It's crazy, when I was in school, we couldn't have phones, in elementary school, they would take away our pokemon cards and anything else for the day. Why should it even need "research?" Teachers should be able to take the damn phone until the end of the day if the school decides it's not appropriate for class.
I remember having books I was reading under my desk during maths class being taken away from me. And I wasn't surprised, because I should have been doing maths, instead of reading the House of the Spirits. Only insane people think kids should have access to phones all the time.
I never got it either. Apparently there's a small faction of parents that lose their shit when phones get banned because they're convinced there's going to be a school shooting and the only thing that'll save their child is a last minute Insta just in the nick of time to alert authorities.
It' seems part of the trend of shaping social policy around the histrionic needs of the 1 out of 1000 nutters that make the most noise.
There is nuance here though. You can ban kids from taking them to school at all, or you can just ban them in class. There's no reason not to do the second, but doing the first might be overkill. Especially since they're all gonna be on those things for the rest of the day anyway.
Honestly though, if I hear anything of Taylor Lorenz talking about it, all the nuance leaves my body and I think there should be a worldwide cellphone ban in schools
They already do, it's not that uncommon. Even entire districts have bans on them. I do agree that it's kind of overkill. I don't really think it should be that highly legislated. I think teachers should be given that authority, but they should also have protection from the parents to be able to do their jobs.
Congratulations on your anniversary. My one bragging right is I started listening with your second episode after seeing a Tweet about it from Jesse. I tuned in at the time because I was supporting Jesse’s gentle heterodoxy.
But what started as principled (and I had anticipated short term) support has become a six year essential listen for me that I happily followed from Patreon to Substack. Discovering Katie’s major news smarts and comedy talent is my find of the century. My love of the podcast is driven by the top notch news talent & intellectual curiosity — the delivery is balanced between caustic wit & earnest concern and all floated by the wonderful chemistry between Jesse and Katie.
I’ve seen Jesse in person twice (in SF) and despite living closer to Katie, have not made it to one of her meet ups but that is an ambition.
Thanks so much for the awesome work through the pandemic, Trump Biden Trump, awokening, vibe shift etc. it’s been a truly crazy ride but you have stayed sane throughout and kept me at least as sane as I am.
During 7th or 8th grade a girl from another middle school and I (we had mutual friends) would talk on the phone every night (almost) during the radio's “top10 songs today” rundown, where they would talk for 10 seconds about each song then play it.
Probably did that for a couple months, mostly the same songs. A couple times we even fell asleep on the phone together.
Facebook has done their internal studies about things like sending carefully timed push alerts to tweens late night keeps them up later scrolling forever and they know that's bad for them but worth doing. These coming lawsuits have plenty of material about social media companies knowing they are doing harm to mental health but they keep doing it intentionally because it's a good way to keep kids online.
Like how the lawsuits against cigarettes and OxyContin showed the companies 100% knew their products were addictive, harmful and being abused but decided to lie about it.
I take your point, but as a parent, I also think it's nuts for parents to pay for their kids to have unrestricted access to phones in their bedrooms late at night and in their schools during the day. There are lots of methods of fighting the social-media companies short of getting the government to crack down on them.
Don't get me wrong; I'm OK with age-gating laws. But I just don't understand this helpless "I can't do anything if the government doesn't do it for me" attitude a lot of people exhibit.
I take a yes-and perspective. Parents aren't helpless, but their kids are being actively targeted and the government could make regulations that require services/platforms to provide effective parental controls even if it's against their financial interest.
I wish companies would target dumb phones at kids instead of seniors. Today's seniors usually had a work issued cell phone in the 90s, they aren't totally tech illiterate. Those odd old people phone commercials are pretty insulting.
For example, Verizon could make family plans with dumb phones more affordable. Society could herd people in this direction of delaying kids' exposure to IG and Facebook pretty easily if we felt like it.
I think there is an argument that kids should be able to have a cell phone on them in case they need to call home in an emergency. There are no pay phones anywhere and no one will like let you use their phone, it's seen as a really strange request these days.
But I don't know why they need a smartphone so young. Give 'em a Nokia with Snake and Tetris they'll be fine.
I'm pretty sure the only reason either of the two existing carriers still even allow flip phones is because of consumer demand. They almost certainly make more money through smartphones with their own proprietary apps and special deals that they get with app and platform companies like Samsung and Apple.
If you banned companies from paying to have their apps pre-installed on a phone, and you banned network locked phones I bet you see a lot less of that.
I think it’s the opposite of getting government to do something for you. The lawsuits anyway. It’s exactly because our government is extremely liberal in its regulation and tends to err on the side of doing nothing and letting things sort themselves out rather thsn over regulating that the courts become the last recourse to exert pressure from the public onto large conglomerates like tobacco or social media companies.
It’s literally the most libertarian possible way to punish private companies for harm to the public. They intentionally cause harm. You prove it in court. They’re penalised enough so they change their behaviour.
Yeah, I should have clarified that my beef is mostly with getting sweeping federal laws cracking down on tech companies passed and much less with state legislation (within reason, like age-gating laws) and civil suits.
I disagree because this reads to me as 1:1 "cigarettes are addictive and dangerous, but instead of implementing an age limit on them and severely limiting how they are marketed to impressionable children, parents should just keep their kids from smoking." Parents don't have eyes on their kids all the time and we rightly recognize that some things are just dangerous. Parents are already overstretched, some people are not good parents (or were, in the case of today's young parents, brought up completely stewed in social media themselves). We understand that Mr. and Mrs. Smith can't out-parent Big Tobacco if harmful products are allowed to be marketed to their children; Billy's friends at school will have parents who don't care. No one parents in a vacuum. We used to recognize that.
Agree. Another problem with putting it all on the parents is that unlike with cigarettes or alcohol, there is a network effect. If other kids have phones and social media and your kid doesn't, your kid becomes a social outcast. It's insidious. I'm a hardliner: ban it all! The only criteria I'm considering when we select our daughters secondary school is whether they allow phones or not.
Interesting perspective. Mine is that we had overwhelming evidence that cigarettes cause lung cancer and cardiovascular disease for years before we cracked down on cigarette ads, but the evidence for the more extreme harms attributed to social media is shakier, as touted by statistically inept bestsellers like Jonathan Haidt’s book. I think we risk backlash when we take big legislative steps on the basis of as yet low-quality evidence.
That's why I prefer (1) my own judgment and (2) more localized policies, like district-wide bans of phones in schools.
Listen, I understand that perspective, but I'm 33. I remember being a kid and how abruptly things changed. My friends and I watched beheading videos on Liveleak and showed each other porn because none of our parents understood the internet. I also was fourteen when Facebook came out, and I watched how it morphed from a social network to an ad delivery system. Now all of the incentives for creators and content seem completely messed up and backwards. The most successful creators model antisocial and cruel behavior. I think it's like gambling. I don't think there's a demonstrable upside to letting kids be online at all, and I think there's plenty of new downsides to allowing children to engage with platforms designed to be both extractive of personal data and designed to keep users scrolling as long as possible by exploiting their brains' reward systems. Even if there's no evidence of profound harm, that's a huge opportunity cost for other things, developmentally better things, that kids could be doing with that time. If there is evidence of harms that materialize, it will also be unevenly distributed and disproportionately harmful to the development of poor children whose parents rely more on screens. If our concern is actually for the wellbeing of kids I see no positive argument for allowing access to social media at all.
One of my favorite examples of this sort of learned helplessness in parenting was on a travel hockey trip this winter where we didn’t play on day 2 until like 1pm or something.
And a couple parents were hopping mad that I as a coach didn’t set a curfew. These are 12-13 year olds, and if you as a parent think they should go to bed tell them that and make them go to bed. I made my kid go to bed at like 10:30.
They really seemed like “no way I can get my kid to go to bed without your support”. Ummm, 70% of the parents had no trouble getting their kids to go to bed.
I know I’m late but still need to squeeze in this Lindy West comment. She is EXACTLY like the friend who shit talks her boyfriend like crazy and then when you agree with her gets defensive and pissed and starts saying how great he is. It’s this rhetorical and psychological move where you get to both make yourself the victim and justify your abuser by making your listener take on your own misgivings so you can attack those thoughts and argue the away. And Lindy managed to get the entire internet to participate.
Read Careless People. It’s a memoir by a former Facebook lead attorney. The problem is the design, and it was willfully designed to maximize user engagement regardless of how the user is harmed. I think it’s a good ruling that — as it is written — doesn’t impact free speech
The idea that "design is free speech" is as idiotic as the sentiment that corporations are people, and probably comes from the same school of caustic, anarcho-capitalist thought. If product design is free speech, then corporations do not have to make ANY ethical considerations when designing products. The idea of that as a legal precedent is absolutely horrifying; imagine people whose family members were killed or injured by a product being told that they they're less likely to win a suit because they're challenging a corporation's "constitutional rights."
Actually less crazy than that by a lot. Not saying it's a very compelling argument (though I think these get tossed or reduced on appeal) but the means and manner of expression does cover a lot of ground.
Imagine if you would someone looks at political bullshit on YouTube and goes all coo coo bananas - one solution would be to ensure for every political video served there's four of non political content in the name of balance and mental health. It's still futzing with the algo to produce a desired governmental outcome.
The design argument was specifically not a content argument, from what I understood? It’s with relation to stuff like autoplay (again, based entirely on the episode - I’m sure there’s much more nuance). If autoplay causes addictive behaviour shown to cause specific harmful outcomes, I don’t see how free speech applies.
I suppose you’re saying that content can be considered a kind of design, and sure, but then free speech just applies to those specific content-based design decisions.
Minor correction. Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism", 2025, is a former director of public policy at Facebook/Meta, not former lead attorney. I agree with you that it's a good book and worth reading or listening to the audiobook. Link to reviews of book:
I second the thank you for the corruption. You saved me from going off on an Internet rant about how it would have been uncool, man, for an attorney to write about about a client.
The information provided in the book is good, but it drove me crazy that Sarah Wynn Williams never realized that she was one of the "careless people" she wrote about. I've never seen a person make so many excuses in my life.
In the book she realizes that several years before she actually leaves, and she gives continuing reasons year after year as to why she simply can't leave. One of the main excuses she gives for staying is that she'll lose her health insurance. But she's been making very good money for several years at that point, with stock she could cash out on if she leaves and a husband who is also employed. By her own description they live very modestly. I know those people could've found some dang health insurance!
I don’t know, man. You’re making her out to be as villainous as Sandberg and Zuckerberg. If she was, why leave at all? Why not keep her prestigious, super high-paying job?
While it’s possible she’s as much of a sociopath as the rest of Meta’s leadership, I think it’s more likely she stayed because she thought she could change the organization from within. When she realized she couldn’t, she left
There's a wide berth between naive lamb and evil villain, and I think she was somewhere between. It's hard to resist the prestige and high compensation that come with the job she had, and she was able to turn a blind eye for that until eventually she hit her limit. Mark Zuckerberg has still not hit his limit!
Fella, she did. She did resist the prestige and money. That’s why she left and wrote a scathing tell-all.
Naivete is a thing. Especially if — like her — you haven’t been around the rich and powerful before.
I’m skeptical bordering on cynical, but even I’ve be bamboozled. When I did some work for the MIT Media Lab, I only vaguely realized the director was a scumbag (he didn’t like that I refused to license my work under Creative Commons).
Low and behold, 11 years later Joi Ito is featured on an episode of Behind the Bastards. The IP vampire took money from Epstein to fund a crypto scam, because of course.
But you could not have told me in 2015 he wasn’t the most upstanding citizen in America. It never dawned on me the leader of a prestigious technology lab at a prestigious university could be a complete piece of shit.
So yea, since she ultimately gave up the money and prestige, I tend to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But that's also the product and how they sell it. It's very similar to a lot of other products. Are we going to sue Netflix for getting people addicted to binge watching because it auto-plays the next episode? I'm really wondering what the underlying principle is here.
This line of thinking also skips a step, you do need to prove that a strategy of 'maximizing user engagement' always leads to harm that cannot be reasonably prevented by the user (or the user's parents). And then you need to prove that this harm was intentional. I don't think any of that happened here and it's very clear to me that this and most other cases are cynical cashgrabs that only work because of the weird jury system and the fact that these companies are very unpopular in the media.
I agree with this. How exactly was this woman harmed in a way that could not be prevented by herself or her parents? Why are other people very similar to her not harmed?
Afroman wearing the coolest America flag suit and glasses ever made to the trial and watching all the cops have to sit through the music videos about them being played in public on a big screen was great. And the cop who said he couldn’t say for sure Afroman wasn’t banging his wife like the song said.
That was because if he said that it was patently false then it would invalidate their lawsuit as it would show the claims to be clear parody and protected by the first amendment. So he had to swallow that embarrassment to not torpedo their (weak) case.
Also, Jesse's "my God, what an ordeal" at the thought of a trip from Adams County to Red Rocks. Cincinnati to Denver (multiple direct flights daily) with an hour commute on either side, dude. It's not exactly Wrangel Island to Tierra del Fuego.
He's made it all the way from Brooklyn to Berkeley, a journey that takes no fewer than three different train systems if you go to OAK, up to four through SFO, the Airtrains on either side aren't even the SAME Airtrain, baby steps ok he's making great progress
Afroman might stand out in rural Ohio, but I don’t think the fro and skin color would actually matter. Most conservatives or MAGA bros I know, because clearly those are two types of people, do not care about that sort of thing. Most of them actually do have many black friends (not just the I have a black friend) and will actively help out professionally and or otherwise
my line of work is also retail so take that for what it is worth
Younger people might care less but a proudly non-white dude would still get stares and chilliness from plenty of people in the rural Midwest. I live in the rural Midwest (not Ohio) and there are still places I will not go with my Asian husband.
There could not possibly any stronger evidence of Katie's horrible racism than her confession that she "forgot" about Afroman. Did she forget about Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, or the Beatles? No. What do those people have in common? They're white. QED. Do <clap> better <clap>.
I have never heard of this song, this man, or this controversy and I very much enjoyed this episode. To decide to make the lemon poundcake the focus of this takedown was clearly an act of genius on Afroman’s part.
I have been seeing a lot of afroman posts on Reddit over the past couple weeks, and I was surprised more of the anti-Afroman takes weren’t shared as I feel like that would be classic BARpod material.
The top two reasons I have seen people say “actually Afroman sucks” weren’t transphobia related but rather:
This has been the cause of majority of the anti-Afroman backlash I’ve seen.
Another thing I had read was that Afroman had a previous history with the county Sheriff’s department. Supposedly his house had previously been broken into (that’s why he had the cameras installed later), but he needed some sort of formal police report to provide to his insurance company. I heard he was really annoying to the sheriffs department about trying to get this so they decided to do the search warrant as revenge. No clue if any of that was true, but I was surprised the rumor wasn’t referenced in the episode.
Great episode with K&J in top form, but as the Afroman story went on I increasingly found myself thinking are we all really just supposed to laugh along and praise him as a quirky free speech hero when he was seeming like a pretty awful person. Your video link of him totally clocking that poor girl kind of confirms that, yes, he really is a total POS.
Counterpoint, if a drunk man came on the stage with a female performer and started grinding on her and she hit him people would think she was a boss.
Obviously there are reasons for that discrepancy, but I do think the alternate situation paints it is a slightly less “POS” light. I suspect he had been annoyed for a while, probably also drunk, and overrreacted.
I really don't have a problem with Afroman hitting the woman in that video. She hopped up on the stage to be obnoxious and make herself the center of attention.
As a prosecutor, I agree that charging him for the assault was the correct legal decision. Strictly speaking, that was not a lawful use of force.
But as an uninvolved observer, that video doesn't make me think any less of Afroman. I think a lot of people inwardly support the practice of answering antisocial public behavior with quick fists to the face.
I don’t think super highly of people who straight up punch someone smaller than them — even if they were being annoying. Maybe just push them off to the side and let security handle it instead.
Yeah, as much as I am on Afroman’s side re: free speech, I really hate that he just plain assaulted a lady. He really does seem like a jerk, even though I like his music. Many such cases.
Jesse very much looks like the kind of person who thinks “Allstar” is a great song. It is wild how radio was so influential for so long and now it just isn’t.
Congratulations guys! As someone who has listened to every episode (humble brag sorry not sorry) I'm amazed and delighted the podcast has aged so well.
It's crazy, when I was in school, we couldn't have phones, in elementary school, they would take away our pokemon cards and anything else for the day. Why should it even need "research?" Teachers should be able to take the damn phone until the end of the day if the school decides it's not appropriate for class.
I remember having books I was reading under my desk during maths class being taken away from me. And I wasn't surprised, because I should have been doing maths, instead of reading the House of the Spirits. Only insane people think kids should have access to phones all the time.
Seriously!! I don't understand why this is even controversial.
I read "Secret History" under the desk in math and no regrets.
I never got it either. Apparently there's a small faction of parents that lose their shit when phones get banned because they're convinced there's going to be a school shooting and the only thing that'll save their child is a last minute Insta just in the nick of time to alert authorities.
It' seems part of the trend of shaping social policy around the histrionic needs of the 1 out of 1000 nutters that make the most noise.
Exactly - parents have become accustomed to constant access to their kids via phones, and push back hard when school systems try to take that away.
We would have our phones confiscated for having them out during class. That's why we all got so good at T9 blind texting.
There is nuance here though. You can ban kids from taking them to school at all, or you can just ban them in class. There's no reason not to do the second, but doing the first might be overkill. Especially since they're all gonna be on those things for the rest of the day anyway.
Honestly though, if I hear anything of Taylor Lorenz talking about it, all the nuance leaves my body and I think there should be a worldwide cellphone ban in schools
They already do, it's not that uncommon. Even entire districts have bans on them. I do agree that it's kind of overkill. I don't really think it should be that highly legislated. I think teachers should be given that authority, but they should also have protection from the parents to be able to do their jobs.
Congratulations on your anniversary. My one bragging right is I started listening with your second episode after seeing a Tweet about it from Jesse. I tuned in at the time because I was supporting Jesse’s gentle heterodoxy.
But what started as principled (and I had anticipated short term) support has become a six year essential listen for me that I happily followed from Patreon to Substack. Discovering Katie’s major news smarts and comedy talent is my find of the century. My love of the podcast is driven by the top notch news talent & intellectual curiosity — the delivery is balanced between caustic wit & earnest concern and all floated by the wonderful chemistry between Jesse and Katie.
I’ve seen Jesse in person twice (in SF) and despite living closer to Katie, have not made it to one of her meet ups but that is an ambition.
Thanks so much for the awesome work through the pandemic, Trump Biden Trump, awokening, vibe shift etc. it’s been a truly crazy ride but you have stayed sane throughout and kept me at least as sane as I am.
All the best and happy anniversary!!
Oh stop, you’re embarrassing Katie.
I had no idea how much I needed to hear you guys recite Afroman lyrics. That was as healing as Heated Rivalry episode 5.
“I have an even darker story about a radio DJ”
Why is this so funny
Katie and Jesse explaining '90s teenagerhood to the young'uns in the audience will never be short of hilarious.
During 7th or 8th grade a girl from another middle school and I (we had mutual friends) would talk on the phone every night (almost) during the radio's “top10 songs today” rundown, where they would talk for 10 seconds about each song then play it.
Probably did that for a couple months, mostly the same songs. A couple times we even fell asleep on the phone together.
Never even met in person until HS.
I laughed out loud! Thank you, Jesse, for your honesty and bravery. ❤️
Facebook has done their internal studies about things like sending carefully timed push alerts to tweens late night keeps them up later scrolling forever and they know that's bad for them but worth doing. These coming lawsuits have plenty of material about social media companies knowing they are doing harm to mental health but they keep doing it intentionally because it's a good way to keep kids online.
Like how the lawsuits against cigarettes and OxyContin showed the companies 100% knew their products were addictive, harmful and being abused but decided to lie about it.
I take your point, but as a parent, I also think it's nuts for parents to pay for their kids to have unrestricted access to phones in their bedrooms late at night and in their schools during the day. There are lots of methods of fighting the social-media companies short of getting the government to crack down on them.
Don't get me wrong; I'm OK with age-gating laws. But I just don't understand this helpless "I can't do anything if the government doesn't do it for me" attitude a lot of people exhibit.
I take a yes-and perspective. Parents aren't helpless, but their kids are being actively targeted and the government could make regulations that require services/platforms to provide effective parental controls even if it's against their financial interest.
I wish companies would target dumb phones at kids instead of seniors. Today's seniors usually had a work issued cell phone in the 90s, they aren't totally tech illiterate. Those odd old people phone commercials are pretty insulting.
For example, Verizon could make family plans with dumb phones more affordable. Society could herd people in this direction of delaying kids' exposure to IG and Facebook pretty easily if we felt like it.
I think there is an argument that kids should be able to have a cell phone on them in case they need to call home in an emergency. There are no pay phones anywhere and no one will like let you use their phone, it's seen as a really strange request these days.
But I don't know why they need a smartphone so young. Give 'em a Nokia with Snake and Tetris they'll be fine.
I'm pretty sure the only reason either of the two existing carriers still even allow flip phones is because of consumer demand. They almost certainly make more money through smartphones with their own proprietary apps and special deals that they get with app and platform companies like Samsung and Apple.
If you banned companies from paying to have their apps pre-installed on a phone, and you banned network locked phones I bet you see a lot less of that.
I think it’s the opposite of getting government to do something for you. The lawsuits anyway. It’s exactly because our government is extremely liberal in its regulation and tends to err on the side of doing nothing and letting things sort themselves out rather thsn over regulating that the courts become the last recourse to exert pressure from the public onto large conglomerates like tobacco or social media companies.
It’s literally the most libertarian possible way to punish private companies for harm to the public. They intentionally cause harm. You prove it in court. They’re penalised enough so they change their behaviour.
Yeah, I should have clarified that my beef is mostly with getting sweeping federal laws cracking down on tech companies passed and much less with state legislation (within reason, like age-gating laws) and civil suits.
I disagree because this reads to me as 1:1 "cigarettes are addictive and dangerous, but instead of implementing an age limit on them and severely limiting how they are marketed to impressionable children, parents should just keep their kids from smoking." Parents don't have eyes on their kids all the time and we rightly recognize that some things are just dangerous. Parents are already overstretched, some people are not good parents (or were, in the case of today's young parents, brought up completely stewed in social media themselves). We understand that Mr. and Mrs. Smith can't out-parent Big Tobacco if harmful products are allowed to be marketed to their children; Billy's friends at school will have parents who don't care. No one parents in a vacuum. We used to recognize that.
Agree. Another problem with putting it all on the parents is that unlike with cigarettes or alcohol, there is a network effect. If other kids have phones and social media and your kid doesn't, your kid becomes a social outcast. It's insidious. I'm a hardliner: ban it all! The only criteria I'm considering when we select our daughters secondary school is whether they allow phones or not.
Interesting perspective. Mine is that we had overwhelming evidence that cigarettes cause lung cancer and cardiovascular disease for years before we cracked down on cigarette ads, but the evidence for the more extreme harms attributed to social media is shakier, as touted by statistically inept bestsellers like Jonathan Haidt’s book. I think we risk backlash when we take big legislative steps on the basis of as yet low-quality evidence.
That's why I prefer (1) my own judgment and (2) more localized policies, like district-wide bans of phones in schools.
Listen, I understand that perspective, but I'm 33. I remember being a kid and how abruptly things changed. My friends and I watched beheading videos on Liveleak and showed each other porn because none of our parents understood the internet. I also was fourteen when Facebook came out, and I watched how it morphed from a social network to an ad delivery system. Now all of the incentives for creators and content seem completely messed up and backwards. The most successful creators model antisocial and cruel behavior. I think it's like gambling. I don't think there's a demonstrable upside to letting kids be online at all, and I think there's plenty of new downsides to allowing children to engage with platforms designed to be both extractive of personal data and designed to keep users scrolling as long as possible by exploiting their brains' reward systems. Even if there's no evidence of profound harm, that's a huge opportunity cost for other things, developmentally better things, that kids could be doing with that time. If there is evidence of harms that materialize, it will also be unevenly distributed and disproportionately harmful to the development of poor children whose parents rely more on screens. If our concern is actually for the wellbeing of kids I see no positive argument for allowing access to social media at all.
This. Thank you.
One of my favorite examples of this sort of learned helplessness in parenting was on a travel hockey trip this winter where we didn’t play on day 2 until like 1pm or something.
And a couple parents were hopping mad that I as a coach didn’t set a curfew. These are 12-13 year olds, and if you as a parent think they should go to bed tell them that and make them go to bed. I made my kid go to bed at like 10:30.
They really seemed like “no way I can get my kid to go to bed without your support”. Ummm, 70% of the parents had no trouble getting their kids to go to bed.
I like how Katie's main argument against it was basically "won't somebody please think of the podcasters!"
Some good First Amendment thoughts on the successful social media lawsuits. https://blog.simplejustice.us/2026/03/30/social-media-the-constitution-and-the-weapons-of-mind-destruction/
I was gonna kidnap some girls, but then I got high.
Some with straight hair, some with curls, but then I got high.
Now my dungeon sits there empty, and I know why.
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high.
I know I’m late but still need to squeeze in this Lindy West comment. She is EXACTLY like the friend who shit talks her boyfriend like crazy and then when you agree with her gets defensive and pissed and starts saying how great he is. It’s this rhetorical and psychological move where you get to both make yourself the victim and justify your abuser by making your listener take on your own misgivings so you can attack those thoughts and argue the away. And Lindy managed to get the entire internet to participate.
100%
Read Careless People. It’s a memoir by a former Facebook lead attorney. The problem is the design, and it was willfully designed to maximize user engagement regardless of how the user is harmed. I think it’s a good ruling that — as it is written — doesn’t impact free speech
Yeah. If design is free speech, Boing could claim it’s ok if their airplanes crash because free speech. Crazy argument.
The idea that "design is free speech" is as idiotic as the sentiment that corporations are people, and probably comes from the same school of caustic, anarcho-capitalist thought. If product design is free speech, then corporations do not have to make ANY ethical considerations when designing products. The idea of that as a legal precedent is absolutely horrifying; imagine people whose family members were killed or injured by a product being told that they they're less likely to win a suit because they're challenging a corporation's "constitutional rights."
Actually less crazy than that by a lot. Not saying it's a very compelling argument (though I think these get tossed or reduced on appeal) but the means and manner of expression does cover a lot of ground.
Imagine if you would someone looks at political bullshit on YouTube and goes all coo coo bananas - one solution would be to ensure for every political video served there's four of non political content in the name of balance and mental health. It's still futzing with the algo to produce a desired governmental outcome.
The design argument was specifically not a content argument, from what I understood? It’s with relation to stuff like autoplay (again, based entirely on the episode - I’m sure there’s much more nuance). If autoplay causes addictive behaviour shown to cause specific harmful outcomes, I don’t see how free speech applies.
I suppose you’re saying that content can be considered a kind of design, and sure, but then free speech just applies to those specific content-based design decisions.
Minor correction. Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism", 2025, is a former director of public policy at Facebook/Meta, not former lead attorney. I agree with you that it's a good book and worth reading or listening to the audiobook. Link to reviews of book:
https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/careless-people-a-cautionary-tale-of-power-greed-and-lost-idealism/
I second the thank you for the corruption. You saved me from going off on an Internet rant about how it would have been uncool, man, for an attorney to write about about a client.
Thank you for that correction. If I remember correctly, she is an attorney by training, but yes, that was not her title.
The information provided in the book is good, but it drove me crazy that Sarah Wynn Williams never realized that she was one of the "careless people" she wrote about. I've never seen a person make so many excuses in my life.
I think she went to the role naive. Once she realized they were fundamentally evil, she left.
In the book she realizes that several years before she actually leaves, and she gives continuing reasons year after year as to why she simply can't leave. One of the main excuses she gives for staying is that she'll lose her health insurance. But she's been making very good money for several years at that point, with stock she could cash out on if she leaves and a husband who is also employed. By her own description they live very modestly. I know those people could've found some dang health insurance!
I don’t know, man. You’re making her out to be as villainous as Sandberg and Zuckerberg. If she was, why leave at all? Why not keep her prestigious, super high-paying job?
While it’s possible she’s as much of a sociopath as the rest of Meta’s leadership, I think it’s more likely she stayed because she thought she could change the organization from within. When she realized she couldn’t, she left
There's a wide berth between naive lamb and evil villain, and I think she was somewhere between. It's hard to resist the prestige and high compensation that come with the job she had, and she was able to turn a blind eye for that until eventually she hit her limit. Mark Zuckerberg has still not hit his limit!
Fella, she did. She did resist the prestige and money. That’s why she left and wrote a scathing tell-all.
Naivete is a thing. Especially if — like her — you haven’t been around the rich and powerful before.
I’m skeptical bordering on cynical, but even I’ve be bamboozled. When I did some work for the MIT Media Lab, I only vaguely realized the director was a scumbag (he didn’t like that I refused to license my work under Creative Commons).
Low and behold, 11 years later Joi Ito is featured on an episode of Behind the Bastards. The IP vampire took money from Epstein to fund a crypto scam, because of course.
But you could not have told me in 2015 he wasn’t the most upstanding citizen in America. It never dawned on me the leader of a prestigious technology lab at a prestigious university could be a complete piece of shit.
So yea, since she ultimately gave up the money and prestige, I tend to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But that's also the product and how they sell it. It's very similar to a lot of other products. Are we going to sue Netflix for getting people addicted to binge watching because it auto-plays the next episode? I'm really wondering what the underlying principle is here.
This line of thinking also skips a step, you do need to prove that a strategy of 'maximizing user engagement' always leads to harm that cannot be reasonably prevented by the user (or the user's parents). And then you need to prove that this harm was intentional. I don't think any of that happened here and it's very clear to me that this and most other cases are cynical cashgrabs that only work because of the weird jury system and the fact that these companies are very unpopular in the media.
I think the problem is obviously with the extremely relaxed definition of harm, rather than any sort of speech concern.
I agree with this. How exactly was this woman harmed in a way that could not be prevented by herself or her parents? Why are other people very similar to her not harmed?
Afroman wearing the coolest America flag suit and glasses ever made to the trial and watching all the cops have to sit through the music videos about them being played in public on a big screen was great. And the cop who said he couldn’t say for sure Afroman wasn’t banging his wife like the song said.
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AiuqQpB1U&pp=0gcJCZoBo7VqN5tD
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HM8Ee6pcXvQ
That was because if he said that it was patently false then it would invalidate their lawsuit as it would show the claims to be clear parody and protected by the first amendment. So he had to swallow that embarrassment to not torpedo their (weak) case.
OMG NEITHER OF THEM KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT OHIO
Sorry I am gell-man amnesia-ing Jesse's sense of geography and generally several takes in a row
“The mountains of Ohio” was brutal.
Especially cuz he them seemed to say southern Ohio was the flat part?? To the extent there ARE mountains (hills), they are in... Southern Ohio
Also, Jesse's "my God, what an ordeal" at the thought of a trip from Adams County to Red Rocks. Cincinnati to Denver (multiple direct flights daily) with an hour commute on either side, dude. It's not exactly Wrangel Island to Tierra del Fuego.
He's made it all the way from Brooklyn to Berkeley, a journey that takes no fewer than three different train systems if you go to OAK, up to four through SFO, the Airtrains on either side aren't even the SAME Airtrain, baby steps ok he's making great progress
Wrangel Island's Wikipedia page is highly rewarding, thank you!
Hehehe, pure Brooklyn.
Afroman might stand out in rural Ohio, but I don’t think the fro and skin color would actually matter. Most conservatives or MAGA bros I know, because clearly those are two types of people, do not care about that sort of thing. Most of them actually do have many black friends (not just the I have a black friend) and will actively help out professionally and or otherwise
my line of work is also retail so take that for what it is worth
Younger people might care less but a proudly non-white dude would still get stares and chilliness from plenty of people in the rural Midwest. I live in the rural Midwest (not Ohio) and there are still places I will not go with my Asian husband.
Yeah he isn’t just random black dude…
He had a high profile song about illegal activity and still seems to live somewhat conspicuously.
Cops were still idiots, but him being targeted has a context.
There could not possibly any stronger evidence of Katie's horrible racism than her confession that she "forgot" about Afroman. Did she forget about Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, or the Beatles? No. What do those people have in common? They're white. QED. Do <clap> better <clap>.
Was it because she got high?
The real test is if she also forgot about Dre.
Underrated comment
I have never heard of this song, this man, or this controversy and I very much enjoyed this episode. To decide to make the lemon poundcake the focus of this takedown was clearly an act of genius on Afroman’s part.
I'm right there with you!
"We live in a society."
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, Katie.
Someone had to say it, thank you.
I have been seeing a lot of afroman posts on Reddit over the past couple weeks, and I was surprised more of the anti-Afroman takes weren’t shared as I feel like that would be classic BARpod material.
The top two reasons I have seen people say “actually Afroman sucks” weren’t transphobia related but rather:
1. Afroman was arrested for punching a woman in the face on stage in 2015 making him an abuser: https://youtu.be/se-lzTUNfys?si=2-LyZeoehQnrvZ3k
2. Afroman is very comfortable with Trump: https://x.com/danieledobish/status/1794540810991436029
This has been the cause of majority of the anti-Afroman backlash I’ve seen.
Another thing I had read was that Afroman had a previous history with the county Sheriff’s department. Supposedly his house had previously been broken into (that’s why he had the cameras installed later), but he needed some sort of formal police report to provide to his insurance company. I heard he was really annoying to the sheriffs department about trying to get this so they decided to do the search warrant as revenge. No clue if any of that was true, but I was surprised the rumor wasn’t referenced in the episode.
Great episode with K&J in top form, but as the Afroman story went on I increasingly found myself thinking are we all really just supposed to laugh along and praise him as a quirky free speech hero when he was seeming like a pretty awful person. Your video link of him totally clocking that poor girl kind of confirms that, yes, he really is a total POS.
Counterpoint, if a drunk man came on the stage with a female performer and started grinding on her and she hit him people would think she was a boss.
Obviously there are reasons for that discrepancy, but I do think the alternate situation paints it is a slightly less “POS” light. I suspect he had been annoyed for a while, probably also drunk, and overrreacted.
I really don't have a problem with Afroman hitting the woman in that video. She hopped up on the stage to be obnoxious and make herself the center of attention.
As a prosecutor, I agree that charging him for the assault was the correct legal decision. Strictly speaking, that was not a lawful use of force.
But as an uninvolved observer, that video doesn't make me think any less of Afroman. I think a lot of people inwardly support the practice of answering antisocial public behavior with quick fists to the face.
I don’t think super highly of people who straight up punch someone smaller than them — even if they were being annoying. Maybe just push them off to the side and let security handle it instead.
Yeah, as much as I am on Afroman’s side re: free speech, I really hate that he just plain assaulted a lady. He really does seem like a jerk, even though I like his music. Many such cases.
Jesse very much looks like the kind of person who thinks “Allstar” is a great song. It is wild how radio was so influential for so long and now it just isn’t.
Congratulations guys! As someone who has listened to every episode (humble brag sorry not sorry) I'm amazed and delighted the podcast has aged so well.
Thank you!
All Star is a great song.
My kids no shit, love it. Even my wife has warmed up to it. I never liked it, but it is catchy.
Sadly, despite my distaste for the song I could name all the lyrics without looking them up, on cue.