Drake Defamation Diss; Trump loses Nobel Prize; Robin Williams’ daughter slams Open AI’s Sora; Google Drops Women; YouTuber kills as ＂vengeance＂ for Charlie Kirk - NEWS ROUNDUP!
00:07:36.140But it really reminds me of a few years ago when a lot of folks were posting those AI-generated, futuristic-looking selfies on Facebook a few years ago.
00:07:46.120I think the reason why people who are using it are saying it's so fun, they're just excited to see themselves and their friends in AI-generated scenarios.
00:07:56.780I don't think that that necessarily means that the kind of content that is coming out of these platforms are interesting, unique, the kind of thing that's actually going to hold someone's attention.
00:08:05.580i just think people are excited because hey that's me and my friend in a scenario it almost
00:08:11.020reminds me of you might remember this do you ever yik yak i do from like the early internet like
00:08:18.420we're talking early 2000s right yes so for folks who don't remember yik yak was this app from
00:08:25.420i want to say 2013 oh apparently it just relaunched in 2021 so maybe we can get back on it
00:08:30.540But you would take a picture of your face and you can put it in these animated cards.
00:08:36.500So I remember making one for Christmas where it was my face and my best friend Kristen's face in the in like dancing animated elf.
00:08:45.320So it looks it looks like our faces were on the bodies of elves and we were dancing and we sent it to all of our friends and we thought it was just hilarious.
00:08:51.800That is genuinely what this reminds me of.
00:08:54.460I think people are just excited to see their own faces and the faces of their friends in these AI generated scenarios.
00:09:01.260When people post them on social media, they post in the handful of posts that I've seen.
00:09:05.880People post them saying, oh, this is so incredible. Can you believe this? Can you believe this?
00:09:09.800And it just reminds me of when people post super hyper specific to them content on social media.
00:09:16.140And of course, they like it because it's about them. But will other people like it? I'm not so sure.
00:09:20.680Yeah, I think you're absolutely right that it probably doesn't have a lot of staying power. Because for one thing, it's just like the novelty of like, oh, look, I can put myself in an AI generated video. It reminds me of something that one of my friends who is a visual artist told me about self portraits one time, how he considers them to be like one of the laziest forms of art.
00:09:44.680art uh you can probably guess which friend this is uh because it's just it's just a subject that
00:09:50.600is always there uh if you don't have any other ideas you can do it uh it's just like yourself
00:09:56.780and i feel that that's a pretty good analogy for this kind of tech that is just like hey look it's
00:10:05.020a picture of you this is like a mirror but there's some cool ai wizardry behind it well don't tell
00:10:12.600that to Frida Kahlo but sure that's true yeah it wasn't my opinion it was his uh I know exactly
00:10:19.160the person that you're talking about also I know uh that's true I should next time I see him I'm
00:10:25.280gonna ask him about Frida but anyway we digress so I've actually seen tech tools that both remove
00:10:30.600and add a Sora AI watermark to any video whether or not it's AI and whether or not it's made with
00:10:38.280Sora because right now when you make these Sora AI videos there's a watermark that kind of moves
00:10:42.580around that's kind of meant to be a way for anybody to see it and say, hey, that's AI,
00:10:47.680even though it has not stopped people from commenting on videos that have that Sora AI
00:10:54.080watermark as if these videos are real, which, again, I think it goes to show that it's not
00:10:58.720just that these AI videos are hard to tell that they are AI, which it is hard to tell.
00:11:03.960And it's not just that they're everywhere. It's that we live in this climate that has
00:11:07.820completely eroded our trust in everything that we see online. And I know people are having fun with
00:11:13.660it. I get it. I don't want to be a party pooper, but I just don't love it. I mean, I'll be a party
00:11:17.840pooper. I feel that's like kind of my role on this show. Yeah, I think all those problems you
00:11:23.100mentioned are also compounded by the ADD nature of social media, where everything is like fast
00:11:30.560cuts super short form videos uh a lot of videos are only a few seconds long and no surprise people
00:11:39.140when they're scrolling through videos are not taking the time to critically evaluate is this
00:11:44.840real or not um before commenting which is unfortunate and we should do that but let's be
00:11:50.640honest a lot of people don't uh i'm certainly guilty of the same and the algorithms uh in a
00:12:00.540everything they can to encourage people to not critically evaluate. They just want to connect
00:12:07.160with feelings and emotions to keep people clicking and engaged. Yes. And you know who is really
00:12:13.300raising the alarm about that right now? Family members of famous dead people because Sora lets
00:12:18.740anybody use the likeness of anyone, public figures, copyrighted characters, whoever.
00:12:23.520So to back up a little bit, OpenAI's first position was that anybody who objected needed
00:12:28.380to opt out of having their likeness used in this way on Sora, which to me is wild and
00:12:33.540truly not how consent works in any other context where you would have to object and opt out.
00:12:40.080Otherwise, it's just understood that you've given your consent.
00:12:43.020But eventually, as Ars Technica reports, OpenAI was forced to change the way that Sora handles
00:14:43.480I saw content where he was eating a crab boil with Malcolm X.
00:14:49.200I saw content where instead of giving his speech, he gives that, do you know, that meme of the kid who is saying, do you ever believe you think you have dreamed that you think you could do anything?
00:14:59.400Have you ever had a dream that you you had your you could you'll do you want you could do so you'll do you you want you want them.
00:15:09.200Where when Martin Luther King gets up to give his speech, that's what he says.
00:15:12.220And the wildest thing to me is that Bernice King, MLK's daughter, says that people send her these videos, not necessarily to try to troll her because they don't like her.
00:15:23.180They send her these videos because they think she might like it.
00:15:27.700And Zelda Williams, daughter of the actor Robin Williams, who died by suicide, shared that she also doesn't like this, that people will send her these AI generated videos of her late father, maybe thinking that she will like it or get a kick out of it.
00:16:46.260It's really pretty gross that this is like one of the big use cases of this technology.
00:16:52.780And you mentioned that in response to threatened copyright lawsuits, OpenAI changed their policy to require copyrighted characters to be opted in.
00:17:00.160And, you know, that seems all well and good for the owners of the copyrights. But that policy is doing nothing to protect the descendants of these recently deceased public figures like Zelda Williams or Steve Irwin's kids. And I think that's a pretty good example of the inhumanity of these tech companies and AI companies in particular, that they'll go out of their way to protect copyrighted assets before protecting real humans.
00:17:25.960I can't help but think of that new law they have in Denmark to try to push back against this. It grants every living person in the country copyright to their likeness. As AI continues to blur the line between fiction and real life, I remain hopeful, I guess, that that kind of solution to protecting people is going to be viable.
00:17:47.680Yeah. And I have to add, and this is a little bit of a tangent, but when my mom passed away last year, my mom was my mom was somewhat of a public figure. She was definitely a public figure in our town. And I don't know. I think that people really need to understand what it feels like when you are grieving someone, someone that you had an intimate, private relationship with that nobody else in the world had.
00:18:12.900even though people might think that they had an intimate relationship with that person,
00:18:17.560they didn't. They, you know, they might have liked them or enjoyed their work or respected
00:18:22.040them, whatever. When your loved one, your deceased loved one, when their image and likeness and
00:18:27.660story is taken in that way, it just really hurts. And it's so confusing. And the fact that there's
00:18:35.480a dynamic where the people who do this and the people that profit from it think that you might
00:18:40.060like it just disgusts me. So I've certainly never experienced this on the level of Zelda Williams
00:18:45.720or Bernice King, but I know a little bit about how invasive that feels. And then the feeling of
00:18:52.380it being out of your control, right? The feeling of, I cannot, I cannot stop this. I cannot stop
00:18:58.380the internet. So, you know how they say like, once something's on the internet, it's on the
00:19:01.620internet forever. Imagine that feeling when the intimacy and the privacy of somebody that you are
00:19:07.320grieving somebody that you have lost, it's taken and you know there's nothing that you could do
00:19:11.240about it. It's just out there in the ether because people decided it belonged to them and it doesn't.
00:19:16.400I think there's really something so wrong about this. And then hearing people say, oh, but the
00:19:22.420platform is a lot of fun. I can see myself and my friends. Look, I made a video where it looks like
00:19:27.280we're doing a funny thing. I don't think that's a fair trade-off, but I also understand that we
00:19:32.720don't have a culture that asks people to understand the stakes of that trade-off. They will only
00:19:36.980understand it if it happens to them. And I hope it doesn't because it fucking sucks. So, yeah,1.00
00:19:41.120I'm very it's a little hard for me to see people just talking about how they don't care about any
00:19:47.780of those issues that you just brought up, Mike, because this platform is fun for a laugh and it
00:19:51.920gives them a dopamine hit and they can make a little bit of content with their friends and get
00:19:54.88020 likes on it or whatever. Boy, yeah, thanks for sharing that. You mentioned consent a little bit
00:20:00.680earlier in this discussion, and I do think that's a good framework to understand this, where I get
00:20:06.820the sense that a lot of these videos that people are making are just for laughs or for trolling
00:20:11.740which is messed up in its own way but it it's really interesting that some of these people
00:20:17.100sending these ai slop videos to the to people that feature their deceased parents thinking that
00:20:24.360they're going to like it it just seems really interesting and that seems like something
00:20:28.020different than just fun and lulls it seems like this technology it's enabling the creators of
00:20:36.260these videos to be in relationship with the deceased person. And, you know, it's certainly
00:20:43.840not new that celebrities have had fans where the fans want to have be in relationship with the
00:20:52.080person. And I think that's a big, you know, it's related to why people listen to podcasts. People
00:20:55.920like to connect with the hosts that they like. And, you know, it can feel like a bit of a
00:21:02.120parasocial relationship and hosts like to connect with their fans as well but there's a separation
00:21:07.280there i think there's a way to look at this technology where it is a way to non-consensually
00:21:12.500break down that separation and be like no we are in relationship whether you or your deceased
00:21:19.320parent consent to it or not and it's gross and and people shouldn't do it and not for nothing
00:21:27.840I promise you that if Zelda Williams or Bernice King wanted to use AI to make this kind of content
00:21:33.460about their dead fathers, they could. You don't need to send it to them. They have access to the
00:21:38.560same internet that everybody else has access to. If they wanted to make these videos, they could.
00:21:43.880Yes, and making them with AI strips the uniqueness of these figures that made them
00:21:52.140the exceptional public figures that they are. Every time you run something through AI,
00:21:56.680It just makes it feel right based on all of the other data that was used to train the model and strips away a little of that uniqueness.
00:22:09.960So in using these people, these deceased figures, it diminishes them, which which is another part of what's, I don't know, not great about it.
00:22:21.780That's what when Zelda says that it's the human centipede of content, that's exactly what she's referring to, I think.
00:23:57.280Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:24:01.820I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:24:06.280I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:24:13.900They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:24:17.800But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:24:21.240They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:24:24.360Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:33.320If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:24:39.260This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:24:51.720I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:24:58.840I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:25:02.420From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:25:08.360It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:25:15.840Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:25:25.460Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:26:41.680They didn't allow us to come to the Community Mixer.1.00
00:26:44.820Women Techmakers was the only community not allowed to join the community event.0.64
00:26:49.980Now they straight kick us out of the platform, removing all access to the resources and new home us to some nonprofit, painting it as a fantastic opportunity and how cool it would be.
00:27:01.160Seven years of being an ambassador, curated and organized more than 40 events, including huge IT conferences with 400 plus attendees, a team of 13 women.
00:27:09.580Everything is now in shambles and demoralized because the big G decided that the community
00:27:14.040that was promoting and supporting women in STEM is too DEI for their brand.
00:27:18.600So that sounded pretty messed up to me.
00:27:20.720A lot of the comments were essentially saying, yes, this has been the vibe.
00:27:25.220You know, they have been, their support has been dwindling.
00:27:27.680So I did some digging and I found a piece that explains that Google officially did hand
00:27:32.200over their women technakers to a nonprofit called Technovation, a nonprofit that says
00:27:37.360that they've spent nearly 20 years empowering young innovators to solve real world problems
00:27:41.560through tech and entrepreneurship. I want to be clear that tech novation sounds good. Like this
00:27:47.440is not to besmirch them at all. They seem genuinely interested in supporting women tech makers. And
00:27:53.100it is entirely possible that they're capable of doing more with this program and taking this
00:27:57.320program further than Google ever did or ever would. So I'm not trying to besmirch them at all.
00:28:03.240But even the name Technovation, like taking identity out of it specifically is telling to me.
00:28:11.400And I also really couldn't find this explained anywhere.
00:28:15.540If this was really meant to be this fantastic thing, this fantastic partnership with these great opportunities,
00:28:21.680like Google told the women tech makers ambassadors that it was going to be for them,
00:28:26.260I would then expect Google to make some comment about it somewhere or announce it on the Google blog.
00:28:31.900However, it seems like Google is keeping this move a little bit quiet.
00:28:37.020When you go to the Women Techmakers site, it now just says,
00:28:40.940Women Techmakers is now with Technovation, a trusted organization dedicated to empowering girls and women in STEM,
00:28:46.660and then redirects you to the Technovation site.
00:28:49.520In a piece called Google Women Techmakers Moves to Technovation But Not Everyone is Cheering,
00:28:55.760For many longtime ambassadors, this transition feels less like a celebration and more like closure for something that had already been quietly fading.
00:29:03.840Several members say the signs were there as early as late 2024, with dwindling support, fewer sponsored events, and an overall sense that Google's enthusiasm for the program was waning.
00:29:14.060That is disappointing. And just the way that this fits so neatly with the larger trends of companies that aren't just retreating from diversity commitments that they have made and have supported for years, but seemingly like performatively running from them to demonstrate to the Trump administration and their allies how anti-woke they are.
00:29:37.440It's just so disappointing and depressing, but I guess it really shouldn't be surprising that these giant tech companies were not as firmly behind those commitments as they claimed to be back when that was the en vogue thing to do.
00:29:57.480yes and when it was the in vogue thing to do they did it with such fanfare such pr pushes they really
00:30:04.300wanted a lot of attention attention for doing this and now that they're retreating they want
00:30:08.620to do it quietly and i just i i don't think that's fair if you said it with your full chest when it
00:30:15.200was in vogue that you were doing this say it with your full chest that you are abandoning these
00:30:20.020commitments that you no longer want to do this and that's what you're going to be doing i don't like
00:31:36.540And if the MO here is to do it quietly, you know, and we still notice some of these big
00:31:44.720things like, you know, supporting a an initiative to organize conferences for women in tech.
00:31:51.180When the funding for that goes away, people notice there's no way to do that, like completely
00:31:55.580behind closed doors because it was a public basing event. But things like employment and
00:32:00.600who gets laid off or not, that's so much harder to see. And so if they're doing the publicly
00:32:05.860visible stuff quietly on the down low, it just makes you have to wonder what is going on with
00:32:13.100things that are less visible like you just mentioned those employment or those layoff
00:32:18.400statistics and also those layoff statistics they're all for uh you know you you mentioned
00:32:25.320that women are more like we're being more likely to be laid off during this round of tech layoffs
00:32:30.520uh black workers were latinx workers are and those are independent effects i have to suspect based on
00:32:38.700decades of evidence uh that the interactive effects the the intersectional effects are even0.63
00:32:48.560greater right where like you can have the independent effect of uh if if you're a black
00:32:53.380tech worker you're more likely being laid off as that revelio lab study found uh if you're a woman0.88
00:33:00.380you're more likely to be laid off than your male peers as that women tech council report uh found
00:33:06.240I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I would bet good money that even above those independent effects, being a black woman in tech right now puts one at even greater risk of layoff than just the independent additive effects of being black and a woman.
00:33:25.440We've seen that so many times in analyses of labor statistics.
00:33:49.660Our tech landscape is better when the people who are making the decisions about the technology that we all use look like the people who will use that technology.
00:33:58.020And, yeah, it's not just about, I know I've said this a million times, inclusion at tech companies is not just the right thing to do ethically, which it is.
00:34:07.720It also makes technology in the entire tech landscape better, safer for all of us, everyone.
00:34:13.980We just talked about Sora from a consent framework, right?
00:34:17.380How it's, you know, from a certain perspective, it is violating consent in a way that is harming people.0.51
00:34:22.880You have to suspect that if most of the people working on that project were women, they might be weighting consent a little bit higher in their policies.0.61
00:34:33.400Oh, it reminds me so much of the story we talked about when Instagram rolled out that feature that displayed all of your stories on an interactive map.0.74
00:34:42.860I think that how they rolled that out would be totally different if they had more women making decisions about that kind of technology.0.83
00:34:50.280The way they, I really will take this to the bank, the way they rolled out a tool that allows you to see on a map where photos were taken, I think if they had more women making decisions, they would have rolled that out a little bit differently because most women will tell you, yeah, I don't really love the idea, even if it's not show it tracking my real-time location, I don't love the idea of giving the internet or whoever a visual map of my frequent locations.0.89
00:35:14.780Yeah. I mean, this conversation is getting pretty close to the core essential premise of this show, which is that women and girls are so often the subject of the Internet, but often left out of decisions about how it is shaped and how it functions.0.57
00:35:38.200Yeah, that reminds me of this thread post that I saw from Kento Morita that says,
00:35:43.000us, we can make anyone, any being in the world with this new technology.
00:36:11.540Yeah, and we see it in the content that is produced.
00:36:15.900We see it in the boards and leadership of tech companies.
00:36:22.200And we see it in the images and the language that makes up the Internet.
00:36:28.420So it's funny that you bring this up because I was reading this study that basically suggests that on the Internet, in technology, all the grown women are actually girls.
00:36:38.380This is according to new research from Solene Delacorte, who is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and the co-author of this study published in Nature, where researchers looked at images and text across some of the most well-trafficked spots on the Internet, ChatGPT, Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, and found that women are regularly depicted as younger than men and devalued in the real world and real world spaces because of it.
00:37:05.460This was such a cool study and just staggeringly impressive in its methods and its scope and its ambition.
00:37:14.860I just wanted to shout that out before you get into it.
00:37:17.560They had over 6,000 human coders rating over 650,000 images.
00:37:25.740It's like a breathtaking amount of data and it's orders of magnitude more data than many studies that look at similar topics.
00:37:33.600We'll link to it in the show notes. And it's and also I want to give him credit for like it is a pretty accessible read as far as studies go.
00:37:41.520I found it quite accessible. Yeah. As our resident podcast scientist, I knew that you would be excited to talk about the methodology.
00:37:49.740How did I know that you were going to have a little big up to the methodology used in the study?
00:37:54.760But I read a summary of the study in Mother Jones called It's True.0.99
00:37:58.340the internet skews the reality of women and men in the workforce. And it really is quite
00:38:03.320interesting. So basically, the researchers analyzed over half a million images from Google search
00:38:08.520in which women consistently appeared younger than men. This serves as a measure of cultural bias
00:38:13.360because it's basically trying to give you content that you are most likely to click on.
00:38:17.200That is from co-author Douglas Gulbolt, who is an associate professor at Stanford. He said,
00:38:22.420that has a way of being prone to bias because it ends up just amplifying whatever most people
00:38:26.540click on. So across the internet, women are most commonly shown in their 20s, while men are usually
00:38:33.320shown in their 40s or 50s. And it's not just that women in these images look younger. Often, they
00:38:40.000are younger. On IMDb and Wikipedia, the researchers were able to collect information about the actual
00:38:45.560ages of the people in these photos that were all over the internet, and that trend really persisted.
00:38:50.600So importantly, this trend does not accurately reflect reality. In both online images and text, the researchers found similar skewed depictions of men and women in thousands of occupations and other categories.
00:39:04.460But in census data across most of those fields examined, there were no age differences among men and women.
00:39:11.460In the few professions where an age gap existed in the census data, the women tended to be older on average than men.
00:39:18.680But the online images presented an inverted picture.
00:39:22.200The pattern we see in the data just does not match reality, Devacourt said.
00:39:26.000The average woman in the U.S. and actually in the world has a higher life expectancy.
00:39:30.380The average woman is older, so what we see in online images and text and videos is wrong.
00:39:36.500So the internet is really out here making us think that the only women around are younger than we actually are.
00:39:43.160Even in situations where the data confirms, okay, women in these specific positions do tend to be older,
00:39:49.000even in those situations, the women are still reflected as younger than we actually are.
00:39:53.640Not just in the United States, globally.
00:39:55.320And since, as the study said, this is all being shaped by our biases, I guess this is just anti-older woman bias being reflected back at us via the Internet.
00:40:05.420It speaks to this assumption that underlies so many of these large language models and AI tools.
00:40:15.280There's this assumption that the trading data, right, they're scraping data from the Internet, all the different corners of these huge corpuses of text and images.
00:40:25.000And I think there's often an assumption that that data accurately represents the real world, the natural world.
00:40:33.400But it definitely does not. It reflects what people want to see on the Internet, what platforms want to serve up to people on the Internet.
00:40:44.220And so it is not at all surprising that, you know, the distribution of women's ages in photos on the Internet is not a perfect match for the distribution of women's ages among the living women on the world.
00:41:02.460These are two different things. The internet, the images that are on the internet are serving a particular purpose. And like in that sense, it's not a new idea. But I think it's very easy to forget that fact when we're talking about training data or a bunch of other phenomena about the internet.
00:41:24.780And I think this study has done a really good job of numerically quantifying that gap, that difference between the real world and the data that exists on the Internet.
00:41:39.720Yeah. And something else about that study is that they really make it clear that even though these images do not reflect reality, it goes on to shape our perception of IRL reality.
00:41:50.920This age gap myth impacts how people view women in the workplace.
00:41:54.680As part of the study, the researchers asked participants to find photos of people working across different professions.
00:41:59.680When the participants selected photos of women, they assumed that the people with that job would generally be younger and have less experience.
00:42:06.380And it is funny to me, just as a woman of a certain age, you know, I do think that people have this idea that when you hit 30 as a woman, you basically dig a grave and crawl into it and die.
00:42:22.440you are pretty much out to pasture. I do think that there is an impression that there aren't
00:42:29.460women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s out here living our dynamic lives that once you hit a certain age
00:42:36.260as a woman, you just go out to a lovely idyllic farm and they give you some overalls and you're0.59
00:42:41.380never to be seen from again. You're certainly not in public. You're certainly not making podcasts
00:42:45.280and living your life and on television. They just give you a pair of overalls, a sun hat,
00:42:50.700some clogs a thriller novel and a mug of cranberry tea and they send you to that pasture i mean
00:42:57.380except for the part of being sent out to pasture that does kind of sound like something that you0.98
00:43:00.640would like no being being a woman of a certain age fucking rocks right you don't first of all0.99
00:43:05.780you don't give a shit what anybody has to say about you you're like whatever you say about me1.00
00:43:08.960go ahead and say it that's fine with me you completely stop giving a shit about the way0.99
00:43:14.440that you present physically all of that all of that stuff is for you and anybody who doesn't0.97
00:43:18.660like I could kick rock, you basically become whoever it was you wanted to be or were at 15 or
00:43:24.04016. But this time around, you're totally cool with it. You've got zero insecurity about it.
00:43:28.360And if you're lucky, you've got a little bit of coin to support whatever that thing is.
00:43:32.740Tea, herbal tea really hits different. I feel sometimes I'm drinking a lot less these days,
00:43:37.280and sometimes a good mug of herbal tea really does hit different. Aging is awesome. And anybody
00:43:42.740who tells you otherwise just hasn't hit that age yet. I've heard people say that this is what they
00:43:47.620love about the Real Housewives franchises, that they show women in this age bracket that you're
00:43:55.200talking about, just demolishing those stereotypes of what they're supposed to be doing with their
00:44:02.020lives. I'm sure that you got that from me because that is exactly what I love about these shows.
00:44:07.220Like, Ramona Singer is almost 70 years old. Where else are you going to see a woman in her late 60s
00:44:14.320throwing back box wine and throw an ass where else are you going to see that i want to see that i0.99
00:44:19.520want i want i think we need reminders that people live full dynamic lives into their 70s we we need1.00
00:44:27.700to dispel this notion that you just fall off a fucking cliff or crawl into a grave once you hit
00:44:33.00030 especially as women and you don't there's not really a lot of places where you get to see what0.97
00:44:37.780that looks like bravo for better or for worse is giving it to us and i like it i don't know i feel
00:44:44.080like every conversation comes back to Housewives with me. You know, I'm like an algorithm. I'm
00:44:49.940just trying to give you what you want. It's talking about Housewives. More after a quick break.1.00
00:45:06.540Let's get right back into it. Okay, I have to give a trigger warning to this story because it is
00:45:12.060very disturbing, but I don't think it's gotten a ton of coverage, so I did want to quickly talk
00:45:16.660about it. And that is a story out of New Jersey, where 17-year-old Vincent Battalaro was charged
00:45:22.460with intentionally hitting and killing two 17-year-old girls, Isabel Salas and Maria
00:45:28.340Neotis, at 70 miles per hour with his car as they rode e-bikes around their house. So before this,
00:45:35.480Vincent shared these rambling live streams. He was a YouTuber who would YouTube about sports,
00:45:42.060but also, according to New Jersey Today, would also talk about his need for vengeance against
00:45:46.900one of these girls. He would post these rants on YouTube Live about false allegations against him,
00:45:53.300including child sexual exploitation material, and this one girl from his school who was causing him
00:45:59.800legal trouble, he said. So he really blamed 17-year-old Maria, one of the girls that he
00:46:05.360would go on to kill, and her mother for, I guess, legal trouble and legal problems he was having at
00:46:10.800school. And he began harassing her, according to her neighbors and family. He delivered pizzas to
00:46:16.620her house, the kind that you're meant to pay cash for upon delivery, as some kind of a bizarre
00:46:21.840revenge for what he says was a critical post on social media that she made about Charlie Kirk
00:46:28.440after Kirk's death. So after he delivered these pizzas to her house, Vincent went on YouTube and
00:46:33.220said, whenever Maria sees the pizza guy come, better think of Charlie Kirk for making fun of0.99
00:46:37.760his fucking death. Stupid ass clown. Just remember that. So he started stalking her, even staking at1.00
00:46:43.940her home in the months before he struck and killed her and her friend Isabella as they rode their
00:46:48.360bikes on the street. So her mom basically had been reporting this creep to the police for harassing
00:46:53.880her daughter for a while. And it just genuinely sounds like nothing was done. According to NJ
00:46:59.380Advanced, Vincent even referenced all of this, the fact that her mom had been reporting this and
00:47:04.860nothing was done on his live stream. He referenced a police investigation several times on his live
00:47:10.040stream this summer saying because I got into her relationship business and now the school and now
00:47:15.440I'm going to tell you all this. Cops got involved in the school, got involved in the shit. Somehow1.00
00:47:19.620they're believing this crap. They suspended me basically indefinitely until they figured it out,0.99
00:47:23.900which makes, again, no sense. But by June, he said the police told him, quote, that the case is going
00:47:29.000to be dismissed and I am not going to be facing any charges, he said during a live stream. He also
00:47:34.040compared himself to an ex-Dodgers pitcher, Trevor Bauer, who was suspended over sexual assault
00:47:39.480allegations back in 2021, but never faced any criminal charges. Vincent said on his live stream,
00:47:44.860quote, I'm basically cleared of any wrongdoing. It says a lot. It says a lot. If they're closing
00:47:49.100the case on me for this and they're bringing me back to school, it says how much of an innocent
00:47:53.000I was in the first place. Now, people are trying to treat me like Trevor Bauer to make me feel like
00:47:57.300the bad person. So I wanted to talk about this, one, because I don't feel like it's gotten enough
00:48:02.360coverage that this person who was holding out a vendetta against one of these girls for comments
00:48:08.180she allegedly made about Charlie Kirk ended up murdering her after harassing her both in person
00:48:13.140and online. And I wanted to bring it up because it is absolutely tale as old as time that a woman0.51
00:48:18.420or a girl reports dangerous behavior that typically has an online component. Nothing is done. It is
00:48:25.680it is belittled it is dismissed it is chalked up to just oh it's just internet whatever and then
00:48:32.640when nothing is done it leads to larger violence that could have been prevented this it sounds
00:48:38.220like to me this was preventable the fact that this girl's mom had been reporting this creep
00:48:42.640for a long time and there's a documented even he talks about this documented history of these
00:48:48.540reports and saying oh they found out i was innocent they dismissed it was nothing there
00:48:51.540I was innocent. I was innocent. Just goes to show that when we do not take online harms against
00:48:57.100women and girls seriously, it has violent consequences. Absolutely. What a tragic story.
00:49:03.720I cannot begin to imagine the rage that that mom must feel that she clocked this guy as a threat.
00:49:12.780She was reporting him to the authorities and nothing was done. And then he made good on that
00:49:19.920threat. It's such a failure. And I don't know enough about this. I don't I don't want to just
00:49:27.200blame the police. I don't want to blame the school. It's hard to know exactly who should be
00:49:32.340responsible and accountable here. But clearly, this was a huge failure. And it's so tragic.
00:49:40.800Tragic and preventable. OK, well, switching gears a little bit, will you allow me to talk
00:49:47.360about drake really quickly yes please we need a palate cleanser after that last story okay so do
00:49:53.380you understand how deep a diss track has to hit for the target of said diss track to try to sue
00:50:00.480over it because that is what drake did so after kendrick lamar's epic diss track not like us that
00:50:08.420basically was a song of the summer where lamar heavily implies that drake is a pedophile and
00:50:15.460And I mean, not for nothing, Drake did have some kind of a friendship with Millie Bobby Brown when she was 14 and he was 31,
00:50:23.440where Millie Bobby Brown said, oh, we're we're buds.
00:51:10.860A federal judge dismissed Drake's defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group over Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us, ruling that a, quote, war of words during a heated rap battle did not violate the law in that some of the case was logically incoherent.
00:51:26.360So Drake filed this suit earlier this year, claiming that UMG, the music company, defamed him by releasing Kendrick Lamar's diss track, which tarred him as a, quote, certified pedophile.
00:51:39.280He likes to call himself a certified lover boy, more like a certified pedophile.
00:51:43.140Drake argued that millions of people took that lyric literally, severely harming his reputation.
00:51:48.520But this week, the judge granted UMG's motion to dismiss that case, ruling that Kendrick's insulting lyrics were the kind of hyperbole that cannot be defamatory because listeners would not think they were statements a fact.
00:52:01.560The judge ruled that, quote, the artist's seven-track rap battle was a war of words that was the subject of substantial media scrutiny and online discourse.
00:52:09.580Although the accusation that the plaintiff is a pedophile is certainly a serious one, the broader context of a heated rat battle with incendiary language and offensive accusations hurled by both participants would not incline a reasonable listener to believe that not like us imparts verifiable facts about the plaintiff.
00:52:26.440This, I mean, it reminds me of the classic example of Bob Marley's track, right?
00:52:33.020Like when he sings, I shot the sheriff.
00:52:34.980No one thinks that he actually shot a sheriff, right?
00:52:39.460So I do have a point that I do feel I need to make whenever we're talking about this Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef,
00:52:44.960which is that ultimately we are talking about allegations of harm against women and girls.
00:52:50.360And I think it's important that that not get lost in all the hoopla and fanfare around diss tracks and all of that.
00:52:56.800I think it's incredibly easy for the fact that we're having a conversation about actual harmful allegations to go overlook because we're talking about something that is so amplified and big.
00:53:07.220So I do think it's important to just name that.
00:53:10.260But also, it reminds me of, I don't even know if I should tell this story on the podcast, but I once got in fairly serious trouble at a job because of a karaoke song choice that I did during a work conference where I sang LL Cool J's Mama Said Knock You Out.
00:53:28.660and i dedicated it to um let's just say some public figures and uh and then i nailed the
00:53:38.420rendition that is my song if you've ever heard that song it's like a it's like a tough one to
00:53:42.880sing but i didn't really think about the lyrics that are actually quite violent and i didn't you
00:53:49.800know when i got up to do this karaoke song i wasn't thinking this is going to be taken as a
00:53:54.800literal promise or a literal threat. After the performance, I'm slapping high fives. I'm feeling
00:54:00.040good. The next business day, the next Monday, my manager calls me into her office and she's got
00:54:06.100the lyrics to Mama Said Knock You Out printed out for me to look at. And I know this song from
00:54:13.140singing it at the gym and from being a fan of LL Cool J, but I had never actually sat down and
00:54:19.220looked at these lyrics, which are quite explicitly violent. Like in the song, LL Cool J explicitly
00:54:25.540says, these are lyrics that will make you call the cops. Like there's one in particular line
00:54:30.440that he says, don't you never ever pull my lever because I explode and my nine is easy to load.
00:54:36.860And I remember my boss reading that to me and thinking like, oh, is this really the kind of
00:54:42.080song you want to be singing on stage with such a gusto? And, you know, she was right. Looking back
00:54:48.480now i can see how it wasn't super appropriate and it wasn't super cool and i understood that but
00:54:52.780yeah i i wish i wish i could i wish i could have pointed to this judge's ruling saying
00:54:57.180a judge has ruled that we don't take song lyrics literally even at a work karaoke event i'm so
00:55:04.060glad you told that story i think it's so funny i've heard that story before and i just love to
00:55:07.740picture uh young bridget like screaming that into the mic i bet you did kill it oh not literally
00:55:13.460killed anything or anybody but like no one is literally wanting to kill anybody the other
00:55:18.500funny thing about this Drake story is that that same judge uh Jeanette Vargas she's been involved
00:55:23.080in a lot of these Trump cases and like most notably earlier this spring was like weighing in
00:55:28.400on whether Doge and Elon Musk could access treasury information uh so she's been involved
00:55:34.960in like really high profile high stakes cases affecting like the way that America functions
00:55:41.500and I just find something funny about the fact that she had to take time out from that
00:55:46.320to weigh in on Drake's hurt feelings I know I wonder if she was like you know those half glasses
00:55:52.160that judges wear kind of at the bottom of their nose is she pouring over these lyrics and watching
00:55:58.080Kendrick Lamar kind of wink wink at the camera during his Super Bowl performance saying oh Drake
00:56:03.060likes a minor you know was she pouring over all of this I'm so curious yeah uh I mean she seems
00:56:10.380like a thorough judge, so I suspect she probably was. That's so funny. The world we live in where
00:56:15.760one day you're making a ruling on high-level Trump administration shenanigans, and the next day you're
00:56:21.600mediating a beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. What a country. Yeah, what a country.
00:56:28.600So Bridget, we got to wrap it up here, but I wanted to promote the mailbag, if that works for you.