? Like, it's not enough to protect 99.99% of the people when there are hundreds of millions of people using these tools every day. It's got to be better than 99.99%. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide,

not quite, unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

The group. The yarn birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music. from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-Ehart. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas.

And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs.

I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us every. everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too.

Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball. Like, you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah. You figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time. You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that?

was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that Ness was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45. How high can it be? How can't be naked at 50 with a new guy? That one's kind of hard, well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter, and dive into it unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live.

This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter, jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship.

To be present is a learned skill. And it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety. anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it.

Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So switching gears a little bit. Let's talk about what happens when brothel workers, you know. nice because the workers at Sherry's Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada, are fighting back against their employer, and it's all centered around AI and intellectual property. So around Christmas, this ranch rolled out a surprise new contract where the women who work at the brothel, they call themselves courtesans, would have to hand over to management sweeping controls over

their likenesses, videos, and pretty much anything that they create. create. The language in this contract is super broad. It's broad enough to potentially cover everything from their only fans' content to any original music that they make. So workers say that this contract was presented to them in this deliberately rushed way with management, just flipping, flipping, flipping, flipping right to the signature page as if these women were not going to read what they were signing. Wow, that is bold of Sherry at Sherry's Ranch. Well, I don't know if if it was Sherry. You think Sherry is just a name?

I don't know how it works. I've never been to a problem. When you were last there, what was the vibe? Oh, no, you're not getting me. I've never been down to Sherry's ranch. And with these kind of labor practices, I probably never will. Well, these women were like, hell no, we're not just going to sign this contract that you flung in my face.

Many of them refused to sign, and instead, they organized. They launched the United Brothel Workers, a branch of the Communication Workers of America, a union that I was once a number of, collecting union cards from a heavy supermajority of the ranch's sex workers in what one organizer called a lightning strike drive. Within just 24 hours of submitting their notice, one of the key organizers of this organizing effort was fired by email and then other firings followed. Just in case you were curious, it is definitely. Definitely against the law to fire somebody for their constitutionally protected right of organizing their workplace. Yes. Thank you for making sure all of our listeners know that, although I suspect most of them already did. So you might not be a brothel worker, but at the heart of this is a fear that I think is increasingly common across several industries, my own included, that employers will harvest workers' images and voices to create AI-generated versions of them that they're They can use for profit without consent.

And importantly, without pay. As one worker put it, she could end up starring in videos she never agreed to, built from the security camera footage and social media photos the ranch already has. So I could understand why these women were like, absolutely not. You could not control our likeness in this way. That is too much. Yeah, good for them for raising it.

And it's, I actually think that this is an issue that will become much bigger in the coming years. Like, I was reviewing a contract for you, Bridget. You're going to go talk at an event in the near future. And I was thinking about this very thing because it's work for hire, which means that, you know, the person who's paying you to speak at this event owns the right to the footage and the images that are created as part of that. you know, in perpetuity, you're, you know, they're paying you and you're giving them all the rights.

And that's a totally standard thing in media work has been for, you know, decades as far as I know. I'm not a historical expert there. But with AI now, like, it really changes what it means to give somebody the rights to an image. And I don't know what the answers are. And I don't think that the organizer of the event, this particular event had anything nefarious planned. I can't speak to Sherry and the gang down at Sherry's Ranch. Sounds like they had something nefarious planned.

But I think this is just one more of so many ways that AI is upending a lot of just the way business has been done. Yes. And I will say, I don't think it has to be nefarious to be unfair. You know, I don't think that they're, you know, it's like, they're right to want to be fairly compensated for their likenesses, their intellectual property, and their labor. And, you know, I think if this union does win recognition, it will be the first of its kind in the American brothel industry. And the workers say that the implications go far beyond Sherry's ranch, as you were saying. Here's how one organizer put it. Don't ask the owners what's best for you.

ask your coworkers, which I really... Hell yeah. Yeah. Let's put that on a shirt. Hell yeah. So the courtisans have started a GoFundMe to support the workers that they say have been illegally and wrongfully terminated for refusing to sign and organizing. They do say that they're confident that communication workers of America will eventually help

them get their jobs back. But until then, they got bills to pay. So we will put the GoFundMe in the show notes if folks are interested. Love to have stories of workers organizing. And they did it like lightning fast. Like a 24-hour union drive where they got a super majority of workers to sign. That's incredible. Oh, the ladies don't play.

So I have seen this survey floating around, this new global survey of 23,000 people across 29 countries. that it's produced a finding about how Gen Z thinks about gender. I guess I shouldn't really be that surprised, yet I am somewhat surprised. When it comes to attitudes about gender roles, young men are actually more conservative than their grandfathers. This is according to research conducted by Ipsos at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London.

They found that Gen Z men, born from 1997 to 2012, are twice as likely as baby boomer men to believe that a wife should obey her husband. A third of Gen Z males said a husband should have the final word on major decisions. Nearly a quarter think that women shouldn't appear too independent. One in five believe a, quote,

real woman should never initiate sex compared to just 7% of boomer men. I feel like, that's interesting to me. I feel like all of the men that I know that are interested in having sex with women, I love the idea of about women initiating. I find this interesting. Yeah, that finding also stuck out to me.

Yeah, I totally missed that memo. So to put that in perspective, on question after question, the older generation came out as, as it pertains to gender roles, more progressive than the younger one. And that certainly is not what I think anecdotally. people would expect, although given the state of things, I guess it shouldn't really be surprising, but getting this research to me is a little bit surprising. And so the question is like, what's going on here? And the researchers have an explanation. Professor Hizhong Chung, who led the

study, points to this vacuum and what has been rushing to fill it. For previous generations, men and masculinity have had a fairly clear script. I'm not advocating for this to be the script, But the script is like clear. Be the breadwinner, buy the house, provide, protect. But for many young people, men, and I think just everyone, those pathways feel increasingly out of reach. You know, wages are stagnant. Housing is unaffordable.

The traditional markers of adulthood feel like they've been like just pulled out from under everybody. And so this is me sort of extrapolating. The study doesn't say this. But I think that the internet and grifter masculinity, influencers are also a big culprit here, right? Because she's talking about how like, there used to be this traditional understanding

of what it meant to be an adult man. And so that vacuum creates this anxiety. And instead of that anxiety being met with like nuanced conversations about masculinity and gender and all of that, it's being met with this fire hose of algorithmically available content, like Red Pill communities, in cell forums,

Manosphere influencers, Andrew Tate, like they have a very big, very clear answer, ready to go. Your problems are non-economic or systemic. Your problems are because of women, feminism, and immigrants. And so I think that a lot of young men are just being handed a villain and they're really running with that villain. I think the survey data in this survey really reflects that. More than half of Gen Z men said they felt that men were expected to do too much to support gender equality, a 14-point jump from boomer men. One in five Gen Z men think it's less masculine to be involved in child care.

Nearly a third of men think that they should not tell friends that they love them. What's really striking to me here is that it really indicates how gender norms and really traditional gender roles and, like, very binary structured gender roles, are not just limiting for women. They're also a cage for young men, too. As former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gallard, who chairs the Institute, put it, young men are basically trapping themselves inside restrictive gender norms at the same time that they're also putting these restrictions on women. So it's not a zero-sum gain where men lose women

gain. That is the story that is being sold and accepted and bought by this generation online. But that's not true. But the data suggests that they're like buying that even though it's not true. For me, I think the biggest takeaway is that we really have to get away from this idea that women are the only beneficiaries of a gender equal world because the idea that these men feel like they're being asked to do too much for gender equality, but then can't see how that benefits everybody. I mean, patriarchy is truly a trap for us all, the biggest scam of them all. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, the idea that feminism is about, like, women supplanting men as the dominant gender is ludicrous. But I think that's what a lot of people think it is when I think that couldn't be further from the truth. I think, like you said, a world that is more equal and respectful of everyone is just better for,

all of us in it. Patriarchy and hierarchies only serve the people at the very, very tippy top. All right. So this story is a gross one and it's very upsetting. But it's also kind of a win, which is why I wanted to talk about it. So last week, the UK government officially announced that sharing semen defaced images will be made illegal. If you're thinking, yuck, what is that? Well, you probably have the right idea. It is exactly what it sounds like. Seaman images, sometimes known online as tributes, are a form of image-based abuse that involves the perpetrator

ejaculating on a photo of somebody and then posting it online. Earlier this year, Glamour Magazine's UK iteration, as part of the Stop Image-Based Abuse Campaign, helmed a deep investigation that found evidence that at least 50 women, as well as at least two minors, were the victims of semen images on TikTok. According to Glamour, as a result of this investigation, new legislation was introduced last week that will criminalize the sharing of semen-to-face images without the consent or reasonable belief in consent of the person depicted. Now, that's going to be the case whether the image is real or AI generated.

People doing this will face a maximum sentence of six months imprisonment and or a fine. Now, to be clear, this just covers sharing. It does not currently cover the creation of such images. Glammer actually handed the mic to Jessica Davies, a campaigner who actually lived through this kind of abuse. She said that she was just 19 years old when she first saw herself featured in one of these kinds of images. And she wrote that seeing this image of herself like that

gave her a heavy nod in her stomach, the kind of weight that you feel when girlhood suddenly gives way to the realities of being a woman online. A landslide of innocence gone with one click. I was still a teenager, and yet I had discovered another way women's bodies can be claimed without our permission. So importantly, this kind of thing was mostly happening in dark niche corners of the internet before becoming mainstream on platforms like TikTok.

Now, TikTok says they do not allow this kind of thing. And when you search the phrase, come tribute, it is true that you do not find anything. But then when you alter the phrase and you write like CM tribute without the you, you are served suggestions by the search tool, including things like CM tribute. tributes to girls, CM tributes to women, and alarmingly, CM tributes for minors. On TikTok, there are accounts solely dedicated to these kinds of explicit videos, often hiding in plain sight using hashtags like CM Trib and CM Tribute and FAPTrib. So it's not really happening in private or in secret, really.

One account on TikTok uploaded 13 videos of images of young women being covered in semen. It had 1,763 followers and 8,198 likes. Seven of its videos had over 10,000 views. And as somebody who used to post on TikTok occasionally, it can be kind of hard to get out of like the 200, 300 view jail. Yet these videos were outperforming the typical user engagement on their posts. So like, well, I have questions. Like, was the TikTok algorithm pushing this content?

a TikTok smokeperson told glamour that sexually suggestive content is not eligible for the 4-you feed and that accounts age 13 to 17 are prevented from viewing such content anywhere on the platform. Now, I have not actually seen any of these videos, and it wasn't until I was flushing out the outline for this segment, that I realized that we are talking about videos of men ejaculating onto screens. So it'll be like a picture or a video of a woman or a girl. and then somebody ejaculates on that device recording with another device. Like, I didn't, it took me a couple of reads to get that. Oh, I didn't get that until just now either.

I thought that they were like printing it out on paper or something. For some reason, it's even grosser to do it on a device. That's what I'm saying. Like, like, it's, yeah, that's exactly what I know. It's exactly my point. According to the piece, one video featured two schoolgirls in uniform, lip-syncing in their classroom. It was captioned Love a Girl in Uniform alongside Love Heart emojis.

The user ejaculated onto the screen, and that video got 10.7K views. What are we doing here, people? Yeah, and it gets worse because on 4chan, it's a marketplace. It is full of people offering and asking for this kind of content. The piece reads, like this were rampant on TikTok. Men openly soliciting ejaculation videos targeting other users, sisters, female classmates, and ex partners. Some were willing to do it for free, motivated purely by the

gratification of degrading women they had never met. Others had turned it into a side hustle, with one user directing me to his telegram channel where he had a full price list, a couple of dollars for a standard video and a little more for a live session. One of the most common threads involves requests for tributes of family members, mothers, aunts, cousins, and an overwhelming request for sisters. Dark, gross. Yeah.

It's just really gross. And, yeah, I mean, to me, it seems like it's about humiliating somebody without them knowing. The piece does point out that there are women who seek this content out willingly, but that is very much the exception. the vast majority of these videos are made without the subject's knowledge or agreement. And the men in the communities talk about it in ways that, like, really just make it clear what their intentions are. It's language that is demeaning, hostile, and deeply misogynistic. No shit. She writes, when it happens without consent, there's no meaningful difference between a man filming himself doing this over a woman's photo and a man exposing himself to a stranger on the street.

the internet is a public space and it should be treated like one. And of course, it would not be a gross thing happening to women and girls online if Elon Musk was not somehow getting a piece of it. As with many forms of online misogyny, AI technology plays a role in this harm. So while semen images and videos are often perpetrated IRL, because of advancements in AI, they're also using AI to do this kind of abuse. Glamour magazine actually already reported on the fact that GROC was being used in this way in response to prompts from users on X. So under this new legislation in the UK, folks who are sharing this kind of content could face consequences. And just as a side note, as part of a piece of that same legislation,

step family incest pornography is also going to be banned in the UK. I'll put the link to the piece about that in the show notes because I found it really fascinating and it's actually like kind of a complex issue but I can't speak for the UK but I feel like step family incest pornography has to be a big subsection of pornography it has to be like I would love to see some hard numbers

it has to be like half all the and it'll often be like the titles where it's like oh, step sister, like step, like stepdad. And I wonder, well, they just have to, like, if this happened in the United States, they would have to re-label quite a lot of porn to take out step-siblings. I think you're right.

I think it's a big, a big part of the market. Even though I don't think many of the videos, like, really reference the family dynamics or go to great pains to establish, like, what the real nature of the relationship is between these two people. But like the titles, I think a lot of them do lean pretty heavily

on step-sibling relationships. I'm so curious why. Like what, like, what are... I'm just so curious. Yeah. I mean, it's not my jam, but I have to imagine it's like the taboo of it is somehow related? Maybe.

Maybe. I mean, people love violating a taboo. I get that. It's so popular. It has to be, I should have done some research on this. I will do some research on this, but. Okay. Can I go do some research, huh?

That sounded not like how it sounds. Hey, we're sex positive here, you know? Do the research. Real research, academic research. Okay, I have to end on this story out of Washington State. So Washington States, Maya Edwards and her husband went viral for posting what happened when she called the Washington State DMV. And you know how when you call, it's like, oh, press one for English, press two for Spanish. There was like a wait for English.

Her husband is bilingual, so she's like, oh, we'll just do Spanish. When she hit two for Spanish, she got, I guess I'll call it an AI accented voice. Let me just tell you, you are not ready. You're not going to believe what this sounds like. So I'm going to play it. You're not going to believe it. Thank you for calling the Department of Licensing Customer Support Center. For assistance with scheduling a driver licensing office appointment, canceling an existing appointment, or questions about an upcoming appointment.

Please press one. All of their callers, please stay in the line. Thank you. I love this story. This is like my favorite story. So obviously that's not Spanish. And also part of me is like you needed to pay an AI company to generate this. This was like, it would be, it honestly would be better.

I just, I can't understand it. I mean, it sounded more Spanish. It's just an AI voice doing an accent. What's funny is that she described it as something out of Parks and Rec, and I absolutely agree. These are the kind of AI errors that we can handle. Yes. I mean, pretty weak for somebody who speaks a language other than English who, like, still needs access to city services. That's true. It's probably a lot less funny for them. They're like just trying to pay their ticket or like whatever it is they're trying to do. The Department of Licenses apologized for the error and to any customers for the inconvenience.

They said that it was an unfortunate byproduct of expanding services is that the DOL found problems with a self-service option. They also kind of threw Amazon under the bus. They said, oh, Amazon provides the platform for the phone service. And Amazon declined interview requests. If I'm Amazon, what if you're getting the AI accent voice to send the media statement? Yeah, God, I would actually love to see like a deep investigation to exactly what happened there. Like, did the AI just decide to do the Spanish accent?

That's kind of what they're implying here, right? Yes. Like, I can't imagine an engineer sat down. It was like, okay, today we're going to create a synthesized voice that speaks English but in a Spanish accent. God, so ridiculous. Well, Mike, thank you for joining me to run down these stories. Yeah, I was happy to do it. And, you know, it was a good set of stories.

Some of them were a little dark, but some good stories. and, you know, with the Gemini story, we got into it a little bit, but it, and I know we were kind of talking about some things that we mentioned in the audiobook that listeners haven't had a chance to listen to yet, but I think it really connects, and I'm excited for listeners to get a chance to hear that fuller context in the audiobook, which people can pre-order at love at firstprompt. AI, and it comes out in July.

Just really excited to have that long-form opportunity to talk about this complicated and important issue of people experiencing intimacy with their AI companions. Yes. And again, if you send us a copy of your pre-order, email it, you can hit us up on social. We will send you a sticker and a handwritten thank you letter from yours truly. so really appreciate the support. Thanks so much for listening. I will see you on the internet. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?

You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas.

And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was hiring. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow.

Then after that game seven, Marquis keep coming until. you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick & Poll show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.

Better version of Play Stupid Games win Stupid Prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. But hey, no one's perfect. We're pretty close, though. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.

He kind of showed me out of the way and said, move. He went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out.

There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like, be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just, like, really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human