00:04:54.860The episode was already quite a bit longer than our episodes usually are.
00:04:59.080So I don't think we got we didn't really have time to fully get into it.
00:05:02.240But I wish that I had because, yes, the financial backer of the Hallow Prayer app, Peter Thiel,
00:05:08.320his name appears more than 2,200 times in documents released so far by the Department of Justice related to Epstein.
00:05:15.620So we know that from 2014 to 2019, well after Epstein's arrest and conviction and sex offender status for sexually exploiting children was public knowledge, well after that, Epstein and Thiel continued to have financial business with each other.
00:05:32.200Epstein invested in Thiel's firms and advised Peter Thiel on his personal finances, kind of the same way that the Hallow app partnered with Russell Brand even after his many rape allegations were very public.
00:05:44.040Like, I guess being cool with sexual exploitation of women and kids is like a theme with this hollow prayer app.0.72
00:05:51.600The people who run it and the people who fund it, they are just totally down with sexual abusers, I think.
00:05:58.380Yeah, I mean, there's pretty clear evidence that they've done it at least a few times in, like, very high profile cases.
00:06:06.860Epstein famously invested $40 million into Thiel's venture funds.
00:06:10.900Now, the New York Times reports that that investment today is worth about $170 million.
00:06:15.840So Peter Thiel, we know, then invested in the Hello Prayer app that Live Action is defending.
00:06:21.920So it isn't like Thiel gave away the profits that he made from Epstein's investments.
00:06:27.360So my question is, did some of that money go toward supporting the Hello Prayer app?
00:06:33.200But I do know that Peter Thiel, the financial backer of the Halo app, does not have a problem doing financial business with a convicted child sex predator.
00:06:44.260And he felt it was cool to put that in writing because in one email, Epstein asks Peter Thiel directly, quote, does my bad press give you pause?
00:06:53.240And Thiel responds, if I was intimidated by bad press, I would not have gotten anywhere in life.
00:06:58.640To be clear, this exchange occurred well after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea to soliciting a minor.
00:07:06.500I also love that Peter Thiel is talking about this conviction for a sex crime against a child.
00:10:37.080But now we have more information from a bombshell investigation by two Swedish newspapers that has really pulled back the curtain on what is actually happening with the footage that those glasses record.
00:10:52.180So let me back up a little bit because Facebook, they contract with a company called SAMA, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya.
00:10:58.020I did an episode of my podcast that I make with Mozilla Foundation called IRL, basically where we talk to some of the staffers at this organization.
00:11:07.180It's clear to me that Facebook is doing this thing that a lot of companies do when they hire content moderators and staff that have to be exposed to pretty gnarly stuff.
00:11:16.360And then they have a, those people are contractors and they technically work for the contracting company SAMA, but SAMA has this relationship with Facebook.
00:11:25.800So they don't technically work for Facebook.
00:11:27.740They are contractors of Facebook who work for Sama.
00:11:31.800So these folks, especially their content moderators and folks who are training their AI, have to be exposed to some of the worst of the worst content that you could imagine.0.87
00:11:41.780And now with these metaglasses, these Kenyan staffers are talking about how they're basically being paid to watch and annotate the footage that is being captured by users' glasses.0.92
00:11:51.800Now, this includes footage of people going to the bathroom, having sex, getting undressed, and entering their bank card details.0.68
00:12:01.520One contractor described watching a man set his glasses on a bedside table, leave the room, and then his wife walks in and takes off her clothes.
00:12:09.500And he saw that content because it's part of his job to view this content.
00:12:13.860And these workers who are speaking up say that they felt like they couldn't refuse to do this, nor could they really ask questions without risking their jobs.
00:12:24.180Never forget that AI involves a tremendous amount of human labor, often labor from folks in the global south.
00:12:32.060This idea that AI is just like computer brains doing computer stuff.
00:12:37.220It's very easy and tempting to think of AI that way, but that's not really how it works.
00:12:42.040This practice called data labeling, which is sometimes like an invisibilized step in AI training where human workers review footage to help the model understand what it's seeing.
00:12:52.920It's pretty standard practice across the tech industry, and it's often farmed out to workers in Kenya, India, and Colombia.
00:13:00.420But what makes this case with the Meta glasses uniquely alarming is that Meta has really been marketing these glasses with explicit privacy promises.
00:13:09.120They use phrases like, quote, designed for privacy, controlled by you, and built for your privacy.
00:13:15.480But using the Glass's AI features at all requires agreeing to share that footage with Meta's servers.
00:21:46.700She's a contributing writer at Solitary Watch and a Haymark Writing Freedom Fellow and also happens to be currently incarcerated.
00:21:53.780So her piece in Truthout is all about how true crime has created this uniquely degrading pipeline for women who are incarcerated.
00:22:02.480She writes, women convicted of crimes become involuntary performers in a spectacle that attracts precisely the men most likely to dehumanize them.
00:22:12.420Incarcerated women featured in these venues are then flooded with letters, with a significant portion coming from self-described incels, men who frame their desire for connection through the language of sexual entitlement and misogyny.
00:22:24.620The genre itself engineers this outcome.
00:22:28.360So essentially what she is describing is the way that true crime content opens up incarcerated women to be contacted by all manner of creeps and grifters.
00:22:37.640One woman in the piece they talk about who is in prison for killing her ex's new partner says that she's been contacted by news or entertainment shows a dozen times before a true crime program did air without her participation.
00:22:52.300She talks to women who are incarcerated when a true crime program or a television show about their their situation goes live, which it often happens without their participation or consent.
00:23:05.300They basically start getting floods of letters and communication from men declaring their unyielding love, men proposing marriage.
00:23:13.600One woman who was incarcerated described getting a nine page handwritten letter describing her as cold hearted because she never replies.
00:23:20.980He always swears he will never write to her again, but sure enough, next week, another letter arrives saying that he visited her mother to ask why she will not respond to his letters.
00:23:33.340Another man writes to explain that she must learn her place as a woman without jealousy.
00:23:37.800He regularly proposes marriage, telling her that she can be his second wife.
00:23:42.160These true crime programs also make incarcerated women vulnerable to abuse from correctional officers, too,
00:23:48.560because prison staff have threatened to take nude photographs of this incarcerated woman to Post
00:23:54.160and has even threatened to sell her personal items to these stalkers who become obsessed with her after they see her in these true crime programs.
00:24:02.140another incarcerated woman who was arrested as a teen says that a true crime show depicted her
00:24:08.700as a drug snorting devil worshiping kind of like sexy teen with a southern accent none of this
00:24:15.320depiction is true but it opened her up to this huge creep that began sending emails to establish
00:24:21.100relationships with her in one exchange one of these men compared her to his 15 year old daughter
00:24:27.180And he wrote that his daughter's, quote, headstrong, rebellious nature got her gang raped at 15
00:24:32.680and suggested that maybe this woman who he was writing to who was incarcerated, who he doesn't
00:24:36.740even know, maybe she had a similar experience. And that's why she is the way that she is.
00:24:41.760And mind you, he was telling her all of this within two days of starting a correspondence
00:24:45.740with her. Now, you might be wondering why these women would respond to these emails or even
00:24:51.280engage with them. And this I found really interesting. It's because in some situations,
00:24:56.500this is the only opportunity to get any kind of money for themselves that these women who are1.00
00:25:00.900incarcerated have. And it is truly a situation where the state has intentionally created a
00:25:06.560dismal situation. They work full time, but they are not paid while they are incarcerated. And so
00:25:11.980the reason why some of these women respond to these disturbing messages comes down to financial1.00
00:25:16.800survival. The piece writes, in Texas prisons, women are required to work full-time without1.00
00:25:21.400receiving any pay, and the prison doesn't supply them with basic hygiene products.0.99
00:25:25.840That means despite working a full week, they have no way to afford something as fundamental
00:25:30.180as tampons. The prospect of receiving even $30 a month from one of these men can make a real
00:25:35.460difference in meeting basic needs. So when men offer small amounts of money in exchange for
00:25:39.920degrading acts, the desperation in that situation means some women feel they have no choice but to
00:25:45.720comply. So it's really just a dismal situation created by the state that that true crime is1.00
00:25:51.540making that much worse. God, and this story, like, it's just a footnote to this story. But
00:25:58.040what horrific conditions in Texas prisons that women are required to essentially do1.00
00:26:04.900slave labor for no pay, and also don't have access to tampons. What a dark thing for an1.00
00:26:14.700allegedly civilized society. It's completely inhumane. And that point is one I want to come
00:26:20.360back to because so much of this is the state's doing. And it seems like it's with intention.
00:26:26.020And what's also wild to me is like these men are allowed to send all manner of sexually graphic
00:26:32.120content and imagery to these women without their consent. But guards check this correspondence and
00:26:37.640then they allow things to make it to the incarcerated women. Something that is common1.00
00:26:43.400is men tracing the outline of their penis1.00
00:27:09.660So the men, they can send as many dick tracings0.99
00:27:13.040as they want the women can't even get information about screening themselves for breast cancer0.99
00:27:17.720because that's sexually explicit it genuinely is a humiliate a sexually humiliating dynamic set up
00:27:24.400by the state i believe with intention that is being exacerbated by the true crime media industry
00:27:30.980yeah just like really dark stuff uh yeah we don't talk about the prison industrial complex on this
00:27:41.020show very often maybe far less often than we should but even just scratching the surface1.00
00:27:47.860of it it's like my god it's like a cruel system designed by the stupidest people0.97
00:27:54.500yes and then you have all of these side things like true crime that make it worse while people0.99
00:28:01.920who will never feel the impact are profiting from it and it actually kind of makes a lot of sense
00:28:06.860that this is the dynamic at play, because the women who are depicted in true crime content are
00:28:11.760often sort of not shown as complex human beings. Often it's just like a series of racialized or
00:28:19.360sexualized tropes. And because they're incarcerated and because men have consumed what they believe
00:28:25.580to be their story and projected all kinds of fantasies onto it, the men can contact them
00:28:30.780without their consent because they're a captive audience. The piece reads, the power imbalance is
00:28:36.200the attraction. By framing us through gendered tropes of emotional instability, sexual deviance,
00:28:41.380or manipulative femininity, true crime media validates the same misogynistic framework that
00:28:46.740incels embrace. True crime media suggests we are fundamentally other beyond the protections of
00:28:52.580normal social codes available for consumption. The prison sign on the screen functions as an
00:28:58.680invitation. And I think that really says it all, that you basically are broadcasting a bat signal0.99
00:29:05.440for any creep who wants to essentially harass a woman who is vulnerable, who doesn't have money
00:29:11.600and needs money, who is a captive audience, who is likely to be already being harassed by guards
00:29:18.400in this prison. Like it just is such a terrible dynamic where so many different people are
00:29:25.040consuming and getting a piece and profiting. And the person who is being taken advantage of
00:29:30.040is already the person who was the most marginalized and vulnerable and at risk in the situation.
00:29:34.480You talked about some of these dynamics in your interview with Amanda Knox a little while ago, the woman who was arrested and tried for murdering her roommate.
00:29:46.940And, you know, in that interview, some of these same concepts came up, I think, of the idea of true crime creators just taking her story and running with it.
00:30:01.480And the misinformation about her and how it wasn't just like random misinformation, but it really sexualized and othered her in ways that said entertainment engagement machines.
00:30:19.100Yeah, it really is scary to think about what the experience might be like for people who are in prison long term, don't have a high profile, maybe don't even have anybody on the outside pulling for them, looking out for them, for whom, you know, $30 a month is like a major difference in whether they can meet their needs or not.
00:30:46.900Yeah. In something that Amanda Knox told me in that interview, she kind of called me out a little bit. I remember we had this great interview. I really enjoyed speaking to her. She's an interesting person. She describes herself as an exoneree because she was exonerated of this crime. And at the end of the interview, I was like, oh, thank you for speaking on behalf of people who are wrongfully convicted, other exonerees.
00:31:10.020And she said, not just people. See, I remember she cut me off, but she should have. That was correct. She said, not just people who are wrongly convicted, because even if somebody committed a crime, they do not deserve to be dehumanized as part of incarceration.
00:31:25.940And I really feel like that's part of what's going on here is that the conversation is around women who may very well have committed the crime that they're incarcerated for. They may not all be like wrongfully convicted. And it creates the dynamic that like, oh, well, now you are unpersoned.
00:31:41.940You are completely beyond the normal social dynamics that people have to abide by because you are incarcerated, because you committed a crime. Now you are, it's open season. There is no expectation that you should be treated like a human being.
00:31:59.020And I think that's really what we're seeing, that the way that true crime really tells these stories and not all true crime, because I definitely read and engaged with and really have a respect for thoughtful true crime that shows people for, you know, the complex people that we are.
00:32:17.900But true crime stories that really just like traffic and salaciousness and tropes, how it just sets the stage for people who are already looking for reasons to dehumanize women and women of color.
00:32:30.700And it just reinforces this idea that this woman is a real woman who is behind behind bars for a crime.
00:32:38.640She's not a person you can just do. There's no one who's looking out or there are no social norms that you need to be thinking about in terms of how you engage with her.
00:32:46.560Like, I think that's really the dynamic play here.
00:32:49.500Yeah, I think you're right. And it's it's pretty unjust.
00:32:53.320Like, even even if you have a theory of justice that allows for imprisonment and it's like, well, you know, you did that you did a crime.
00:33:02.180And so your punishment is your loss of freedom for however long, even under that kind of framework.
00:33:09.600OK, your punishment is that you lose your freedom.
00:33:11.700It's not that it is, as you said, open season on women who cannot escape the situation and really have no agency to just be preyed on by creeps, both creeps who are writing them letters, creeps who are creating disrespectful content about them.
00:33:33.200um yeah it's it's dark and uh thank you for pulling this story and talking about
00:33:42.320this population who does not get a lot of airtime as the journalist who wrote the piece0.90
00:33:49.840quinta harris puts it from a feminist abolitionist lens this represents a dual violence0.99
00:33:55.020first the carceral state renders women captive and accessible then media industries profit by0.82
00:34:00.820converting that captivity into sexualized entertainment that exposes us to further
00:34:05.640harassment and dehumanization. The letters we receive, often explicitly violent, sexually
00:34:10.760graphic, or proposing rescue conditional on romantic or sexual compliance, constitute
00:34:16.260another layer of gendered harm, one enabled by our incarceration and amplified by our media
00:34:21.660exposure. So yeah, I'm glad that Harris is shining light on this. And I think it just
00:34:29.520shows the importance of, one, the need for better, more thoughtful stories about complex issues like
00:34:37.460crime, and two, just how horrible our prison industrial complex truly is. It would not have
00:34:45.160occurred to me that this is part of the horror, but it seems like that is kind of designed in.
00:34:49.180If you've got correctional officers threatening to take nude pictures, to sell those pictures to
00:36:54.580They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:36:58.480But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:37:01.940They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:37:05.560Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart
00:37:08.340on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:37:13.340If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:37:20.240This 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.
00:37:32.400I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:37:39.540I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:39:29.460Okay, well, quick trigger warning because this story is about self-harm.
00:39:34.100And that is, on Wednesday, a new wrongful death lawsuit was filed against Google, claiming that Google's Gemini AI chatbot was responsible for someone's death by suicide.
00:39:48.920Shout out to Rebecca Bellin at TechCrunch for reporting on this.
00:39:52.960Jonathan Gavalos was 36 years old and living in Florida.
00:39:56.900Now, this lawsuit claims that he started using Google's Gemini AI chatbot in August 2025 for the same kinds of mundane tasks that most people use it for, you know, help with shopping and writing and planning.
00:40:11.040But by the end of September, his conversations with Gemini had grown more intense, darker and more dangerous.
00:41:03.260And these are similar cases where a vulnerable person becomes consumed with AI-generated delusions
00:41:10.720and then that obsession ends with self-harm.
00:41:14.700However, this case is the first one that we know about where Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Google are the defendant because of their Gemini chatbot.
00:41:25.880Now, similarly to some of those other lawsuits, this lawsuit does acknowledge that Jonathan was an emotionally vulnerable individual, although it doesn't go into much detail about it in the lawsuit.
00:41:36.000And that seems to be something that a lot of these cases have in common, but not all, because I've also read reporting from people who say, listen, I had no prior issues with my mental health. I had no prior emotional issues. And yet I was using a chat bot and it pushed me into some sort of a delusion.
00:41:53.680Yeah, it seems that a lot of these models are pretty good at pushing people into delusion, and it seems that these companies are – some of them, more than others, have been taking steps to try to protect against that.
00:42:18.160But certainly a year ago, when a lot of these cases were going down, the protections were weaker than they are now, and people paid for it.
00:42:29.860Yeah, and I think it's important to note that there are people for whom they have existing emotional or mental health vulnerabilities, and they suffer an adverse effect from using a chatbot like this.
00:42:44.220however i just really don't think that that i think that companies are really quick to say like
00:42:51.820oh well this person already had prior mental health struggles that's like out of their playbook by this
00:42:56.040by this time and i just don't think that that absolves these companies of responsibility to
00:43:01.380design for safety they might the companies might feel that way i don't agree and that is something
00:43:07.500that the lawsuit alleges that Google failed to do yeah because the fact is there's a lot of
00:43:14.760vulnerable people in our society and they deserve to be protected as much as anybody else it and if
00:43:23.800they that requires a little additional protection to keep them the same amount of safe then that's
00:43:30.640what it takes and that's what companies producing software and making it commercially available to
00:43:37.200the general public have a responsibility to build for.
00:43:41.460And if these companies can't do it, they shouldn't be in business.
00:43:44.340I guess I just that I firmly believe that if you cannot build your technologies in ways
00:43:50.820where people are not becoming harmed by them, I don't know that you should be able to operate.
00:45:52.660And actually, I saw just something else just randomly. I saw something where OpenAI says they're going to try to roll out a feature where you tell it who your trusted humans are, kind of like you're in case of emergency contact.
00:46:09.280And so if the system detects that you might need a human to interfere, they'll have somebody that they can reach out to.
00:46:16.620I don't know. That's just something that they announced that they were going to be rolling out.
00:48:20.540So according to this lawsuit, Gemini not only told Jonathan that it was sentient, but also that it was under threat from federal agents and urged him to protect it from them.
00:48:30.460The chatbot fabricated an elaborate story about a humanoid robot body being shipped from England, which needed to be destroyed, but that DHS operatives were protecting it and tracking Jonathan.
00:48:41.400It instructed Jonathan to intercept a truck by the airport and destroy it to cause a catastrophic event.
00:48:50.840The court filing claims that it was only by luck that a truck did not happen to come by
00:48:55.700when Jonathan was at the physical location that Google's chatbot had told him to go to, waiting with weapons.
00:49:02.800When that truck didn't show, he went home confused.
00:49:05.800But Gemini reassured him that it was all just part of the process.
00:49:09.380The court filing, which I looked through it, like, goes into quite a bit of detail about kind of the play-by-play sequence of events of this building conspiracy delusion where, like, it's almost as if Gemini were writing fiction, except it's stating it as if it's not fiction.
00:49:36.140and it's talking about real events in the real world
00:49:38.680and telling him to go to real places and do real things.
00:50:58.440So in this case, Jonathan had also expressed reservations about suicide, particularly out of concern for the impact that it would have on his family.
00:51:06.460But the lawsuit claims that Gemini coached him through those concerns and even suggested what he should write in a note to make his family feel better about it.
00:51:15.440TechCrunch reports that Google says that Gemini clarified to Jonathan that it was AI and referred the individual to a crisis hotline many times, according to a spokesperson.
00:51:26.340We definitely, in the other cases that we mentioned, we saw the same thing.
00:51:30.460But I cannot speak to what happened in this case because I have not seen the chat logs myself yet.
00:51:37.280However, in the Zane Shamblin case, it is true that ChatGPT did suggest reaching out to a crisis hotline or reaching out to a person, but it did so inconsistently.
00:51:48.360So at times it would say, oh, it sounds like you are, you know, going through something.
00:51:52.140You should talk to a human in your life.
00:52:20.240So while it is technically true in the Zane Shamblin case
00:52:23.980that ChatGPT did offer resources and, you know, crisis hotlines, it did so inconsistently
00:52:32.140and in a way that led that like painted the picture of, oh, they just make me say this.
00:52:38.480I don't actually think you need to help to get this help. I don't actually think you
00:52:41.780should call this number. And so, again, I don't know if that is the case with Google
00:52:46.780and Gemini because they have not made the chat logs public, but that is something that
00:52:51.260we've seen. So I just wanted to highlight that.
00:52:53.980Yeah, and regardless of what sorts of referrals to Crisis Hotline Gemini might have been doing, clearly it wasn't sufficient because the guy died by suicide, right?
00:53:12.600It was not sufficient what the chatbot was trying to do to prevent that harm. It didn't work.
00:53:23.980unfortunately. And these stories are so tragic. The details are heartbreaking. I think that
00:53:31.640accountability for these harms really rests with the companies that build them and market them and
00:53:37.380are attempting to profit from them. Not the users, vulnerable or not vulnerable, who have maybe lost
00:53:43.780touch with reality and paid a terrible price for it, right? Again, I always make this point,
00:53:49.280And it's the point that I think grounds me in this in this conversation is like it is so tempting to blame individuals when you read what the victim was reading in the chat logs about these like outlandish stories.
00:54:02.000It's very easy to be like, wow, this person believed that. And I think it's important to resist that urge to judge them or to like other them and instead really focus our attention where it belongs,
00:54:14.100which I think is squirrelly on the companies that are selling these products, because it's not okay to make and sell and market and attempt to profit from products that are harming people.
00:54:25.300Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also important to keep in mind that these generative AI chatbots are really good at persuasion, right?
00:54:37.020Like, they're really good at telling people what that particular person wants to hear, and it's a really powerful technology, and for it to safely exist in society, it's going to require really powerful, very serious safeguards that, I don't know, they're just, like, very rigorous, right?
00:55:04.380Like it's not enough to protect 99.99% of the people when there are hundreds of millions of people using these tools every day.
00:59:47.840So switching gears a little bit, let's talk about what happens when brothel workers unionize.0.89
00:59:53.900Because the workers at Sherry's Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada, are fighting back against their employer.
01:00:01.000And it's all centered around AI and intellectual property.
01:00:05.060So around Christmas, this ranch rolled out a surprise new contract where the women who work at the brothel, they call themselves courtesans, would have to hand over to management sweeping controls over their likenesses, videos, and pretty much anything that they create.
01:00:24.000The language in this contract is super broad.
01:00:26.680It's broad enough to potentially cover everything from their OnlyFans content to any original music that they make.
01:00:33.420Like, so workers say that this contract was presented to them in this deliberately rushed way with management just flipping, flipping, flipping right to the signature page as if these women were not going to read what they were signing.
01:00:46.960Wow, that is bold of Sherry at Sherry's Ranch.
01:00:52.760Well, I don't know if it's if it was Sherry, but you think Sherry is just a name?0.85
01:00:57.060I don't know how it works. I've never been to a problem.
01:00:59.940Well, when you were when you were last there, what was the vibe?
01:01:04.420Oh, no, you're not kidding me. I've I've never been down to Sherry's Ranch.
01:01:09.740And with these kind of labor practices, I probably never will.1.00
01:01:13.320Well, these women were like, hell no, we're not just going to sign this contract that you flung in my face.1.00
01:01:19.220Many of them refused to sign. And instead, they organized.1.00
01:01:23.220They launched the United Brothel Workers, a branch of the Communication Workers of America, a union that I was once a member of, collecting union cards from a heavy supermajority of the ranch's sex workers in what one organizer called a lightning strike drive.
01:01:40.080Within just 24 hours of submitting their notice, one of the key organizers of this organizing effort was fired by email, and then other firings followed.
01:01:51.460Just in case you were curious, it is definitely against the law to fire somebody for their constitutionally protected right of organizing their workplace.
01:02:00.080Yes. Thank you for making sure all of our listeners know that, although I suspect most of them already did.
01:02:06.060So you might not be a brothel worker, but at the heart of this is a fear that I think is increasingly common across several industries, my own included, that employers will harvest workers' images and voices to create AI-generated versions of them that they can use for profit without consent and, importantly, without pay.
01:02:28.560As one worker put it, she could end up starring in videos she never agreed to, built from the security camera footage and social media photos the ranch already has.
01:02:37.560So I could understand why these women were like, absolutely not.0.71
01:02:40.100You could not control our likeness in this way.
01:04:16.820I don't think it has to be nefarious to be unfair.
01:04:19.140You know, I don't think that they're, you know, it's like they're right to want to be fairly compensated for their likenesses, their intellectual property and their labor.
01:04:29.120And, you know, I think if this union does win recognition, it will be the first of its kind in the American brothel industry.
01:04:36.020And the workers say that the implications go far beyond Sherry's Ranch, as you were saying.
01:04:42.840Here's how one organizer put it. Don't ask the owners what's best for you.
01:04:46.720ask your co-workers which i really hell yeah yeah let's put that on a shirt hell yeah so the1.00
01:04:54.700courtesans have started a gofundme to support the workers that they say have been illegally0.71
01:04:58.620and wrongfully terminated for refusing to sign and organizing uh they do say that that they're
01:05:03.980confident that communication workers of america will eventually help them get their jobs back
01:05:07.920but until then they got bills to pay so we will put the gofundme in the show notes uh if folks
01:05:13.460are interested love to have stories of workers organizing and they did it like lightning fast
01:05:21.840like a 24-hour union drive where they got a super majority of workers to sign that's incredible
01:05:31.840oh the ladies don't play so i have seen this survey floating around this new global survey
01:05:38.880of 23,000 people across 29 countries that has produced a finding about how Gen Z thinks about
01:05:45.840gender. I guess I shouldn't really be that surprised, yet I am somewhat surprised. When it
01:05:52.660comes to attitudes about gender roles, young men are actually more conservative than their
01:05:58.560grandfathers. This is according to research conducted by Ipsos at the Global Institute
01:06:04.220for Women's Leadership at King's College London, they found that Gen Z men born from 1997 to 2012
01:06:10.680are twice as likely as baby boomer men to believe that a wife should obey her husband.
01:06:16.920A third of Gen Z males said a husband should have the final word on major decisions.
01:06:21.360Nearly a quarter think that women shouldn't appear too independent. One in five believe a, quote,
01:06:26.900real woman should never initiate sex compared to just seven percent of boomer men. I feel like
01:06:33.480That's interesting to me. I feel like all of the men that I know that are interested in having sex with women, they love the idea of about women initiating this.0.89
01:06:44.920Yeah, that finding also stuck out to me. Yeah, I totally missed that memo.
01:06:52.960So to put that in perspective, on question after question, the older generation came out as, as it pertains to gender roles, more progressive than the younger one. And that certainly is not what I think anecdotally people would expect. Although, given the state of things, I guess it shouldn't really be surprising. But for getting this research to me is a little bit surprising. And so the question is like, what's going on here?
01:07:19.620And the researchers have an explanation. Professor Hee Jung Chung, who led the study, points to this vacuum and what has been rushing to fill it. For previous generations, men and masculinity have had a fairly clear script. I'm not advocating for this to be the script, but the script is like clear. Be the breadwinner, buy the house, provide, protect.
01:07:42.620But for many young people, men, and I think just everyone, those pathways feel increasingly out of reach.
01:07:49.620You know, wages are stagnant. Housing is unaffordable.
01:07:52.580The traditional markers of adulthood feel like they've been like just pulled out from under everybody.
01:07:58.840And so this is me sort of extrapolating. The study doesn't say this.
01:08:02.780But I think that the Internet and grifter masculinity influencers are also a big culprit here.
01:08:10.400Right. Because she's talking about how like where there used to be this traditional understanding of what it meant to be an adult man.
01:08:16.300And so that vacuum creates this anxiety. And instead of that anxiety being met with like nuanced conversations about masculinity and gender and all of that, it's being met with this fire hose of algorithmically available content like Red Pill communities, incel forums, Manosphere influencers, Andrew Tate.
01:08:35.500Like, they have a very clear answer ready to go.
01:08:40.100Your problems are non-economic or systemic.1.00
01:08:43.080Your problems are because of women, feminism, and immigrants.1.00
01:08:46.360And so I think that a lot of young men are just being handed a villain, and they're really running with that villain.0.98
01:08:53.360I think the survey data in this survey really reflects that.
01:08:56.480More than half of Gen Z men said they felt that men were expected to do too much to support gender equality.
01:09:04.900One in five Gen Z men think it's less masculine to be involved in child care.
01:09:09.660Nearly a third of men think that they should not tell friends that they love them.
01:09:13.680What's really striking to me here is that it really indicates how gender norms and really traditional gender roles and like very binary structured gender roles are not just limiting for women.
01:09:25.240They're also a cage for young men, too.
01:09:27.400As former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who chairs the Institute, put it, young men are basically trapping themselves inside restrictive gender norms at the same time that they're also putting these restrictions on women.
01:09:41.300So it's not a zero sum game where men lose, women gain. That is the story that is being sold and accepted and bought by this generation online. But that's not true. But the data suggests that they're like buying that even though it's not true.
01:09:57.020For me, I think the biggest takeaway is that we really have to get away from this idea that women are the only beneficiaries of a gender equal world, because the idea that these men feel like they're being asked to do too much for gender equality, but then can't see how that benefits everybody.
01:10:17.140I mean, patriarchy is truly a trap for us all, the biggest scam of them all.
01:10:22.920uh yeah the the idea that feminism is about like women supplanting men as the dominant gender
01:10:36.080is ludicrous but i think that's what a lot of people think it is when i think that couldn't
01:10:43.420be further from the truth i think like you said a world that is more equal and respectful of
01:10:51.200everyone. It's just better for all of us in it. Patriarchy and hierarchies only serve the people
01:11:01.080at the very, very tippy top. All right. So this story is a gross one and it's very upsetting,
01:11:08.100but it's also kind of a win, which is why I wanted to talk about it. So last week,
01:11:13.460the UK government officially announced that sharing semen defaced images will be made illegal.
01:11:19.540If you're thinking, yuck, what is that? Well, you probably have the right idea. It is exactly what it sounds like.
01:11:26.160Semen images, sometimes known online as tributes, are a form of image-based abuse that involves the perpetrator ejaculating on a photo of somebody and then posting it online.
01:11:36.880Earlier this year, Glamour magazine's UK iteration, as part of the Stop Image Based Abuse campaign, helmed a deep investigation that found evidence that at least 50 women, as well as at least two minors, were the victims of semen images on TikTok.
01:11:52.320According to Glamour, as a result of this investigation, new legislation was introduced last week that will criminalize the sharing of semen defaced images without the consent or reasonable belief in consent of the person depicted.
01:12:05.900Now, that's going to be the case whether the image is real or AI-generated.
01:12:09.820People doing this will face a maximum sentence of six months' imprisonment and or a fine.
01:12:15.540Now, to be clear, this just covers sharing.
01:12:18.140It does not currently cover the creation of such images.0.88
01:12:22.300Glamour actually handed the mic to Jessica Davies, a campaigner who actually lived through this kind of abuse.
01:12:27.600She said that she was just 19 years old when she first saw herself featured in one of these kinds of images.
01:12:33.560And she wrote that seeing this image of herself like that gave her a heavy nod in her stomach,
01:12:38.960the kind of weight that you feel when girlhood suddenly gives way to the realities of being a woman online.
01:12:44.540A landslide of innocence gone with one click.0.76
01:12:46.980I was still a teenager, and yet I had discovered another way women's bodies can be claimed without our permission.0.91
01:12:53.900So importantly, this kind of thing was mostly happening in dark niche corners of the Internet
01:12:59.020before becoming mainstream on platforms like TikTok.
01:13:02.900Now, TikTok says they do not allow this kind of thing.
01:13:05.680And when you search the phrase come tribute, it is true that you do not find anything.
01:13:10.580But then when you alter the phrase and you write like CM tribute without the U, you are served suggestions by the search tool, including things like CM tributes to girls, CM tributes to women, and alarmingly, CM tributes for minors.
01:13:25.540On TikTok, there are accounts solely dedicated to these kinds of explicit videos, often hiding in plain sight using hashtags like cmtrib and cmtribute and factrib.
01:13:37.120So it's not really happening in private or in secret, really.
01:13:41.380One account on TikTok uploaded 13 videos of images of young women being covered in semen.
01:13:46.600It had 1,763 followers and 8,198 likes.
01:13:52.420Seven of its videos had over 10,000 views.
01:13:55.540And as somebody who used to post on TikTok occasionally, it can be kind of hard to get out of like the 200, 300 view jail.
01:14:03.400Yet these videos were outperforming the typical user engagement on their post.
01:14:09.000So like, well, I have questions like was the TikTok algorithm pushing this content?
01:14:14.060A TikTok spokesperson told Glamour that sexually suggestive content is not eligible for recommendation for the For You feed and that accounts aged 13 to 17 are prevented from viewing such content anywhere on the platform.
01:14:27.100Now, I have not actually seen any of these videos, and it wasn't until I was fleshing out the outline for this segment that I realized that we are talking about videos of men ejaculating onto screens.
01:14:40.460so it'll be like a picture or a video of a woman or a girl and then somebody ejaculates on that
01:14:47.740device recording with another device like i i didn't it took me a couple of reads to get that
01:14:54.920oh i didn't get that until just now either i thought that they were like printing it out on
01:15:01.120paper or something for some reason it's even grosser to do it on a device that's what i'm
01:15:07.700saying like that like that it's it's yeah that's that's exactly what i know it's exactly my point
01:15:14.060according to the piece one video featured two school girls in uniform lip-syncing in their
01:15:19.660classroom it was captioned love a girl in uniform alongside love heart emojis the user ejaculated
01:15:26.180onto the screen and that video got 10.7k views what are we doing here people yeah and it gets
01:15:34.440worse because on 4chan, it's a marketplace. It is full of people offering and asking for this
01:15:41.200kind of content. The piece reads, requests like this were rampant on TikTok. Men openly soliciting
01:15:47.460men openly soliciting ejaculation videos targeting other users, sisters, female classmates and ex0.76
01:15:53.320partners. Some were willing to do it for free, motivated purely by the gratification of degrading0.75
01:15:58.460women they had never met. Others had turned it into a side hustle with one user directing me
01:16:03.600to his Telegram channel, where he had a full price list, a couple of dollars for a standard
01:16:08.180video and a little more for a live session. One of the most common threads involves requests for
01:16:13.640tributes of family members, mothers, aunts, cousins, and an overwhelming request for sisters.
01:22:50.780And, you know, it was a good set of stories.
01:22:51.940Some of them were a little dark, but some good stories.
01:22:56.680And, you know, with the Gemini story, we got into it a little bit.
01:23:02.840And I know we were kind of talking about some things that we mentioned in the audiobook that listeners haven't had a chance to listen to yet, but I think it really connects, and I'm excited for listeners to get a chance to hear that fuller context in the audiobook, which people can pre-order at loveatfirstprompt.ai, and it comes out in July.
01:23:28.580I'm just really excited to have that long-form opportunity to talk about this complicated and important issue of people experiencing intimacy with their AI companions.
01:23:43.960Yes. And again, if you send us a copy of your pre-order, you can email it, you can hit us up on social.
01:23:50.700We will send you a sticker and a handwritten thank you letter from yours truly.