There Are No Girls on the Internet - Reese Witherspoon AI Gender Gap; Lauren Sanchez Cosplays Relevance; Online Assault Academy; Flock Spying; Nigerian WhatsApp Smut – NEWS ROUNDUP

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

In this week's News Roundup, Bridget and Producer Mike cover the tech news stories you might have missed. TRIGGER WARNING - one story discusses disturbing sexual assaults. . Reese Witherspoon thinks women should embrace AI more. The comments were not kind. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXKphAtkbgW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== . Gisèle Pelicot's story of being drugged and raped by her husband and other men for a decade captured headlines. A new CNN investigation reveals a large ecosystem of men helping each other commit similar crimes around the world with something like an "online rape academy." https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html . Lauren Sanchez Besos is a cultural force, revolutionizing the way Americans live, and inspiring everyone with her embrace of joy and her perfect marriage to Jeff Bezos. Right? RIGHT?! (wrong) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/business/lauren-sanchez-bezos-jeff-bezos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.blA.i7qg.dQZ7G1_RUIcF&smid=url-share [gift link] Anti-Occupy Wall Street Champagne Toast Later Today? https://gothamist.com/news/anti-occupy-wall-street-champagne-toast-later-today Rich people watching Occupy protestor: https://www.threads.com/@yungbooks/post/DEEOKfUOXkA . Workers at surveillance company Flock inexplicably accessed cameras in a gymnasium and pool, prompting the city of Dunwoody, Georgia, to delay their contract renewal after a citizen's open records request revealed anomolies in the logs. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/06/flock-cameras-privacy-concerns . Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children? https://jasonhunyar.substack.com/p/why-are-flock-employees-watching-720 . Women in northern Nigeria have been writing steamy romance books for decades. They are fighting morality censorship by innovating new models of distribution and monetization on WhatsApp. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/love-is-universal-but-nigerias-romance-lit-market-is-one-of-a-kind and https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/africa/nigeria-erotica-writers-censors.html . Here are more stories we were watching this week: NAACP lawsuit accuses Elon Musk’s xAI of polluting Black neighborhoods near Memphis: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/14/naacp-lawsuit-elon-musk-xai-memphis A Redditor Criticized ICE. Trump Is Trying to Unmask Them by Dragging the Company to a Secret Grand Jury: https://theintercept.com/2026/04/10/reddit-ice-protest-grand-jury/ What is dynamic pricing at grocery stores? Maryland now bans it: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2026/04/15/maryland-bans-dynamic-pricing-practice-popular-among-retailers/89621751007/ Meta’s new rules let it ban users or suppress comments that include the word “antifa” alongside “content-level threat signals.” https://theintercept.com/2026/04/14/facebook-instagram-antifa-censor/ Let us know what you think by emailing [e-mail] or leaving a comment on Spotify. Pre-order Bridget's 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.

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I'm Bridget Todd. And this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Welcome to There Are No Girls on the Internet, where we explore the intersection of technology, identity, and social media. And this is another installment of our weekly news roundup where we dig into the stories that you might have missed on the Internet, so you don't have to. I gotta start with a little bit of heartbreak here because, Mike,

I know you know this about me. I love me some Reese Witherspoon. She's my girl. I like her a lot. We all love Reese Witherspoon. She's just so nice. You know how you, I don't know if the white community is the same way, but I know the black community is this way where you might get, you might have like your handful of white actors and actresses and like singers and celebrities that you really like. Reese is one of mine.

She's, she is, I like her a lot. And so it breaks my heart to have to start with a little bit of less than flattering Reese Witherspoon. discourse, although I don't know if I would call it less than flattering. I'll just tell you what's going on because I'm sure you haven't seen it. So Reese Witherspoon is taking some heat for a video that she posted on social media, basically saying that she was in a book club and that she asked the women of the book club, how many of you ladies use AI? And of the 10 women, only three of them said they use it. And then, of those three women, only one said that they felt confident using AI. So Reese Witherspoon made a video and said,

Women are being left behind because we're not using AI. And she said that technology is the kind of thing that if you don't at least get a little bit familiar with it early on, it advances so quickly that you won't really have time to catch up. What do you think the reaction to this video was online? You know, I have to suspect it might not have been as positive as she was hoping. I feel that the sentiment that everyone should, should stop what they're doing and rededicate their lives to learning AI is not universally held.

Not universally held is definitely one way to put it. People really did not have a good response to this video. Some people were saying, she's right, this is great. This would not be the first time that she has made a statement like this around technology. Back in 2021, Reith Witherspoon tweeted, quote, crypto is here to stay. I'm committed to supporting creators who have pioneered the NFT space and encouraging more women to be part of the conversation. And she wasn't getting around. She launched an effort to turn NFTs into movies and TV shows through her production company. It seemed like that didn't really come to fruition.

Yeah, because it doesn't make any sense. Like what, how do you turn NFT into a movie or a TV show? Am I missing something? Well, you know what? we forget, but Reese was right. You know, she was saying that back in 2021, and here we are five years later. And you know how you can't do anything without hearing about crypto or NFTs and how women who didn't embrace cryptocurrency and NFTs five years ago?

We're all lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Luckily, Reese Witherspoon was there to sound of the alarm. Don't get left behind on the gravy train of possibility and promise that is NFTs and cryptocurrency ladies. Aren't we so glad we listened to Reese? For listeners who can't tell, Bridget's using sarcasm right now because that is not what happened. It reminds me of that time. We went to South by Southwest and it was the only thing anybody was talking about was NFTs in crypto. It was everywhere. And then we went again the following year after that kind of petered out and it was like Crypto Who, NFT, Who, we don't know her.

It was like it never happened. I will never forget my experience inside the Crypto dome at South by Southwest. It was like a miniature Epcot Center kind of thing. Like it looked like it was a geodesic dome, like a giant golf ball that you went inside. And there were all these horrifying images of like weird monkey rabbit humanoids

like all over the place that I guess you could buy as NFTs. And then a panel of the dumbest, like early 20-something dudes opining about just the worst takes and opinions I've ever heard because they were billionaires. Nothing, anybody said there made a lick of sense. Nobody made any sense. It was like they were, yeah, that was my experience too.

I did sort of see another interesting conversation arise from all this. So Roxanne Gay, the celebrated writer and thinker, replied to Reese's posting, quote, oh, Reese, absolutely not. And then somebody replied to Roxanne Gay. Now, mind you, Roxanne Gay, is a PhD? She has won every important literary award there is. She is like a celebrated thinker.

She is celebrated for her ability to write and think and communicate. Somebody replies to Roxanne Gay and says, girl, if you're not mastering AI, it'll leave you in the dust. Just like the internet, it's not going away. Let's use it for good, shall we? Roxanne replies that I'm fitting to be dust and that's on that. I love how on the internet people will just like comment to other people without knowing who they are. Like, I feel like if you knew who Roxanne Gay was, you wouldn't say something like that to her.

I thought I felt like I was losing my mind. I was like, do you not know who you're, first of all, Roxanne Gay does not need your career advice. She's Roxanne Gay. Who are you? And that's my thing. Like, imagine publicly saying this to Roxanne Gay. Imagine telling Roxanne Gay that her fabulous, celebrated, decorated, super-awarded career, she's going to be left behind in that career as a celebrated thinker if she does not embrace AI. Like, Roxanne Gay is a Guggenheim fellow that is like the highest honor a person can get for,

creative work, and she got it by using her own brain. If anyone doesn't need to be getting a lecture about they need to use AI or they're going to get left behind, it's Roxanne fucking gay. She posted on threads. I have a PhD in rhetoric and technical communication. I speak for languages and read to others. I write books powered by human intelligence. I am proud of that. I am curious and dedicated. I will always, always trust my ability to think and read and make mistakes and grow. I wish that for everyone. You're welcome to distrust your innate talent and use AI and tell yourself that you're cutting edge for it. Don't worry about me.

If I'm irrelevant, I will survive. And I really loved that response. You know, it just reminds me of this idea that when people use AI, it's like trying to circumvent the messy human business of creating. And what Roxanne Gay is affirming here is affirming that that is why she creates. She enjoys thinking and being curious and researching and being dedicated and making mistakes and growing. And that's how you put things out into the world. It reminds me, you and I saw the Werner Herzog documentary, what is it, the cave of forgotten dreams. It's a beautiful, immersive documentary where they go into this like narrow cave in France to show, I guess,

guess the oldest paintings ever done by a human thousands and thousands of years ago, right? That's right. They go into not just a cave in France, the Chauvet Cave, which, as you said, contains the oldest paintings made by humans anywhere in the world. They're like 32,000 years old. Like back when the world was covered in ice, sea levels were 300 feet lower than they are today. some human was crawling around in that cave painting animal figurines on the walls. And here we are thousands of years later watching Werner Herzog

undertake this incredibly laborious task of going into this narrow cave to film. They're only able to go in an hour at a time and it's so small and they can't have any lights and human breath causes mold to grow so they have to be like very, very delicate. it. And the movie itself is beautiful. If you get a chance to see it, we saw it in IMAX 3D, and it was breathtaking. But when we got out of the movie, the first thing that I could think

was about AI, about how the whole point of taking on this laborious process of checking out these cave paintings was that because they were made by people, because they were the earliest versions of humans using art to tell a story and express something to other humans and, like, leave, leave a message about what they were seeing and experiencing as one human to another. And here we are thousands and thousands and thousands of years later doing all of this work just to check it out. Like that is the point of expression. And I guess that film really, I just let that film really affirmed in the power of

human creativity and expression and like the humanness being the thing that makes it worth a damn and worth anybody wanting to check out. Like nobody would be undertaking that laborious process. to check out some AI. Nick, 5,000 years down in the future, I don't think people are going to be doing that to check out somebody's AI renderings or something. And yeah, I think I think that's what Roxanne Gaye

is affirming here too. Totally, yeah, I loved that framing of it, of thinking about that movie in terms of what it tells us about AI and the fact that, like you said, we were so intensely interested about what these people did tens of thousands of years ago, not because of some intrinsic property of the way they drew a cave bear or a horse,

but because of what it could tell us about these people and what learning about them could help us understand about ourselves. Like, that's the point of art and literature and creativity. Exactly. And I guess I'm just a little surprised to see Reese Witherspoon, someone who is a creative herself, someone who is now gone from TV and film to producing to the literary space. I am as a creative, most creatives I know are really keen about creative expression being something that is for humans by humans.

And so it's always surprising to me when I hear another creative. Like Diplo was saying something very similar, which like who would expect much different from Diplo? But he basically was saying, oh, I don't even know. need human singers anymore. I have AI. And if you're a creative that's not embracing AI, you're going to get left behind. The same kind of rhetoric. And I just, I can't understand, like, that's such a shocking thing to say. Like, it's not even like he can't afford human singers, right? He's got to be rich. He's been making music for decades. Like, why wouldn't he

want human singers? That's what I don't see in all this. Humans are humans. Sometimes humans have throat problems. Sometimes humans have a bad session. But that's the point of working with humans. You don't get to pick the parts of expression that you like and then discard the rest. And I guess I say that to say something I dip little aside, something that I have seen a little bit more of an uptick of lately that I just want to name, because I kind of sense we're going to this space, AI as a getting particularly getting women invested and involved in AI as almost like a feminist issue. The way that Reese Witherspoon was talking about this was I'm trying to get women invested in AI because women are being left behind and it's like a feminist issue. I'm not even necessarily saying that people shouldn't use AI or like, you know, I'm not even I'm not even trying to make this into like an anti-AI screed or something.

But you don't have to tell me that it's a feminist call. calling to use AI. If you're going to use AI, I guess use AI. But I don't, I don't need the rhetoric of it being wrapped up in the veneer of feminism. That's what I don't like. And I've, I've just seen a little bit more of an uptick in this. I mean, the same way that she talked about cryptocurrency and NFTs, I think if those are domains that are, you know, a value to you, sure, but don't tell me that you're Angela Davis here or something by trying to get women to use AI. You don't need to do that. Just use AI if you're going to use AI. Trying to sell it as a moral good starts to make it feel more like marketing for the product than some kind of beneficent tool.

Do you remember back during the crypto and NFT craze when so many celebrities were essentially making what I suspected were undisclosed. ads for cryptocurrency and NFTs. I want to bring this up because I'm getting a little bit of a whiff of that now. I could be wrong. I don't have any kind of inside information. This is just my sense. Something about this has the width of an undisclosed ad to me that maybe money has changed hands. Maybe an investment has been made somewhere or in a portfolio. And now some celebrities have gotten the message or the memo that I need to get women specifically involved in AI. I'm just sensing this coordinated push to sell AI to women. It does feel a little bit like a like a set up for a one-two punch of like,

oh, here's this problem. We have to give AI to women. Wouldn't it be surprising if down the road there is some kind of program or funding opportunity or products to be sold to meet that need. Wouldn't that just be surprising? Let's keep our heads on a swivel on this one. And I will say that the research about women and AI, Reese isn't totally wrong. It is true that women are using AI less than men in workplaces.

We did an entire episode digging into the research on why this is that we'll put in the show notes. But the too long didn't read version is that I don't think that women are embracing AI less because we're too timid or we don't know how or we're too stupid to figure it out. I think that we are being skeptical and cautious and judicious. And I don't necessarily get down with kind of automatically framing that as a bad thing. So we'll put that episode on the show notes.

But yeah, let us know what you think. Let's take 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.

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We have talked about Flock a handful of times on the podcast. Never anything good. According to the research that I did for this segment, people are like, oh, well, there's been crimes that Flock has helped solve, like violent crimes that Flock has helped solve. I'm not doubting that, but the stories that I have heard about Flock being used for some absolutely gnarly surveillance stuff is very upsetting. And that's another one of these stories.

And so just imagine for a moment, if you will, a security camera being put outside of your kids' gymnastics class or inside the pool where your kids swims. Now imagine that a sales employee at a private tech company, somebody that you've never heard of, a stranger in a city that you don't live in, is watching a live feed of that camera for hours and then coming back later to watch the pool. That is not a hypothetical situation. That is something that is going on in Dunwoody, Georgia, where a parent named Jason Hanyar says that he found buried in audit logs after filing a public records request with Dunwoody, his city. And now all of this is at the center of a fight that is playing out in city council meetings across the country over flock.

So if that name, flock sounds familiar, we talked about it in a story about a woman who was falsely accused of stealing Amazon packages from someone's doorstep because a FLOT camera essentially just caught her driving into the city. Another story where FLOC cameras were used to track down a woman who police suspected of having had an abortion, and they used Flock cameras to track down her license plate. So Flock basically is this company that sells automated license plate readers, which is basically this code for surveillance cameras, to local police departments. They have over 80,000 cameras in their network across the country. And what makes them particularly attractive to police is that all of those cameras are connected. A police department in Dunwoody, Georgia

can search plates that were spotted all the way in Chicago or Toledo or any other place that flock has a presence. So it sounds like Dunwoody, Georgia was an early adopter of flock. Like they're a city that really sort of builds itself as tech enabled. They're kind of amenable to new technology. The city built an entire real-time crime center around Flock's technology. They spent $360,000 on this Flock facility itself and close to half a million dollars a year on Flock's network. So in Dunwoody, it's not just police cameras, but cameras that are owned by local businesses as well. that are on this network.

Which brings us to that parent that I mentioned, Jason Hunyar. So he's a Dunwoody resident and a parent who basically just like doesn't want Flock in his community. So he started filing open records requests after the city's contract with Flock came up for renewal. And he got back these audit logs, which were records of who had been able to access the city's camera network when they were able to access it and what exactly they looked at. And what he found is, let's just call it alarming. For starters, the city had been telling residents that only two neighboring police departments

in Brookhaven and Shambly could view these live cameras. But the logs that he found suggested otherwise. According to his analysis, over 1,200 external agencies have been granted permission to view the live streams from Dunwoody cameras since the start of 2025 alone. Now, one thing that I should note is that he was careful to say that the logs that he found represented changes logged in the system, so not necessarily confirmed viewings. The audit logs that he got were a record of access permissions that were granted to outside agencies, so not necessarily when those agencies actually logged in and actually watched footage.

So that 1,271 number reflects agencies that were given the ability to view live streams, not agencies that definitely did sit down and view those streams. Does that make sense? It does make sense. And it's important distinction, but, you know, when somebody has access, and it sounds like they didn't have great record keeping of who wasn't watching. So, you know, once people have access, who knows what they might do with it? Yeah, so it's not even necessarily the question of whether or not people were actually sitting,

down and looking at this footage, it said it was the access was granted at that scale without any kind of public knowledge. It gets even worse because there's this JCC, a Jewish community center, the Marcus Jewish community center. I don't know if every city has JCC's. We have them here in D.C. But they're basically like a rec center and a gym. Folks can go there and work out. They usually have like pickleball courts or tennis courts. Sometimes they have, you know, pools for kids and like daycares and things like that. It's basically a community center. So the Marcus JCC had cameras on Flock's network. And critically, these cameras were labeled Do Not Share.

Hunyar says that he found that those feeds were shared with outside agencies anyway, even though they were labeled Do Not Share. So we raised it with the chief of police, that sharing appeared to be removed, but he couldn't figure out who made that change. And the user who made the change does not appear anywhere in the system's own user log. So that's pretty curious. And probably one of the biggest deals to me here is that Flock's own employees, so not police, not city staff, but unelected salespeople and business development managers at Flock

had owner-level access to Dunwoody's entire camera network, and you better believe they were using that access. He says that he identified a business development manager in Raleigh, who, according to the logs, click through five traffic cameras before landing. on the Dunwoody library camera, and then he didn't look at anything else for two hours. Two days later, that same employee pulled up cameras at that Jewish community center. He browsed through cameras showing a baseball field, a gym, and then settled on the main pool camera. Three and a half hours then passed before his next login.

Then there's a VP at Flok, someone in strategic relations and business development, who he says access the camera system 185 times in just over a year. On one occasion, his single view that day was the gymnastics room at the JCC. So again, I just want to be clear that I'm not saying, and I don't think that this parent is saying that, you know, anything, I don't think that he's making any kind of allegations, but that is, but this, but according to these logs, this is what happened. And so like, I mean, I'll make allegations.

explain yourself, like, what possible reason could there be for a sales executive to be viewing a gymnastics room at a, effect, you know, at a community center where kids hang out? Like, I feel that's a pretty reasonable question to, like, put to them, like, what possible reason could there be? Well, I can answer that for you because Hanyar shared all of this with the city council and flock's public position is that their employer. only access customer systems for technical support. But he points out that the audit logs don't capture how long someone watches only when they

started watching. So there's really no way to say what they saw and how for how long they saw it. So, yeah, their position is like, oh, we're watching the girls' gymnastics studio for technical support to provide you a better service. I'd love to see, like, the ticket that was put in that prompted this support call, unless their technicians are just like have so much time on their hands that they're just randomly spot checking

every camera in the system if they're doing technical support like what what are they supporting in a technical way? Your daughter at the pool. That's what they're supporting in a technical way. Yeah, I mean it sounds pretty creepy.

I guess I don't know who was doing what but the portrait that's painted by these logs is a pretty creepy one. So this is actually pretty interesting flock, their defenders, and the company itself, they argue that they are being singled out partly because they are more transparent than their competitors. And that is kind of true. Like they have a public transparency portal. They do cooperate somewhat with security researchers up to a point. Other companies like Motorola or Axon run similar networks. And they've mostly

avoided this kind of scrutiny because they're harder to audit and like a little bit less transparent. But Hunyar's records really do suggest that Flock's own auditing process has pretty big gap. They have issues like users not appearing in the official logs or the fact that an account called

auto-approved that shared Dunwoody's data with outside agencies nearly 2,000 times, with no kind of human review or oversight, or the fact that multi-factor authentication was disabled for users by Flock employees. Then there's also the

question of immigration because reporting from 404 media found that local police around the country have used flocks network to assist in federal immigration enforcement, even in cities that have policies against cooperating with ICE. Dunwoody's own police chief acknowledged that an agency connected to ICE could potentially search their database. So I guess to your point earlier, it makes me sad that there are people who believe that this level of surveillance would be let alone would be effective, but would be a reasonable price to pay if it made you feel safer.

If it happened, like, you know, like, I can always speak for myself. Even if this kind of surveillance did solve a crime or two, to me, this is not a reasonable exchange. Having it be like any stranger can access the cameras outside of the pool,

outside of the gym and all of that, where your kids go, that is not a reasonable exchange. even if it did happen to solve a crime or two, which to be honest, I haven't even really seen compelling evidence towards that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It just feels like privacy is valued not at all in these kinds of discussions. And that's just crazy because I feel like if you actually talked with most people,

like, hey, do you think it's cool for some creep at a tech company? thousand miles away to just like creep on your kid anytime they want, they would say no, right? Like they would probably be willing to pay money to prevent that exact thing because they value their privacy and the privacy of their loved ones. And yet somehow flock has been able to convince police departments and communities around the country that actually it's fine and privacy is worthless. Yeah, I completely agree.

And I also think there's something going on where I think there's a dynamic where your kids being creeped on by flock staff is not bad, but somebody from out of town coming and committing a crime, that's the only thing you need to be worried. But I think it's like a mental dynamic about what is or is not crime or what is or is not bad. I think it's like, yeah, if these grown man strangers have unprecedented access to intimate spaces where you and your kids are every single day and you have no public insight or knowledge or transparency into it, that's actually fine. What you've got to be worried about is creeps from out of town coming in and commit bad guys. You know what I mean? Yeah, bad guys. It's fine for the good guys to have this kind of access. They're good guys, but we've got to keep a close eye on those bad guys.

So Dunwoody has now postponed renewing its flock contract twice. At the last city council meeting, Honeyar, the parent who underwent this open records request to get all of these logs, showed up in person and personally offered to help pay for an independent security and ethics audit before the city signs anything new. And his argument, I think, is pretty simple. You cannot open a barbershop or a restaurant in town without a safety inspection. why should flock a company with cameras who are watching your kids' gymnastics class be any different than somebody trying to open a restaurant or a barbershop?

He provided meticulous copies of all of these logs that he got from this audit in his substack and we'll put the link to that in the show notes. It's a pretty in-depth read. Yeah, it sounds like he really put a lot of time and effort into this. I really respect the commitment to going after these guys.

Speaking of going after guys, this is a little bit of a tough one, huge, big trigger warning up top. This is a very upsetting story involving sexual assault. And it's not a new story. It's a story that I think I had put it in the outline to talk about a few weeks ago. I'll just be honest and say it was a story that I had a lot of trouble with. And I think we didn't discuss it because it was so rough. And it's kind of been making the rounds again.

And so I thought, like, well, this is a story that we have to talk about. But yeah, so I just want to own up top that this is not a new story. When it was new, I didn't really feel up to covering it. But now that it's back again, we can get into it. So by now, most of y'all have heard of the story of Giselle Pelico. She was a woman in France who had been being drugged by her husband for nearly a decade and assaulted by dozens of men that he would recruit online. Her husband also abused his daughter, Caroline.

It was one of the most shocking trials and recent memory. And when it ended, I think a lot of people just assumed that story was over. The website where her husband had been recruiting men was shut down. And I think a lot of people just were like, okay, case closed, justice served, moved on. But this new investigation from CNN, called exposing a global rape army really exposes the sort of ongoing online infrastructure that allows men to encourage one another

to drug and assault the women in their lives and to swap tips on how they can get away with it. And this CNN investigation, it's a very, very deep dive. I'll put it in the show notes, but like, again, huge trigger warning. You have to actually click through a few times to get to the story because it's so upsetting,

this CNN investigation really suggests that we moved on too quickly and really saw this as an isolated case when in reality it is a much broader problem than perhaps we would like to admit. So the CNN team as equals spent months investigating what they describe as this hidden online ecosystem where men are giving advice to each other about drugging and assaulting their partners

and they coach each other about how they can avoid getting caught. They found that it is not really a small fringe phenomenon, like on the deep, dark web. Some of it is, but a lot of it is on mainstream platforms in basically plain sight, racking up hundreds and thousands of views. So their investigation centered around this site called motherless.com, which describes itself as, quote,

a moral-free file host where anything legal is hosted forever. Motherless gets around 62 million visits a month, and its core audience is here in the U.S. CNN found more than 20,000 videos in a specific category on the site, organized with tags that signal a woman is unconscious or asleep. And some of those individual videos of women who these tags suggest are unconscious or asleep have over 50,000 views. So inside the communities that are sort of built to spring up around this kind of content, people are not just passively watching it. They're also talking and communicating and kind of like building a brotherhood with each other. They share methods. They talk about dosages of how to knock women out. One user even claimed to be running a business shipping what he called, quote, sleeping liquids.

two addresses around the world. CNN even found evidence of men live streaming assaults to paying viewers with cryptocurrency being used to keep those transactions anonymous. So the piece really centers around the stories of three different survivors who, you know, the details of what they went through with their partners are different,

but they all have like very similar broad stroke. So there's one woman in Devon, England, who found out in 2018 that her husband of 16, years had been giving her a cup of tea every night that was drugged and assaulting her while she was sleeping for years. Her husband, she says that one day they were getting ready for church and her husband just sat her down and admitted this. This little detail I found to be so heartbreaking, which was that after this, she was really left questioning all of her, in all of the like intimate little quiet moment that she had with her husband. She says, quote, at the end of a

very busy day. I was just grateful I had a cup of tea before I went to bed because I was so tired and I didn't have to make it. You don't expect anything other than innocence to come from your partner. And it just made me so sad that she was like, thought that this was like a nice, intimate, nightly gesture. And why, why would you question it? Because this is someone that you're married to and that you are, have, you have, like, trained yourself to not question the sweet, intimate moments that happen in your relationship in your own home. That's very dark.

I mean, that's the sort of thing that you might imagine in a movie or something, you know, just the betrayal of it. That's exactly what she said, that for her, the hardest part was not the abuse itself.

It was rebuilding that sense of reality afterward, after going through something like that and being betrayed in that way. She said, you don't worry about who it is that you lie next to, right? Like this idea that, I mean, kind of like what we were saying before, like you, as women, we often are thinking about, you know, or at least told to be thinking about external threats, like bad guys in dark alleys. But like, the reality is sometimes the threat

is lying next to you in bed. Sometimes the threat is the person that you marry. Sometimes the threat is in your same house, like giving you a cup of tea every night. Another woman they spoke to in Wiggin in Northwest England said that she spent years waking up disoriented with no memory of how she had fallen asleep, but with physical signs that something had happened to her. When she confronted her partner, he basically just gaslighted her.

He told her that she was imagining it, that she was on too much medication and hallucinating it, that she was, in her words, mental or crazy. She actually credits Giselle Pellico's story and public testimony with giving her the courage to speak out. And now she's basically become this like advocate to raise awareness to encourage other women to just trust their instincts. That's when something doesn't feel right or something feels wrong to trust that instinct. They spoke to a third survivor in Northern Italy who only discovered what had happened to her when she said that she found videos that her husband had made.

Her husband was actually sentenced to eight years in prison. And years later she told CNN, no matter how much you brush it off, it's always right there. beside you. So just the piece includes like a video breakout of each survivor. We'll put it in the show notes, but again, it's very dark. The whole piece is

worth reading for sure. Let's take 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 a cappella 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 group. 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 Smygel and Friends on the IHart 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 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 voice.

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 844-844-I-Hart. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defining 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 Nash will get that thing That man, hell get the flying He ran up the court, licking his fingers Why 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 gonna get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players And IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet.

Hey. And we have been joined at the Hipsons High School. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later. We're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey.

With all the snacks and drinks. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just hit it. Oh, what are y'all doing?

Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on. Could you believe? I would buy it. Go. Go.

Go. A hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You are. I'm lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.

Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At our back. So we're talking about the CNN piece about the so-called online. line rape academies, where men swap tips on how they can assault their sleeping or drugged partners and what a pervasive problem it actually is. So why does this keep happening? So in the piece, CNN spoke to experts who sort of pointed to a few different reasons why this is such a pervasive problem. The first is that the drugs being used have really changed. Perpetrators are

increasingly using common medications that really act fast and then don't leave a lot of traces of them in the body. So it makes it harder to prosecute cases like this than it would if they were using what we used to call, like, quote, date rape drugs of the past. Like that's not what is being used here. The drugs being used have really changed. Second is just that reporting rates are understandably extremely low because a lot of the victims that this happens to don't even necessarily remember that it happens. And so even if they might sense that something is wrong, they might face disbelief, including in a lot of these cases, disbelief from the police who are meant to be helping them. One of the victims that they spoke to told CNN that she actually brought video

evidence of her passed out or asleep being assaulted by her partner and that the police told her that that was not going to be usable as evidence because it looked like in the video that she was just pretending to be asleep. And we really did see that a lot in the Pelico case that the men who participated in this, they, I mean, in their testimony, they talked about like,

I assume that she had to be playing some sort of a game that she was in on it or wanted it in some way. And it sounds like that is like a pervasive attitude of like, oh, well, even though I'm being confronted with video, even though I'm a police officer and I'm being confronted with video evidence of you being assaulted,

certainly you're just pretending to be asleep and actually are not being assaulted at all. It's consensual. There's also an algorithmic component to why this is such a pervasive problem as well. You know, I don't think anybody listening is any stranger to the idea that some forms of pornography

have sort of normalized violence against women as entertainment. And then we know that algorithms favor increasingly extreme content and push that exploitative material into the mainstream. That's just like a thing that we know about how online content works. And so that's another kind of like pervasive part of it is it's like people are seeing more of it and that content and it kind of becomes like what is normalized. And then I think another bit here is the is the sort of brotherhood angle that, I talked about earlier, CNN spoke to Sandrine Jaso, who was a French lawmaker, who, after being drugged by a former French senator, has, again, become an advocate and campaign to raise awareness

about drug-facilitated sexual abuse. She basically says these, she calls these schools of violence saying, quote, I would even call them an online rape academy where every subject is taught, there are all the subjects and disciplines needed to become a good rapist or sexual predator. And so it seems like from the piece that there's a dynamic around this that links the men together in a kind of dark brotherhood they have like a shared secret and that that also is one of the reasons why this can be so pervasive is that like it's not just men committing crimes solo it's men creating the world's most fucked up community around committing such horrible acts and like that can be a kind of self-sustaining issue as well.

And then lastly, and this is the bit that I think CNN really drills into the hardest, is that the platforms hosting the content have largely avoided accountability. The piece reads, motherless.com has avoided being targeted for the type of content posted on its site due to U.S. safe harbor protections that largely shield platform owners from direct liability for their users uploads. This creates spaces where men like Pelico can operate behind a veil of anonymity, their abuses too often invisible despite being plotted in plain sight. In the UK, the regulator offcom investigated motherless.com,

not because of its content, but for a paperwork issue. And that investigation was closed after the company just filed the correct forms. During the trial against her husband, Jacelle Pelico said that something that really stuck with me, which is that the shame must change sides. it's a little bit complicated because, as I said earlier, her daughter was also a victim of her father's abuse, and that's something that her mother does not acknowledge. And so, like, I just want to own that Giselle is saying this to me, like, incredibly powerful statement about shame needing to change sides while her daughter says, like, well, I continue to be stigmatized for speaking up about what I experienced also. But I think that is right on its face, right? Like the women who spoke to CNN for this investigation, they all said the same thing that this is just not being taken seriously, whether it's not being taken seriously by the platforms, by the laws, by the lawmakers, by police, that like this thing is happening. It's happening in dark corners of the internet, but also essentially in plain sight. And nothing is being done.

And so, again, we'll link to the entire piece in the show notes. it is a rough read, but these women coming forward are so brave and so powerful that I think we should be honoring their stories. Well, after that, I think maybe you could use a little bit of good news. Yeah, I could definitely use a little bit of a pick-me-up. Did something good happen? All right. So I read this piece in New York Times that I can't, I'm like, I'm like smiling from ear to ear as I think about it. So women in Nigeria are loving steamy romance novels. And the New York Times has this great piece about how the women who write these novels disseminate their steamy writing to get around the country's censors. The piece reads, quote, for decades, northern Nigeria has been home to a booming industry of romance novels written in Houssa by and for women.

But in a region that operates under a dual legal system where Sharia law exists along. aside secular courts to strictly regulate public morality. Steemier stories are deemed immoral. Some books have been publicly burned by zealous officials. So, against this backdrop, what are these women who want to write steamy romance stories doing? Well, a new wave of writers is putting out much more explicit and graphic content and releasing it in installments on WhatsApp where religious authorities and government censors basically can't do think about it because it's a closed network. And since those regulators and sensors are really

zeroed in on print writing. And so they're like, hey, I'm not publishing a book. I'm just publishing my stuff on WhatsApp. They basically are untouchable. A lot of these women writers have to hide their identities to avoid getting in trouble with the morality of police. But the time spoke to one woman romance writer who goes by the name, Ome Hyran, who is proud to be a writer of erotica. And it sounds like her smut writing has basically turned her into a celebrity in her small village in Nigeria that like, she's like, oh, women and girls come up to me and they're like, I want to be like you. I want to write just like you. She's, she is like a celeb in her village. So the time spoke to this writer and she says, they say that we're helping spoil culture and

religion in society, but I see erotic writing as vital in society. That's what's happening. So through writing, people learn about it. Sis has built up a whole financial and tech infrastructure built around WhatsApp. So The Times writes that writers like her hook readers with free chapters in huge WhatsApp groups, dropping a paywall at cliffhangers. To read on, fans must use mobile money to buy temporary book-specific groups, which are shut down once the serialization is complete. Paying more guarantees faster updates,

while an expensive special woman tier delivers chapters via private message for ultimate privacy. Vendors pay $6,500 nara or $4.70 a week to advertise their wares, including lingerie, aphrodisiacs, and kitchenware in the group. This is exactly what you were just talking about, this idea that people are going to find a way. You know, we have this attitude that, oh, everybody's going along with the program. No, people want, women want to read their romance and, like, sell their lingerie. And, you know, I don't know, like, leave it to a woman who wants to sell or read smut to figure out some sort of a tech workaround that the government can't touch. Yeah, and not just a workaround, but like you said, it sounds like she's built a whole infrastructure of like a financial ecosystem within just WhatsApp.

It's pretty impressive. So her biggest hit book is called Gidon Uncle, which came out in 2019, more than 55,000 people read it on Wattpad, which is like a fan fiction storytelling site, and then likely an additional 20,000 plus people on WhatsApp. So unfortunately, she did have to go before the morality police who told her that she needed to make her writing less erotic. But then she was like, aha, you've outed yourself. She says, they told me I was committing a very big sin. she said laughing. She shot back, how could they know that unless they were also reading her books?

Got them. So it really sounds like a climate that it's all about control and like cracking down on things. The Times spoke about how this one children's book was banned and the guy who heads up the censorship board impounded 55,000 copies of this children's book,

which is like a rhyming book for kids. called Queen Premier the Second. So this is the verse that got this children's book band. Ben and Tom may jump in the hay. Is this the way? Yes, let us be gay. The New York Times notes the book was published in the late 19th century when the word gay

was meant to say happy. But that passage got the book banned. And so this guy who runs the censorship board made it pretty clear that the whole thing is about control that he understands that he understands that he cannot control what these women are doing and reading and exchanging on WhatsApp. So what the hell? We're going to impound these very benign kids books that include these like not controversial

at all rhymes because you got you got a ban something, right? Yeah, you got to ban something. Otherwise you just look weak. Weak on books. Week on books. Just like the Pope is soft on crime. This guy doesn't want to look weak on books. So he told the times that when it came to social media and online content,

like the erotic writers. He understands the board has very little power. Quote, there are things that you just have to overlook, but at least you can control the little you have, which I feel like is so telling. It sounds like a very self-aware morality police head of censorship, which is such a strange concept. Yes.

Yeah, shout out to these Nigerian smut queens. Yeah, right in. We'll promote your smut right here on the show. Oh, I am like a voracious reader of smut. I will like, drop a what, let me in the WhatsApp group. I will like star your, I will give you a starred review. 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 headwriters, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that 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 yard birds, 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. A one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart 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 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. 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 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 Nash will get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball, like, after 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. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast

called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. I also bring a bit of advice into the mix so we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We're coming into this world fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside. we're there to support and celebrate each other. And that's not like your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yep, yep, exactly.

And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. Okay, Mike, can we close out with me being a little bit bitchy? I believe that we can. I've seen it before. You're like, I believe in your ability to be a little bitchy. I've seen it in action. Who has you wanting to be a little bitchy tonight?

It's Lauren Sanchez. Did you read the piece in the New York Times? I did read that piece in the New York Times. What a strange world we live in that that very long piece was written in the New York Times. So the time says this piece called Someone Has to Be happy. Why not Lauren Sanchez Bezos? As half of the unfathomably powerful couple, Miss Sanchez Bezos seems to have influenced the Uber Rich to stop apologizing and to start enjoying themselves. When were the rich not enjoying themselves?

Like, we had, like, what is this reality where, like, the rich have just been, like, really downtrodden and like pretending not to have a good time. What are they talking about? You know what it reminded me of? Do you remember when Occupy Wall Street was happening, which I believe was like 2012, so I guess it was a while ago.

But there were all these stories that kept coming out about how the very wealthy, like, couldn't drive around in limousines anymore. And if they were going to step out of their limousine, they might be yelled at, and this was so cruel and unfair to the extremely wealthy. Do you remember those stories? I do remember it. I also, I mean, I was a participant of Occupy Wall Street, and I remember images of wealthy

people from penthouse balconies. I'll see if I can find someone, put them in the show notes. You could Google this, but, like, the optics could not have been more like a man draped in furrowing. drinking champagne as he looks down on the peons below marching in the streets. Standing next to Mr. Peanut up on that balcony with his monocle. Like, basically that. Basically that. So this piece, it's, first of all, it's very long.

Second of all, it says nothing. Like, the, I looked up the, I was like, who even was tasked with writing this? It's Amy Chosick. She seems to be the writer when it's like, when you got to humanize a rich lady, you go with Amy. She's the best. She wrote the very flashy profile of Elizabeth Holmes from Sarinose.

Remember the rebrand? Elizabeth Holmes is sorry, like that rebrand. They put Amy on it. They had to go for the best. It's Amy. Okay, so she's got a beat. Yes, it is. This rich lady's,

isn't so bad. Yeah. Here are some reasons that she's just like us. I don't believe a goddamn word of this. Okay, let me just read this to you. There is no way this is true. She and Mr. Bezos do everything together. On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up around six

on their new roughly $230 million compound on Indian Lake, an exclusive private island in Miami, often called the billionaire bunker. That part is true. No trouble believing that. They do not touch their phone. Instead, they begin each. day by listing 10 things they're grateful for and they can't repeat what they name the day before.

Bogus, not true. That's like when you ask when someone is like, what is your morning routine? And I'm like, well, I wake up. I don't touch my phone for a full hour. I do some light stretching. I have some lemon water. I do my morning pages as I reflect. And as soon as you hear someone say that, you're like, I think this person's lying.

Yeah, like maybe some of those things happened once. Yeah. This is not what you do every day. As I read, my eyes rolled so far back in my head. I worried they were going to get stuck. The article goes on to describe the ways that Jeff Bezos has changed since meeting Lauren Sanchez. You might remember that when they were first engaging with each other, we got copies of their text messages while they were married, by the way.

and Bezos to Lauren Sanchez was like, you alive girl. Basically, it's like clear that Lauren Sanchez was sort of his like, you know, lively thing compared to his boring old wife who just supported him through starting a company and gives money to philanthropic causes. Boo boring. So they're definitely seeding the like, Jeff Bezos is stylish and youthful and happy now that he's married to Lauren Sanchez. The article describes Bezos 2.0 as, quote, a man who has discovered joy, love, and cosmetic dermatology.

I do like that they got in like that little dig and a couple others here and there. So this is, again, I think this is one of those articles where if you read between the lines, the cracks are showing, The article claims that they both rely on each other for advice on everything. Warren gives an example of how Jeff suggested that she changed the cover of the illustration of her children's book about a dyslexic fly that goes on an adventure. No examples are provided of her providing counsel on the way that he runs Amazon or the Washington Post. later in the article when she's asked about widespread layoffs at the post, which her husband owns and micromanages to his political and economic benefit, she said, I don't make those business decisions, so I can't really answer them.

I thought you guys rely on advice with each other. Side note, there is a very interesting lawsuit about whether or not Lauren Sanchez stole that book idea from her best friend. and the only outlet that has it is Daily Mail. So take it with like a billion grains of salt. The falling out with her best friend began at a party wherein the best, everyone knew that Lauren Sanchez's thing was doing a specific dance to that black eyed pea song.

Boom, boom, pow. Like, she was like, everybody knew that was my thing. And that she got into an argument with her best friend over who danced better to black eyed peas as boom, boom, boom, pow. at a party, and that began the falling out between these two women that ended in a lawsuit over whether or not Lauren Sanchez stole her children's book about a dyslexic fly from this friend who tried to show her up dancing to black-eyed peas. I'm not making this up.

I don't know if it's true or not because I only read it in Daily Mail, but like, there you go. The article goes on about all of these deep, profound impacts that Lauren Sanchez has made on culture. Shozak writes, quote, she hasn't just changed Mr. Bezos into a man who hosts Chris Jenner's James Bond themed 70th birthday party at his L.A. home. Sometimes

it seems she's taken the entire culture with her. Now, this is where I'm like, this is PR dark arts. Somebody has paid somebody to make Lauren Sanchez is the culture now happen. You know, like, I don't, I'm not

buying it. No. I know that sometimes we talk about how we live in different internets and don't see the same stuff in our feeds, but when I open up my phone, nobody is talking about how Lauren Sanchez-Bezos is making the culture, like leading culture, this tour to force that is redefining what it means to be a wealthy American. She's just the new wife of Bezos.

Yeah, and I don't care how many times he tries to send her to space. I don't care if he tries to buy her Vogue magazine. I don't care that he's using his obscene wealth to buy the Metball. By the way, I saw these videos of people putting up subway advertisements in the New York Subways, basically being like, Jeff Bezos, this Metball brought to you by the Met, and human suffering. Also, like, if these people are the culture, the culture has not been informed, I guess is what I'm saying.

And also, like, I mean, I could talk all day. They're also tacky as shit. Like, that's my biggest thing is, like, she's now being dressed by Law Roach, who dresses Zendaya. And, like, you know, I love Law Roach, do what you got to do, you know, get your money, I guess. But, like, she look bad. Like, she can't even, she has all this money and she still look bad.

Like, her, like, it's like, all. the money in the world that it's like you still look tacky. The clothes don't the clothes aren't closing. And like, so I just can really see the machinations of trying to make Lauren Sanchez happen. Sort of I think the article is really an attempt to co-brand Lauren Sanchez with joy. Like that's like if there was a thesis of the article, it is that Lauren Sanchez is actually not so bad and really happy. And is that so bad? It's what's so wrong with being happy anymore? Can't anybody be? wealthy and happy anymore? Yeah, I think that's pretty much the main message of the article that it just tries to force on us over and over. Yes, and that it's not just about happiness in her household and in her marriage.

It's also that she's transforming American culture and expectations that now rich people are allowed to ride around in their limousine and furs again, finally. and I just think the larger conversation about who is this for? Because I read the whole article and I left being like, why did they even greenlight this? You know, I think it's incredibly out of step with what people are actually thinking about and feeling right now. I don't know a single person who was like,

is Lauren Sanchez happy? I need to read an article and find out. No one is asking that. No one wants to hear it. No one is curious about it. It's a great question. Who is this for? Maybe it's a very small audience.

I have a little bit of tea for you, which I can tell you who is not interested in this article. And that is Lauren Sanchez's brother. He posted on Medium. I'll just read you a little snippet of it. You know how Medium tells you how long it'll take to read something? Yeah. This is a 101-minute read.

So it's a pretty, it's a pretty, it's a pretty, a pretty, a pretty in-depth piece. It's also a very precise estimate for such a long piece. Yeah, it is. The title is Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez bought New York Times fraud journalist Amy Chosick. There's a little bit more to the title, but that's all I'll read for that, for this portion of it. He is really not happy with Amy Chosick. He says that in 20, 19, after boasting about her unique ability as a special features writer to dedicate lots of time to get a story right, this narcissistic fraud journalist, in quotes, told me she was writing an in-depth expose on my sociopathic sister, Lauren Sanchez, and her then-fiance, mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, admitted liars, cheaters, and unindicted criminals.

he goes on to make an entire slew of allegations both against Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Amy Chozick. Safe to say, Lauren's brother didn't like the piece. Yeah. I looked at that too, and he really had some pretty strong accusation there. He was not a fan.

And his view of Lauren is pretty different from the view that is, put forward in this piece by a lot. He was not focused on joy in his piece. Yeah. In fact, the image that he chooses has Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez was devilhorns. So just to give you a sense of where he falls on the Lauren Sanchez is a joyous person spectrum that should provide it. Well, thanks for going through these stories, Bridget.

If listeners want to let us know their thoughts on any of these stories, they can email us at helloat tangoody. You can leave us comments on Spotify. You can follow Bridget on TikTok or Instagram at Bridget Marie in D.C. Or you can follow the show on YouTube or Blue Sky. It's just the name of the show. There are no girls on the internet. And don't forget to pre-order Bridget's and my audiobook coming out this July is called Love at First Prompt.

You can get it at love at firstprompt.a. And if you take a screenshot and send us your pre-order, we will happily send you. a little card with a sticker and just really appreciate you helping make this first book successful. That is right. Mike, thanks so much for being here. Thanks to all of you 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 tangoody.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 IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

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