Unreasonable commitment is unreasonable. It happens before there’s a guarantee it will work. It’s out of proportion to what others think is standard. Unreasonable commitment is dedication, persistence, care, energy, connection and investment that doesn’t seem to make sense.
You can’t do this in everything, and you probably can’t do it all the time. That’s why it’s unreasonable to expect.
I’ve been fortunate enough to do hundreds of podcasts. The hosts are even kinder and more professional than you’d imagine, showing up for months or years with virtually no listeners. They do it because they care.
But only one podcast host had me in tears before we began recording.
Last September, I spent the day with Mel Robbins and her team of more than a dozen professionals. We recorded for four hours, two episodes worth, and then they quietly spent six months editing the work.
Mel’s even more Mel-like in person. She’s fully present, committed and yes, over the top. Our conversation led to my new book and course, and it also reminded me that better is possible. Not just for the person in front of the camera, but for everyone on the team, for the guests and for the people listening.
Neil Pasricha wrote about Mel a decade ago. Before last year’s bestseller or the Golden Globe nomination or the podcast hit its stride. It’s a choice.
Unreasonable commitment doesn’t seem like a good plan until after it works.
OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from both users and employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance—early reports show that ChaptGPT uninstalls rose nearly 300% after the company announced the deal—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, conceded that the initial agreement was “opportunistic and sloppy.” He then re-published an internal memo on social media stating that additions to the agreement made clear that “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, [and] FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”
Trouble is, the U.S. government doesn’t believe “consistent with applicable laws” means “no domestic surveillance.” Instead, for the most part, the government has embraced a lax interpretation of “applicable law” that has blessed mass surveillance and large-scale violations of our civil liberties, and then fought tooth and nail to prevent courts from weighing in.
“Intentionally” is also doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. For years the government has insisted that the mass surveillance of U.S. persons only happens incidentally (read: not intentionally) because their communications with people both inside the United States and overseas are swept up in surveillance programs supposedly designed to only collect communications outside the United States.
The company’s amendment to the contract continues in a similar vein, “For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.” Here, “deliberate” is the red flag given how often intelligence and law enforcement agencies rely on incidental or commercially purchased data to sidestep stronger privacy protections.
Here’s another one: “The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.” What, one wonders, does “unconstrained” mean, precisely—and according to whom?
Lawyers sometimes call these “weasel words” because they create ambiguity that protects one side or another from real accountability for contract violations. As with the Anthropic negotiations, where the Pentagon reportedly agreed to adhere to Anthropic’s red lines only “as appropriate,” the government is likely attempting to publicly commit to limits in principle, but retain broad flexibility in practice.
OpenAI also notes that the Pentagon promised the NSA would not be allowed to use OpenAI’s tools absent a new agreement, and that its deployment architecture will help it verify that no red lines are crossed. But secret agreements and technical assurances have never been enough to rein in surveillance agencies, and they are no substitute for strong, enforceable legal limits and transparency.
OpenAI executives may indeed be trying, as claimed, to use the company’s contractual relationship with the Pentagon to help ensure that the government should use AI tools only in a way consistent with democratic processes. But based on what we know so far, that hope seems very naïve.
Moreover, that naïvete is dangerous. In a time when governments are willing to embrace extreme and unfounded interpretations of “applicable laws,” companies need to put some actual muscle behind standing by their commitments. After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time. OpenAI promises the public that it will “avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power,” but we know that enabling mass surveillance does both.
OpenAI isn’t the only consumer-facing company that is, on the one hand, seeking to reassure the public that they aren’t participating in actions that violate human rights while, on the other, seeking to cash in on government mass surveillance efforts. Despite this marketing double-speak, it is very clear that companies just cannot do both. It’s also clear that companies shouldn’t be given that much power over the limits of our privacy to begin with. The public should not have to rely on a small group of people—whether CEOs or Pentagon officials—to protect our civil liberties.
I’m writing for The Big Picture substack today, which I do once a week as part of a team of writers. As the name implies, I use the opportunity to step back and take stock of the broader and often confusing political landscape we’re now in. It’s a great complement to my deeper daily dives here at The Status Kuo. You can sign up below to get my Big Picture column in your inbox each week.
My own work there is offered for free without a paywall, but we do always appreciate paid supporters who make our work possible, and paid subscribers receive bonus material such as our guest columns, our Friday summary of the top news stories of the week and our popular Sunday round-up of the “week in wins.”
Today’s topic for my column is Trump blunders. We’re in a monumental one right now in Iran, with no clear or easy end in sight. But if it follows the pattern he’s set with his past mistakes (I examine three of his biggest ones: DOGE, Liberation Day tariffs and the ICE surge), we can make an intelligent assessment of how this is likely to go in Iran.
I get that it’s a bit of a pain to subscribe to two different newsletters in order to read all of my writings. But The Big Picture is something I began with my team and I’m quite proud of, and if you’re not already subscribed, I hope you’ll find our insights there valuable and clarifying.
I’ll be off tomorrow in meetings all day at the Human Rights Campaign in D.C., but back with Skeets and Giggles on Saturday!
Laws prohibiting minors from accessing AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT would violate the First Amendment. But that’s not stopping lawmakers from trying.
Senator Josh Hawley has introduced the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue Act of 2025 (GUARD Act), which would require AI companies to “prohibit” minors under “18 years of age” from “accessing or using” AI chatbots that “produce[] new expressive content” in response to “open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input.” Earlier this year, Virginia and Oklahoma introduced similar bills, as did California last September. The crux is the same: to prohibit minors from accessing chatbots capable of producing human-like speech.
If passed, these bills will get struck down in court for violating the First Amendment, which prohibits laws “abridging the freedom of speech.” Specifically, minors have a First Amendment right to receive information. The Supreme Court has explained, “minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.” This right applies to the Internet with full force.
When analyzing these laws under the First Amendment, a court would start by asking whether the government is regulating speech. Speech is a broad concept, including written and spoken words, photos, music, and other forms of expression like computer code and video games. Chatbot outputs are speech; they comprise all these forms of expression. Laws prohibiting minors from accessing chatbots regulate speech by cutting off young users from the ideas and information communicated in outputs.
Next, a court would assess whether minor chatbot bans regulate protected or unprotected speech. The vast majority of outputs are protected speech: Teens use chatbots to search for information, get help with schoolwork, for fun or entertainment, and to get news. Here, the only relevant category of unprotected speech is content that is obscene to minors. The GUARD Act, for example, states that “chatbots can generate and disseminate harmful or sexually explicit content to children,” and the Virginia bill would block chatbots “capable of … [e]ngaging in erotic or sexually explicit interactions with the minor user.” Sexually explicit outputs to minors are likely unprotected speech, but the bills go much further by blocking all youth access to chatbots.
Because these bills regulate a mix of protected and unprotected speech, the court would then assess whether the prohibition on teen usage is content-based or content-neutral. Content-based restrictions target speech based on its viewpoint, subject matter, topic, or substantive message. On the other hand, content-neutral laws regulate nonsubstantive aspects of speech, like its time, place, or manner.
These bills are content-based because they prohibit access based on the subject matter of chatbot outputs. The GUARD Act would prohibit minors from accessing chatbots capable of “interpersonal or emotional interaction, friendship, companionship, or therapeutic communication.” The Oklahoma bill would block chatbots that “express[] or invit[e] emotional attachment” or “form ongoing social or emotional bonds with users, whether or not such systems also provide information.” Similarly, the Virginia bill would ban minors from accessing chatbots “capable of … offering mental health therapy.” Regardless of the pros and cons of minors accessing such information, the prohibitions are based on the content of the outputs — not on merely nonsubstantive aspects of the speech.
Because these bills are content-based, the court would apply strict scrutiny. The government would have to prove the bills are narrowly tailored to advance a compelling governmental interest and that they are the least restrictive means of serving that interest. Banning minors from accessing chatbots arguably advances “a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors” by “shielding minors from the influence of” obscene outputs.
Strict scrutiny, however, requires lawmakers to use a less restrictive means than bans to protect minors. Lawmakers could, for example, require AI companies to provide parental controls or strict safeguards preventing their models from engaging in sexually explicit conversations with young users. In fact, AI companiesalreadyhavepolicies and features to protect minor users. Because these bills aren’t narrowly tailored, a court would strike them down for violating the First Amendment.
Banning minors from using chatbots is also bad policy. Last October, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the state’s proposed ban, stating, “AI is already shaping the world, and it is imperative that adolescents learn how to safely interact with AI systems … We cannot prepare our youth for a future where AI is ubiquitous by preventing their use of these tools altogether.”
Most U.S. teens use AI chatbots. These young users have a First Amendment right to receive the information the AIs output, which is generally protected speech. Prohibiting access to chatbots would violate minors’ constitutional rights and deprive them of the vast benefits of AI.
Andy Jung is associate counsel at TechFreedom, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on technology law and policy.
Senator Ron Wyden says that when a secret interpretation of Section 702 is eventually declassified, the American public “will be stunned” to learn what the NSA has been doing. If you’ve followed Wyden’s career, you know this is not a man prone to hyperbole — and you know his track record on these warnings is perfect.
Just last month, we wrote about the Wyden Siren — the pattern where Senator Ron Wyden sends a cryptic public signal that something terrible is happening behind the classification curtain, can’t say what it is, and then is eventually proven right. Every single time. The catalyst then was a two-sentence letter to CIA Director Ratcliffe expressing “deep concerns about CIA activities.”
Well, the siren is going off once again. This time, Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:
There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact,when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunnedthat it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.
Here’s a sitting member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — someone with access to the classified details — is telling his colleagues and the public that there is a secret interpretation of Section 702 that “directly affects the privacy rights of Americans,” that he’s been asking multiple administrations to declassify it, that they’ve all refused, and that when it finally comes out, people will be stunned.
If you’ve followed Wyden for any amount of time, this all sounds very familiar. In 2011, Wyden warned that the government had secretly reinterpreted the PATRIOT Act to mean something entirely different from what Congress and the public understood. He couldn’t say what. Nobody believed it could be that bad. Then the Snowden revelations showed the NSA was engaged in bulk collection of essentially every American’s phone metadata. In 2017, he caught the Director of National Intelligence answering a different question than the one Wyden asked about Section 702 surveillance. The pattern repeats. The siren sounds. Years pass. And then, eventually, we find out it was worse than we imagined.
Now here he is, doing the exact same thing with Section 702 yet again, now that it’s up for renewal. Congress is weeks away from a reauthorization vote, and Wyden is explicitly telling his colleagues (not for the first time) they are preparing to vote on a law whose actual meaning is being kept secret from them as well as from the American public:
The past fifteen years have shown that, unless the Congress can have an open debate about surveillance authorities, the laws that are passed cannot be assumed to have the support of the American people. And that is fundamentally undemocratic. And, right now, the government is relying on secret law with regard to Section 702 of FISA. I’ve already mentioned the provision that was stuck into the last reauthorization bill, that could allow the government to force all sorts of people to spy on their fellow citizens. I have explained the details of how the Biden Administration chose to interpret it, and how the Trump Administration will interpret it, are a big secret. Americans have the right to be confused and angry that this is how the government and Congress choose to do business.
That’s a United States senator who has a long history of calling out secret interpretations that lead to surveillance of Americans — standing on the Senate floor and warning, once again, that there’s a secret interpretation of Section 702 authorities. One that almost certainly means mass surveillance.
And Wyden knows exactly how this plays out. He’s been through the reauthorization cycle enough times to know the playbook the intelligence community runs every time 702 is up for renewal:
I’ve been doing this a long time, so I know how this always goes. Opponents of reforming Section 702 don’t want a real debate where Members can decide for themselves which reform amendments to support. So what always happens is that a lousy reauthorization bill magically shows up a few days before the authorization expires and Members are told that there’s no time to do anything other than pass that bill and that if they vote for any amendments, the program will die and terrible things will happen and it will be all their fault.
Don’t buy into that.
He’s right. Every time reauthorization is on the table, no real debate happens, and then just before the authorization is about to run out, some loyal soldier of the surveillance brigade in Congress will scream “national security” at the top of their lungs, insist there’s no time to debate this or people will die, and then promises that we need to just re-authorize for a few more years, at which point we’ll be able to hold a debate on the surveillance.
A debate that never arrives.
But even setting aside the secret interpretation Wyden can’t discuss, his speech highlights something almost as damning: just how spectacularly the supposed “reforms” from the last reauthorization have failed. Remember, one of the big “concessions” to get the last reauthorization across the finish line was a requirement that “sensitive searches” — targeting elected officials, political candidates, journalists, and the like — would need the approval of the FBI’s Deputy Director.
This was in response to some GOP elected officials being on the receiving end of investigations during the Biden era, freaking out that the NSA appeared to be doing the very things plenty of civil society and privacy advocates had been telling them about for over a decade while they just yelled “national security” back at us.
So how are those small “reforms” working out? Here’s Wyden:
The so-called big reform was to require the approval of the Deputy FBI Director for these sensitive searches.
Until two months ago, the Deputy FBI Director was Dan Bongino. As most of my colleagues know, Mr. Bongino is a longtime conspiracy theorist who has frequently called for specious investigations of his political opponents. This is the man whom the President and the U.S. Senate put in charge of these incredibly sensitive searches. And Bongino’s replacement as Deputy Director, Andrew Bailey, is a highly partisan election denier who recently directed a raid on a Georgia election office in an effort to justify Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories. I don’t know about my colleagues, but this so-called reform makes me feel worse, not better.
So the grand reform that was supposed to provide meaningful oversight of the FBI’s most sensitive surveillance activities ended up placing that authority in the hands of a conspiracy theorist, followed by a partisan election denier. And just to make the whole thing even more farcical, Wyden notes that the FBI has refused to even keep a basic record of these searches:
But it’s even worse than it looks. The FBI has refused to even keep track of all of the sensitive searches the Deputy Director has considered. The Inspector General urged the FBI to just put this information into a simple spreadsheet and they refused to do it. That is how much the FBI does not want oversight.
They won’t maintain a spreadsheet. The Inspector General asked them to track their use of a sensitive surveillance power using what amounts to a basic Excel file, and the FBI said no. That’s the state of “reform” for Section 702 after the last re-auth.
Wyden has also been sounding the alarm about the expansion of who can be forced to spy on behalf of the government, thanks to a provision jammed into the last reauthorization that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider” to cover essentially anyone with access to communications equipment. As Wyden explained:
Two years ago, during the last reauthorization debacle, something really bad happened. Over in the House, existing surveillance law was changed so that the government could force anyone with “access” to communications to secretly collect those communications for the government. As I pointed out at the time, that could mean anyone installing or repairing a cable box, or anyone responsible for a wifi router. It was a jaw-dropping expansion of authorities that could end up forcing countless ordinary Americans to secretly help the government spy on their fellow citizens.
The Biden administration apparently promised to use this authority narrowly. But, of course, the Trump administration has made no such promise. As we say with every expansion of executive authority, just imagine how the worst possible president from the opposing party would use it. And now we don’t have to wonder any more.
Wyden correctly points out that secret promises from a prior administration are worth exactly nothing:
But here’s the other thing – whatever secret promise the Biden Administration made about using these vast, unchecked authorities with restraint, the current administration clearly isn’t going to feel bound by that promise. So whatever the previous administration intended to accomplish with that provision, there is absolutely nothing preventing the current administration from conscripting those cable repair and tech support men and women to secretly spy on Americans.
So to tally this up: Congress is about to vote on reauthorizing Section 702 with a secret legal interpretation that Wyden says will stun the public when it’s eventually revealed, with “reforms” that placed surveillance approval authority in the hands of conspiracy theorists who won’t even keep a spreadsheet, with a massively expanded definition of who can be forced to help the government spy, with secret promises about restraint that the current administration has no intention of honoring, and with a nominee to lead the NSA who won’t commit to following the Constitution.
The Wyden Siren is blaring. And if history is any guide — and it has been, without exception — whatever is behind the classification curtain is worse than what we can see from the outside.
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Every phone is a narc whether you realize it or not. The private sector certainly knows what information a cell phone can divulge and has leveraged the always-on nature of these devices to maximize profitability.
The public sector — mainly law enforcement agencies, both local and federal — have caught onto this as well. With court decisions making it less than absolutely clear things like geofence warrants and long-term location tracking are actually lawful, they’re turning to third parties to give them the data they can’t easily obtain without trying to talk judges into approving their warrants.
Data brokers will sell to anyone willing to pay, which means plenty of federal agencies are obtaining location data this way, bypassing the restraints created by courts and the oversight Congress is supposed to provide. The DHS has been doing this for years, as have several other federal law enforcement agencies. It finally attracted enough attention on Capitol Hill that even CBP (Customs and Border Protection) pinky-promised Senator Ron Wyden and other lawmakers that it wouldn’t continue to bypass constitutional protections by throwing its money at private sector data brokers.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.
The document shows in stark terms the power, and potential risk, of online advertising data and how it can be leveraged by government agencies for surveillance purposes. The news comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased similar tools that can monitor the movements of phones in entire neighbourhoods. ICE also recently said in public procurement documents it was interested in sourcing more “Ad Tech” data for its investigations.
CBP told Senator Wyden that it would stop purchasing location data from data brokers back in 2023. There’s no reason to believe this assertion is still true, now that Trump has made hunting down non-whites a prominent part of his domestic policy.
In fact, there’s every reason to believe CBP has gone back to buying up whatever it can from third-party data brokers. A letter signed by 58 Congressional members (including Sen. Wyden and author Rep. Adriano Espaillat) notes that the CBP has refused to discuss its current data broker-enabled location tracking efforts with Congressional oversight.
ICE is now stonewalling congressional oversight into its purchase of location data. Senator Wyden’s office requested a briefing from ICE soon after this contract was revealed in the press, in October, which was scheduled in December, for February 10, 2026. One day before that briefing was to take place, ICE cancelled it with no explanation and without any offer to reschedule.
It’s another DHS power move — albeit one put in play before Kristi Noem was sidelined by Trump. It’s one that says again, quite clearly, that federal agencies (under Trump) feel no compunction to answer to anyone, especially not their direct oversight.
What separates this reporting from earlier reporting on federal agency use of data brokers is this: prior efforts involved purchasing location data obtained via installed apps that tracked users’ locations with or without the explicit knowledge or permission of app users or even the developers of these apps. These efforts utilized built-in tracking tools contained in some SDK (software development kits) frequently used by developers.
This collection involves device information gathered and tracked by ad brokers and their customers. AdID (advertising identification) tracks unique device info to serve up targeted advertising to users, which obviously includes nudging them towards goods and services in their area.
While it doesn’t link device info specifically to the people using these devices, it does allow the government to buy data generated by these ad RTB (real-time bidding) markets to collect location info. This can be used to track people’s movements because it only takes a little extra effort (some of that already being performed for the government by companies like Palantir) to tie a device to a person.
404 Media’s reporting is first to show federal agencies have moved past data brokers to directly collect information that’s perpetually generated multiple times per minute to generate information these companies can sell to marketing firms… or, apparently, the government itself. Here’s how this works:
In essence, the AdID acts as the digital glue between a person’s device and their location data, allowing marketers—or a surveillance contractor or DHS—to attribute a set of movements to a specific device. From there, investigators can draw geofences to see all phones at a particular area over a period of time. Many smartphone location data tools then let officials see where else those devices went, potentially revealing where their owners live or work, or other sensitive locations.
While this information is drawn from a DHS-produced PTA (Privacy Threshold Analysis), the PTA generated after the “pilot program” closed in 2021, CBP has yet to produce the PIA (Privacy Impact Assessment) that is supposed to precede rollouts of programs like this, whether they’re “pilots” or not.
That report still doesn’t seem to exist. And while this report claims this was only a “pilot” program that was not used to engage in any actual surveillance, the facts on the ground say otherwise:
Although CBP described the move as a pilot, the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) later found both CBP and ICE did not limit themselves to non-operational use. The OIG found that CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service all illegally used the smartphone location data, and found a CBP official used the data to track coworkers with no investigative purpose. CBP and ICE went on to repeatedly purchase access to location data.
So… business as usual. The government says it’s just test-driving something but then we found out it was used to actually engage in surveillance. The government says it will stop buying data from data brokers in contravention of Supreme Court rulings on location data and then it just keeps doing it. And when the government is told by a co-equal branch to explain itself, it ghosts its oversight and goes back to doing the extremely dirty business of being a rogue administration that openly embraces any bit of authoritarianism it can hammer into place while the system of checks and balances sputters in disbelief.
There are solutions still available to stem the authoritarian tide. We just need a few GOP representatives to care more about the country they’re supposed to be serving than the guy who’s blundering around the Oval Office in hopes of being next-gen Hitler, albeit one that includes Israel in his genocidal plans, rather than making it a target.
In March of 2024, the Dallas-based IPTV operator William Freemon was sued for copyright infringement by Amazon, Netflix, and several major Hollywood studios.
Freemon defended himself but failed to hire a lawyer for his company, Freemon Technology Industries (FTI). Instead, he responded by filing various motions while refusing to formally answer the copyright infringement complaint.
With the case not moving forward, the movie companies eventually had enough and requested a default judgment of $18,750,000 in copyright damages.
Last month, a Texas magistrate judge recommended granting this in full, and this week, the order was formally adopted by U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay.
Judge Grants $18,750,000 Judgment
As detailed in our earlier coverage, Freemon allegedly operated four unauthorized streaming services: Streaming TV Now, TV Nitro, Instant IPTV, and Cash App IPTV. In addition, he was accused of running a pirate IPTV reseller operation called Live TV Resellers.
‘Streaming TV Now’ was the most popular IPTV service, according to the legal paperwork. It first appeared online in 2020 and offers access to 11,000 live channels, as well as on-demand access to over 27,000 movies and 9,000 TV series.
The studios identified a sample of 125 copyrighted works that were available through the IPTV services, including Universal’s Oppenheimer. As damages compensation, the court granted the recommended statutory maximum of $150,000 per work for willful infringement, for a total of $18,750,000.
This judgment amount will continue to grow, as the court approved a 3.51% annual post-judgment interest rate until the amount is paid in full. In addition, the attorneys’ fee award has yet to be determined and will also add to the total.
From the default judgment
In addition to the damages, Judge Lindsay also entered a permanent injunction, which bars Freemon and FTI from reproducing, distributing, or publicly performing any of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and from assisting others in doing so.
Injunction Targets Domain Names
The signed injunction also requires the eight domain names to be transferred immeidately to the studios’ control: instantiptv.net, streamingtvnow.com, streamingtvnow.net, tvnitro.net, cashappiptv.com, livetvresellers.com, stncloud.ltd, and stnlive.ltd.
The associated domain registrars have five days to facilitate theese transfers. If they fail to do so, the TLD registries can be ordered to either transfer the domains to a registrar of the studios’ choosing, or place them on registry hold, which would make them inaccessible too.
To address a potential whack-a-mole scenario, the studios can also return to court to add further domains to the injunction, as long as evidence shows Freemon operates them.
All in all, the court order is a clear victory for the movie companies. Whether the defendant will be able to pay over $18 million in damages is another matter. The domain seizure order does not have an immediate effect either, as all the mentioned domains have been offline for a while already.
That said, if Freemon ever attempts to relaunch the services, the movie companies will come prepared.
—
A copy of the default judgment, signed March 11, at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
As always with authoritarian regimes (and corporate ownership), this is all presented to the public as an effort to restore balance, eliminate (nonexistent) “liberal bias,” and reach out to real Americans. As if billionaires and their useful idiots could care less about everyday Americana.
“So, look, I’ve said this since the beginning, which is, you know, for — when it really comes to — editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It’s maintained at CBS. It’ll be maintained at CNN. And, really, who we want to talk to is the 70% of Americans and really around the world that identify as center-left, as center-right. And we want to be in the truth business. We want to be in the trust business. And that’s not going to change.”
Traditionally there’s only one editorial direction U.S. journalism usually goes under consolidated corporate ownership. U.S. media owners like tax cuts, deregulation, subsidies, access, and merger approvals, so corporate media’s editorial slant generally follows the financial interests of ownership. The pretense that U.S. media suffers from widespread “liberal bias,” or the belief that there are still functional firewalls between ownership and editorial, are long-deceased relics.
Larry Ellison clearly wants to hoover up what’s left of corporate media (including CBS, CNN, HBO) — and fuse it with his co-ownership of TikTok to create a sort of Hungary-esque autocratic state media, where administration allies praise dear leader while the government strangles independent and public media just out of frame.
The only thing saving us from the full and terrible vision of this outcome to date is the fact that very few of the weird nepobabies and brunchlords being tasked with its creation have anything you’d mistake for competence.
He also understood the process of organizing a plant to build a car.
Scott Belsky knows how to use Photoshop and remembers what it was like to run a small business.
And Sarah Jones knows exactly what is required to be on stage, alone, in a crowded theater.
The world keeps changing (faster than ever) and leading our team (and our career) requires us to do things we didn’t used to know how to do.
In essence, the CEO of every organization, of every size, is more incompetent than ever before. It’s not enough to know how to use the product and have empathy for your customers.
Are you making decisions about AI, supply chains, vendor management, the sales pipeline or employee health?
It’s hard to wing it if you haven’t flown before, and now most of what CEOs do (even for companies of one or two people) has little to do with the actual product or service on offer.
One alternative is to freak out, bury your head and hope for the best.
The other is to use the system to learn about the system. Instead of winging it, find the time to learn enough to make good decisions and to understand the tools well enough to benefit from hiring people to use them.
Because that’s what CEOs make. They make decisions.
As pirate IPTV services have continued to grow in recent years, TV broadcasters and distributors have intensified their efforts to combat the problem.
Pay TV provider DISH Network, in tandem with the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP), has been particularly active on this front, filing a series of lawsuits in the United States.
DISH vs. Innetra
In one of these cases, DISH last year filed a copyright infringement complaint against UK hosting provider ‘Innetra PC’ at a California federal court, accusing the company of aiding widespread copyright infringement while ignoring takedown requests.
Based on IBCAP’s evidence, the complaint alleged that Innetra provided essential infrastructure for pirate streaming services, including the separately targeted Lemo TV and Kemo IPTV, as well as Honeybee, Xtremehd, and Caliptostreams.
In its complaint, DISH argued that Innetra could not rely on safe harbor protection, as it largely ignored hundreds of infringement notices. Additionally, Innetra allegedly failed to designate a DMCA agent and had no policy for terminating repeat infringers.
The complaint listed 171 copyrighted works and requested damages of up to $25 million against Innetra and its general partner, Elna Paulette Valentin was also named as a defendant personally.
Innetra Requested Dismissal
In July last year, Innetra responded with a motion to dismiss. The company argued that the court lacked jurisdiction, as the UK company has minimal to no contacts with the United States or California.
Among other things, Innetra said it had no U.S. servers and had signed up just one paying U.S. customer since its founding, whose account was only active for two months.
The hosting provider did not disregard the idea of a legal battle entirely. Instead, it said that if DISH insisted on filing a lawsuit, it could do so in the United Kingdom, not in the United States.
“Dish may pursue its dispute in the United Kingdom, where Innetra is located. Dish, however, may not force foreign defendants that lack minimum contacts with the United States, let alone California, to defend themselves in the United States,” Inntra wrote in its motion last year.
Court Dismisses $25 Million Lawsuit
After the motion to dismiss was filed, the court allowed DISH sixty days of jurisdictional discovery before ruling on the motion to dismiss. However, that proved not to be enough to overcome the jurisdiction challenges.
Last week, Judge Noël Wise granted Innetra’s motion to dismiss, concluding that DISH had failed to demonstrate specific personal jurisdiction over the UK hosting company. The case was dismissed without prejudice.
The court applied the “purposeful direction” test established in recent Ninth Circuit case law, which requires a plaintiff to show that a defendant made regular sales in the forum and consciously cultivated a customer base there. However, based on the evidence provided by DISH, that is not the case here.
At the time of the alleged infringement, in 2024, Innetra had no U.S. customers at all. Two American customers briefly appeared in 2025: one paid $682 over two months before cancelling, and the other signed up for nine days without purchasing anything. The court described these contacts as “scant, fleeting, and attenuated.”
DISH also argued that Innetra’s peering arrangements with NTT and Lumen showed a deliberate effort to reach U.S. users. However, evidence provided during discovery showed that Innetra contracted with the German and Dutch branches of these companies, not their U.S. affiliates. Innetra did not use U.S.-based servers from these companies.
Finally, the court was not convinced by DISH’s evidence that nearly 49,000 instances of pirate IPTV services used Innetra’s infrastructure to transmit content into the U.S. Since these pirate services were making the connection to U.S. users, not Innetra, the hosting provider is not responsible for jurisdictional purposes.
What’s Next?
Because the case was dismissed without prejudice, DISH is allowed to refile the case, potentially with extra evidence. And as Innetra noted in its motion to dismiss, DISH can also file a lawsuit in the United Kingdom if they like.
For Innetra, putting up a defense turned out to be vital. After all, another DISH lawsuit against Ukraine-based hosting provider Virtual Systems recently showed that not responding in court can result in a multi-million-dollar default judgment.
For now, there is no sign of follow-up action against Innetra yet. However, DISH certainly continues its enforcement efforts elsewhere. Just last month, the company filed a fresh $21 million lawsuit against pirate IPTV operation DMTN, whose operator allegedly posed as Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.
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A copy of U.S. District Court Judge Noël Wise’s order on the motion to dismiss is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Alright, I think it might be time for a wellness check on the people running Buc-ee’s.
I realize that these chain of gas and convenience stores has a strange cult following in the south. I won’t pretend to understand why that is, but whatever. Unfortunately, the company also appears to be run by a bunch of trademark bullying jackwagons. I’ve referred to Buc-ee’s as the Monster Energy of gas stations, because the company appears to think that trademark law allows it to own the concept of a cartoon animal mascot in any tangential industry. They have bullied and/or sued many, many companies under this premise. Because most of its victims are smaller companies, they have gotten a lot of settlements out of these bullying efforts.
But those settlements don’t make the bullying legitimate. Buc-ee’s views on what trademark law allows it to own and control are fantasy. They’re still out here doing their bullying thing, though, with the latest example being its decision to sue a company that runs a gas station called “Mickey’s”. I’ve embedded the suit below, but here is a sample of the claims in the filing made against the gas station chain.
Like the Buc-ee’s Marks, Defendant’s Logos incorporate a cartoon animal facing right with wide eyes and a smile, overlaying a round background…also uses red as a predominant color in its interior and exterior signage, as well as employee uniforms and anthropomorphic representations of its cartoon moose mascot…also uses red as a predominant color in its interior and exterior signage, as well as employee uniforms and anthropomorphic representations of its cartoon moose mascot.
Consumers are likely to perceive a connection or association as to the source, sponsorship, or affiliation of the parties’ products and services, when in fact none exists, given the similarity of the parties’ logos, trade channels, and consumer bases.
And here, dear readers, is the very similar branding that the lawsuit references.
Once again, as with past Buc-ee’s trademark suits, the claims simply fall apart on inspection of the evidence. These logos are not similar. They don’t use the same overall color schemes. They feature easily distinguishable cartoon animals as mascot. A beaver is not a moose, which is a sentence I never thought I’ve have to type out on a keyboard. Likewise, a hexagon is not round, another thing I’d never thought I’d have to write. This is all very, very stupid, and not at all concerning from a customer confusion standpoint.
Despite that, the suit alleges that Mickey’s has “used” the Buc-ee’s logos to enrich themselves. It’s bonkers. In addition, Buc-ee’s has petitioned the USPTO to cancel the trademark registrations Mickey’s has for its branding.
Why is this company so beloved? They truly seem like craven bullies above all else. None of this is trademark infringement and I certainly hope the owners of Mickey’s are prepared to fight this fight. Because Buc-ee’s doesn’t somehow have a monopoly on cartoon character mascots. Not for its industry, never mind others.
In this episode, Lauren & Matt have a conversation exploring why print needs to be part of your creator strategy. We consider the current state of digital content, influenced by algorithms and AI, and how content entrepreneurs can use print books to better establish their brand longevity and legacy (and, of course, to make money).
Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. Today we are going to be adding another P to that while we talk about why print is the missing piece of your creator ecosystem and how print books can help you prosper.
Matt: So Publish. Print. Prosper?
Lauren: Wow, that sounds familiar.
Matt: Somebody shoulda put that on an ad or something. Somewhere over the years.
Lauren: It's not too late to go back and do it now.
Matt: We're professionals. The other P in this.
Lauren: The four Ps of the Publish & Prosper podcast
Matt: Professionals remember their microphones. Actually, I probably shouldn't have this. Yep.
Lauren: Do you want me to start over or should we just –?
Matt: No, no, no. Let’s just keep going.
Lauren: Okay. Great.
[1:22] - Episode Topic Intro
Matt: So we're talking about print. Imagine that.
Lauren: Yes. Yes. Today we're talking about print, and –
Matt: So before you hit the pause button, let us explain.
Lauren: We promise. We know you've heard this before, but not –
Matt: Maybe.
Lauren: – not entirely. You know?
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: There is... I think there's always new angles and new elements that we like to look at when we're talking about different ways that different types of creators and businesses can use print books, print products, print marketing tools, whatever it is.
Matt: Yeah, and it's – actually, it's less about print per se, and more about breaking through the norms and monetizing content in a different way than you have been. And again, quite frankly, just trying to cut through a lot of the white noise that's out there right now.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So...it’s really –
Lauren: Yeah, maybe –
Matt: – it's really a conversation about monetization.
Lauren: A conversation about monetization and a conversation about the creator ecosystem and the creator economy. There may or may not be the phrase somewhere in this outline, ‘the content creator to content entrepreneur pipeline.’ Which I thought you would appreciate more than ‘I'm in my content entrepreneur era.’
Matt: I like both, but I like the first one better. Because the difference between the two is monetization.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So the difference between a content creator and a content entrepreneur is a monetization tactic or strategy.
Lauren: Yes. So we're going to talk through that. We're going to talk through what that looks like, what we've seen and even experienced ourselves a little bit. And then where print books can help you kind of solidify that, maybe even take it to the next stage and really help you kind of slot that last piece – or not last piece, because you're never done building on this – but slot that next piece into place.
Matt: Yeah. As a side note, there's a college. I think it's somewhere in New York, maybe upstate New York, where you're from. That now offers a minor in creator economy.
Lauren: That's cool.
Matt: I think it's cool. I'm not sure. I haven't decided yet. I wish I could remember the name of the school, actually. I'll have to look it up.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: But.
Lauren: I think that is something that's interesting in, in the sense that I'm having a hard time imagining, like... by the time your four year program is over, Imagine how much things have changed from day one.
Matt: Well, yeah. So that's the question, right?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Like at first, sort of, glance or hearing you're like, yeah, that's cool. And maybe it's cool. But they didn't say what context it was in. So is it –
Lauren: True.
Matt: – is it a minor in, in creator economy, you know, economics? Is it a minor in creator economy... you know, like what's the - what's the angle? Because like you just said, I mean, quite frankly, anything to do with it is probably out of date the first week of class.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Like the minute the syllabus is handed to you, it's probably out of date. And I bet some creators would argue that whatever they're going to teach you in that minor, it's probably not very helpful in the real world.
Lauren: Yeah, you’d almost be better off –
Matt: But I don’t know.
Lauren: – doing like, I'm going to buy a four year pass to one, like content creator or content entrepreneur event and go every year to this four day event.
Matt: Or I'm just going to subscribe to six of the top newsletters and –
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: – get my creator education that way. Like, I don't know, I just thought it was a little bit telling in terms of just, you know, A. how academia is always behind on everything, you know?
Lauren: There’s that.
Matt: Oddly enough. But B., I think it's a signal just of how society is kind of embracing it.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: For good or bad, whatever. Anyways.
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely –
Matt: I just thought it was interesting.
Lauren: It is interesting. Now I'm kind of thinking about, like, what would I... Oh no, this is the whole tangent. Okay. We can't do this. I'm going to start building a curriculum in my head.
Matt: Oh, yeah. I don’t want to go down that –
Lauren: Like, what courses would I –
Matt: I don’t want to do that.
Lauren: Yeah. No, no, we can't go there.
Matt: I'd rather build a curriculum for like, you know, if you were going to get a minor in managing Disney Parks, or something. Like, you know? What does that curriculum look like?
Lauren: I do actually –
Matt: I need a class on churros.
Lauren: I actually really do think that if I could go back in time – I feel like this is one of the, one of the things that you learn as an adult. That maybe is why so many people get drawn to things like content creation or like, being an independent educator or creator or something like that. Is because there are so many jobs that I didn't know were an option when I was a kid.
Matt: Oh, yeah.
Lauren: That I think would've been like, like something that I would, like if I had known when I was sixteen –
Matt: When I was a kid most of those jobs –
Lauren: – that theme park management was.
Matt: – weren’t an option.
Lauren: Well that too. But like, like I would have positioned my...
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – education like, very differently if I’d known then what I know now.
Matt: Now all those people you laughed at because they they majored in hospitality management.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. Now who's laughing?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I went to an engineering college and I took a bunch of liberal arts classes. I could have been an imagineer – No I couldn't have. But, you know.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You know. But for those of you that are going in the direction of, or already well on your way into this creator economy, and and you don't need that degree...
Matt: You don't need a degree. Well, anyways.
Lauren: It’s not what my degree‘s in, don’t worry.
Matt: That was my derailment for the day.
Lauren: We’re, we're off to a great start.
[7:05] - Digital Content Today
Matt: Alright, so. We're talking about incorporating print.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Into your monetization strategy as a creator. Or if you don't have a monetization strategy yet, print's a great way to start it.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Why do you think that?
Lauren: I think there's a lot of... like in, in where we are right now in... like culturally and digitally, specifically, and this, like, digital ecosystem that we're in right now. Everything is so intangible and occasionally – frequently – inauthentic and ephemeral. I know you were just waiting for me to use that. But whether you are a consumer of content or a creator of content, we're kind of trapped in this like endless churn of 24/7 content refreshing. It's quite literally flash in the pan content that may be seen once, may never be seen, and then disappears into the ether. I just think that we, like we live in a digital space right now.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Where the people that are putting the content into that space have a very finite amount of control –
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: – over what happens with their content once they get it out there.
Matt: I don't think anybody could argue with that.
Lauren: I don't think so either.
Matt: For the most part.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So, you know, how do you make that content last? How do you make it tangible? And how do you use it to reach people in a way that isn't going to immediately disappear?
Matt: I like it.
Lauren: Thanks.
Matt: I like the making money part.
Lauren: Well, there's that too.
Matt: Yeah. So hopefully we get to that pretty quickly.
Lauren: We will. We will definitely get to that.
Matt: That’s my favorite part. So I think one of the important things to point out at the very top of all of this is that publishing a book is not the same as writing a book.
Lauren: We've made that point once or twice.
Matt: In fact, you could probably replace the word publishing with the word creating or even selling. None of those actions necessarily mean you have to full on write a book.
Lauren: Right. And that can mean different things. And again, we've done multiple episodes on this so we don't have to rehash the individual ideas on different types of books you can make, and different ways you can turn your content into a book. I'll link several episodes in the show notes that you can listen to those if you want to dive deeper into those ideas. But if you're not sold on the concept of a book, think about reframing it as just another way that you can package your existing content. Or new content, you know, whatever. But if you are already in the mindset of... I write blog posts and I wanted to create podcast episodes that, you know, or videos, or whatever, that's using that same content, but delivering it in a different method to reach a different audience of people.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Or I want to take my longform videos and make them into short form social media content, whatever. This is just another version of that. You're taking your content and moving it over to a new platform and a new package, and that just happens to be print books.
Matt: Repackaging –
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: – to make money.
Lauren: We should keep a tally of how many times you talk about making, making money in this episode.
Matt: I can tell you it'll probably be less times than you say the word ephemeral.
Lauren: Well, then I have a lot of catching up to do.
Matt: Yeah. All right. Well let's, let's get to that part about becoming a content entrepreneur.
Lauren: Okay.
Matt: Instead of just being a content creator.
[10:57] - The Content Creator to Content Entrepreneur Pipeline
Lauren: Alright. So I don't think any of this is really news to anybody, but just to kind of lay it out, lay the journey out here. Regardless of how how you're kind of approaching this, whether it was something that you started as just a hobby, that you started posting content for fun, and that evolved over time into something that you were like, oh hey, I could, I can make some money off of this, or –
Matt: Or I'd like to make some money off of this.
Lauren: I would like to, I got to figure out – like, you know, or this is actually going somewhere. I didn't expect people to follow this, but I actually have, like, a pretty decent number of followers. What do I do here?
Matt: Or I hate my job and I'd like to not be at my job anymore.
Lauren: That would be –
Matt: And I’d like to just create and sell content full time.
Lauren: I mean, personally, I can't agree with that, I love my job.
Matt: Yeah, I was going to say tread lightly here on that one. But we do know –
Lauren: But there are plenty of people, yes.
Matt: – one of the big benefits of being a content entrepreneur, and not just a content creator, is that when you make money from your content, you have a much better likelihood of not having to work a nine to five and being chained to a cubicle.
Lauren: All I want is the kind of job that I can do from as, as adjacent to Disney World property as possible.
Matt: Okay. You do know that you cannot live in the woods behind Walt Disney World, right?
Lauren: No, I don't want to – I don't, I don't need to live in that swamp.
Matt: Alright.
Lauren: Thank you so much. But anyway, when you're in that early stage or, you know, if you are starting just from the jump of saying like, yes, I am here. Like, I've always known that I want to start this as a business. Like, I always know that I'm doing this – no matter which angle you're coming at it from, you still kind of going along that same path. Where you're going to start by creating and promoting as much content as you can.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You're going to be churning out as much content as you can, probably short form content. Maybe you'll evolve that into some long form content too. But, you know, if you really want to get out there, it's, it's the, the quantity. Right? Like you're really, you got to get out there. You got to be consistent. This is all the advice they tell you like, 101. You gotta be posting every day, maybe multiple times a day. Valuable content, but still frequent content. You're probably using third party platforms, whether that is something like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever. You're not building on your own space yet.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So, you know, if you're starting there... Sure. Great. That's, that's a totally, like, sensical and viable option for how to do that.
Matt: Sensical. Another good word.
Lauren: Thank you. Beyond that, you know, we reach that that stage where people are looking for ownership.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Now.
Matt: Not only are you – you should be evolving as a content creator, right? Which does include if you've primarily done short form content up to this point, getting to to a place where you're doing long form content. Because that's where you're going to start to have, you know, a little more success converting it to something that you can monetize. But, thinking about ownership and going from these, these channels where you don't have a lot of control over... Again, you're, you're putting stuff out there, you're building your audience, but you've got to start getting to that place where you know, you're trying to actively move them somewhere that you have way more control. Because you can't monetize effectively until you have control.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: If you try to monetize on social media alone, you're pretty hamstrung there. If you try to monetize on some of these other channels like YouTube alone, without any other type of owned platform, or way to control, like, you're hamstrung there. You're still at the mercy of the platforms. So you've got to get them over to an email newsletter, a paid community or a membership, or something like that, or, you know, a Patreon or a Substack or any one of those, those types of platforms where you have way more control.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And ownership to a degree. So ownership in the sense that an email list, for example, if you want to leave that email platform, you can take your list with you. If you want to leave TikTok, what are you taking with you? Nothing.
Lauren: Nothing.
Matt: There's nothing to take. You don't own any of that. It's all property of TikTok. So unless you also downloaded each one of those videos you created or had them stored somewhere else, or... you might be able to take that content, but you're still not taking any of those followers or people who hit that like button or reshared your content, so.
Lauren: Which is also something that in that scenario, you're walking away willingly. We hear stories all the time –
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: – of people whose platform got taken from them for some reason or another, their account got banned –
Matt: Yep.
Lauren: – or suspended –
Matt: – or hacked. Or whatever, Yeah.
Lauren: – or hacked. Or their Facebook page got shut down, and Facebook has not responded to any appeals on it. Like –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – this happens all the time. And if you didn't have a backup option to that, if you didn't, if you weren't already doing the things that you needed to do to save both your content and your audience, there's no way to recover that.
[16:08] - Building for Longevity and Legacy
Matt: Sayonara. Are we done talking about my favorite stage, which is ownership, or are we going to keep talking about ownership?
Lauren: I mean, did you want to keep talking about it?
Matt: Well, it’s my favorite.
Lauren: It's never I know it, I know.
Matt: I love it.
Lauren: But I kind of wanted to get to the part where we talk about the next stage.
Matt: The next stage makes me feel old, but we can move on to the next stage.
Lauren: Because I think that in... in the spaces that we're in now, people need less and less convincing about having to get to that owned stage. Right?
Matt: That's probably true.
Lauren: You know?
Matt: And they're probably tired of hearing us harp on it and other people harp on it, but...
Lauren: Yeah. I –
Matt: Yeah?
Lauren: I think people in the same way that we've said, you know, a few years ago, we used to have to convince people that selling direct was a good idea. And then – and now people are like no no, we're, we're sold on that. We're good on that. How, how do we do it? How do we get there?
Matt: For the most part, yeah.
Lauren: Right. So I don't think we need to convince anyone listening that it's important to have ownership of your audience or your, your content or your creator experience –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – or whatever it is. But I think that's a stage that a lot of people get stuck at. Where they go, okay, I've done the things, I've moved people, or I have like at least one controlled space within my ecosystem that I'm doing everything I can to funnel people from here. I'm still using these third party platforms as a discoverability tool, and I'm still posting content here, but I'm doing my best to kind of like shuffle people over to here as frequently as possible. Which, of course, yeah. And now what? Now it's time to build long lasting, quality spaces that will give your business longevity and...
Matt: I feel like you’re dancing around the word that makes me feel old.
Lauren: I just said the word longevity.
Matt: Legacy.
Lauren: Oh. Well, I was giving you an opportunity to say make money.
Matt: Oh, well, yeah. But, I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive, or –
Lauren: Oh, no.
Matt: – tied or relevant. But longevity and legacy, I think, can mean different things. Longevity is important, yes. Building a legacy could be, or could mean, something slightly different. I think both are important, by the way, but for different reasons to different creators and different creator types. Longevity is extremely important as it relates to building a business. Yes. You know, the more that you can put systems in place that create longevity for your business, the more that you can monetize content that will achieve longevity in the market. Of course, yeah. Legacy I think is slightly different, but also relevant to this conversation. Legacy can mean a couple of different things. We've talked to some people that have talked about legacy and what that means to them. Justin Moore talked about legacy.
Justin: This is going to sound super cheesy, but, you know, we've been doing this since 2009, and I very much felt drawn to educating the next generation of creators. It was kind of like a legacy thing. I don't know if this is like, maybe I'm getting more existential as I get older, but I really felt – I feel so blessed. The amount of success that my wife and I have had, personally, over our career. And it was like, I kind of want to pay it forward. Like, kinda pass the torch to the next generation, so to speak? So it very much was an impact play.
Matt: I think that's important. You know?
Lauren: I think so too.
Matt: And the reason I think it's important is because I'm older than you and I'm older than a lot of creators that we work with. And legacy starts to take on a different meaning the older you get. And I think it's important that, you know, a lot of these creators, because they are creating a new path, they're doing things differently than, than people have done before them. It's important to leave some traces of that, I think. So legacy is another thing to think about. If you're doing really cool stuff in your space as a creator. Everybody loves to joke that the internet is forever. No, it is not.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: 100% it is not. And if half these people are correct that are out here screaming that AI is about to take over the world and murder us all, you can believe that anything they don't want to exist on the internet anymore is not exist. The one thing AI can't touch is your bookshelves. You know? So yeah, I think that legacy is an important piece of that, too. But longevity. Yeah. Stage three, building longevity. As it relates to business.
Lauren: You're right. I think they're, they're parallel and complementary.
Matt: Yup. 100%
Lauren: I do think they are two separate things,
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: But I think that they’re also – I'm assuming that is the next stage that you want to be at with your business growth. If this is something that you are pursuing seriously and not just, I'm doing this for fun, and if it makes some money, that's cool too, and I'll keep making money with it for as long as I can. And then when it fades, it fades. Like – which, which is fine if that's, if that's what you want to do.
Matt: But that's the difference in a hobby and a business.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Right. That's the difference between a side hustle and a career that you're building.
Matt: Interesting choice of words. But yeah.
Lauren: Do you disagree?
Matt: I guess not.
Lauren: Okay. Okay. So I think there are some different ways for you to kind of really, really ground yourself and actually kind of pursue that longevity. And we've talked about them in, in some different episodes. But spoiler alert for this one, in this case, we're talking about using books. And there's a lot of different ways that you can use books for this, whether that's... Like, companion pieces for your digital content, if you're doing online courses and you're creating companion workbooks that go with that. Maybe you're, you're building a new product line around some print things, whether that's I'm going to put out an annual planner and people are going to come back to me year after year to get this planner.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And that's how you're going to generate longevity. Maybe it's just putting together compilations every year. We've talked about other creators that have done this, that published a best of their work from this year, best of their content from, from this series that they did, or whatever.
Matt: I actually like that one, because... like for newsletters and podcasts, I have newsletters that I like, that I subscribe to, that – and I'll read the email every week when it comes. And then obviously the same with podcasts. But you get to a point where it's like, yeah, I know at some point earlier in this year so-and-so talked about this thing on their podcast. I don't really want to dig through all of the podcasts. I like the idea that if I wanted to, I could own a year's worth of that content in a book or something like that, and I could just flip right to it, you know, at my desk or whatever that might be. Yeah, I like that idea of just, again, a legacy product where I could have access to that. And I don't have to go flip through 147 podcasts or, you know, dig in my inbox for that, that newsletter. I'm not even sure when it was. Maybe it was four months ago, I don't remember. Maybe I accidentally deleted them, or data retention kicked in and those emails are gone, or whatever. But I've always liked that idea. Like, just kind of that annual sort of compilation of content.
[23:22] - Why Print Books
Lauren: I do too. Both as a consumer and as a creator. And this is a great segue – thanks for that – into talking about why, why print books specifically. Why print and why not, like, well can’t I just turn my content into an ebook and have it be a digital thing? No, that defeats the point. But that, that is – that first example right there is absolutely, I think, one of the main reasons. Is having that tangible and accessible kind of content there, that referential content that, you know – I know for me, in the same way that I know you do too, I know what creators and what resources I go back to again and again and again.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And I frequently, I have, you know, these are all of my tabs that I keep open because I go back to them so often that I want to be able to reference them. And God knows I won't be able to find them if I'm trying to search them.
Matt: And I'll tell you what too. Man, I hate an ebook.
Lauren: I know.
Matt: And what I hate worse than an ebook is a thinly disguised PDF as an ebook. Like, I can't stand it. No I don't want your damn downloadable PDF that's supposed to be an ebook, that's supposed to, you know, teach me about the five ways to, you know, better monetize. But like, no, I don't want that.
Lauren: Yup.
Matt: But I'm a sucker for like, an actual print book. Like, yeah, it might be a short book – which is great too, by the way. I'm a huge fan of books –
Lauren: Oh yeah.
Matt: – I can read on one plane ride.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: I love it. But no, I don't want your crappy little ebook PDF wannabe educational resource. Keep it. They're usually poorly done anyways.
Lauren: I know. I – you don't have to convince me. You don't have to convince me. And you probably don't have to convince listeners either, because we have talked about this.
Matt: They've all stopped listening at this point.
Lauren: It's alright. We don't need to go wildly far into this, but we – obviously, we've made the argument before that, that having a print book really does help you establish and build on your authority. Whether it's like a subconscious thing that that people subconsciously are like, oh, they know enough about this that they, they wrote a book on it. Like, that's, that's serious. Never underestimate the power of subconsciously connecting with people that way. But it's also a – literally, like a tangible physical thing that proves your investment in I've, I've dedicated time and energy and maybe even money into publishing this as a book.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That means something to people. And obviously, of course, can also be a very powerful lead magnet. So.
Matt: There's actual data out there too, by the way, where, you know, organizations have, have done surveys and polled all different levels of executives and other people and –
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: – asked them questions like, hey, you know, if if somebody had actually written a book on a particular topic that you were interested in contracting somebody to consult for, would you be more inclined to give them an interview or hire them, versus somebody who hadn't? Or like – there's all kinds of data to support what we're saying. It's not, you know, it's not just our anecdotal experiences or our subjective outlook on this, even though we do agree it's probably better to hand somebody a book on the subject than a crappy little business card that was designed and printed on Vistaprint for $1.50.
Lauren: Absolutely. The episode that we did with Justin, the interview that we did with Justin where that legacy quote came from, he also talked about that being a surprising side effect of publishing his book.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Was that it unlocked a whole new tier of clients that were reaching out to him that were, like –
Matt: It's access.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So the way that Justin put it, which is the way that we've heard it from others at this point, too, is that, you know, as as a creator or, you know, however you choose to, to sort of identify. But if you're actively trying to recruit brands, especially larger ones, whether it's for sponsorships or consulting job or for anything really, nine times out of ten you're not getting past somebody at the, the director level. And that's if you're lucky. Like, you might land an email in the director of partnerships’ inbox. If you're lucky. It's very, very rare that you will get any higher than that. You know, a VP or C-suite or somebody like that. But one of the things Justin talked about, and others have echoed at this point, is that, you know, having written a book on something like that, it opens access to a whole ‘nother layer of prospecting. You can now actually find yourself in rooms with VP's, with C-suite, with, you know, executive VPs or other people that, they're the ones really that are making the decisions, and you're typically relegated to dealing with their gatekeepers. So yeah, it can open up access for you. It can broaden the playing field for you in a way that you hadn't thought about prior to that. And might not otherwise get access to.
Lauren: Yeah, possibly quite literally putting you in the room with them.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Too.
Matt: Oh, 100%.
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, there's – just to wrap up quickly, we won't rehash a whole bunch of the different ways that we've already talked about. I would recommend going and listening to episode 58, if you want to listen to more about some of the main reasons that we think –
Matt: It seems so long ago now.
[28:54] - Print Books Open New Opportunities
Lauren: – are really valuable, I know. But there are some, some other reasons that we don't really talk about as often, that I think make a lot of sense here. And one of them is that, like, specific opportunity when it comes to partnering with, or getting sponsored by, or doing some kind of consulting with some bigger businesses.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: If that is something that you're interested in doing... Whether it's you want them to reach out to you and hire you for, like – to come in and do a workshop –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – in-house. Having a book is a selling point for that. Having a book is a value add for that, that you can say, I have this whole like, clear, succinct, one hour, this is what my workshop is. And as a value add, everyone that attends it will get a copy of a workbook or planner or something that I have designed specifically to help them continue to implement the things that I taught in that workshop.
Matt: Well what's even cooler... Is if you're using a platform that allows for personalization, and utilizes print-on-demand, you could actually do customized books for that particular event. Yep. So if you're going to be in a room with fifty people. For IBM, let's say. You could actually update the interior file for your book for that order of books, those fifty or sixty books, to have some dedication page in the front to that group of people you're speaking to. Or literally a one page summary of how everything in this book would relate to their business, or their vertical, or what they do. Like, you have a lot of creative freedoms there that, that takes it that extra mile, where you can guarantee you'll get invited back every time they do want to train a new group. And you can guarantee that by word of mouth they're going to recommend you to others for that same reason. So... yeah. Gosh, I keep going on these side paths. I'm just going to let you keep talking, go ahead.
Lauren: No no, no, I think I think this actually is much more of a conversation than the outline lends itself to. So that's okay. But I also think something else that you said in there with going back to, to getting yourself in the room with people. And this idea of using a book – I know this is a phrase that we overuse, but using a book as a business card.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: How many emails do you delete every single day that are phishing, cold call emails from people pitching nonsense to you?
Matt: I can't even count. And those are the ones that make it past our built-in –
Lauren: Right.
Matt: – spam filters. I got one yesterday, by the way, that I almost had to just show it to the entire team here. But this salesperson, who clearly was relying on some misguided AI tool to help with their, their lead prospecting, not only call me by the wrong name. So it was Dear Mark.
Lauren: Hi Mark.
Matt: The opening sentence was: Now that we're almost through the month of December –
Lauren: Oh no.
Matt: And you're probably wrapping up your 2026 budget planning, I'd love to talk to you about blah blah blah blah blah. This came yesterday, which was February 16th, as of this recording, sorry.
Lauren: Yeah, we're recording this early, sorry.
Matt: I mean, they're just, they're terrible. Then they just get worse. I thought AI was supposed to help a lot of these salespeople –
Lauren: – the wrong name, the wrong content. Getting emails that I'm like, I don't know what about my job title or my LinkedIn or whatever made you identify me as the appropriate recipient for this email, but let me tell you, I'm not. I could easily – I could absolutely book myself a weekend at, at a deluxe Disney Resort if I had a dollar for every email that I deleted in a month that were just, like, absolute – But you know what I will not delete? Is if somebody mailed me an envelope that had a book in it. And it was, if I got, if I came in to work and there was a package sitting on my desk and it was a book with a little handwritten note that was from – or not even, just like a, you know, just a quick like, hey, thought you might find this interesting, would love to connect one on one at some point. At the very least, I'm gonna flip through it.
Matt: It's a better presentation. And I – and again, when we talk about cutting through the noise, regardless of what it is you're doing, whether that's, you know, on social media or with a sales pitch or, you know, some sort of... Yeah, it just – I've yet to ever receive a book or a piece of printed content or something where I was as quick to toss it as I am 90% of the emails that come into my inbox every day.
Lauren: Yes. And we've talked about this in other episodes recently. Robbie Fitzwater talked about this at CEX last year. That direct mail is on the rise.
Matt: Yes. Again.
Lauren: It's a resurging trend. Physical print, mail, whether it's a catalog or just a postcard, an envelope, whatever it is like, whatever it is.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That is absolutely on the rise. And it's effective. It's not on the rise because like, the industry is just throwing whatever at the wall. It's because it's working.
Matt: Well. It's, you know, we're going – we're going back to analog, because digital has become so saturated.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So, you know, to a degree, it makes sense that everything, like you started this episode talking about, is so digital. Like everybody's so attached to their devices, or their screens, or – the only way to be different these days and stand out and cut through that noise is to land in their mailbox instead of their inbox. It, there's just, it's almost impossible. So if you have a serious piece of content or something of real value, most people, like me, don't want your crappy little PDF that you're calling an ebook. Or they don't want, you know, whatever it is you're peddling that's in a digital format that's just going to land flat in their inbox, and possibly not even make it past their spam filter.
Lauren: I think there's a lot of... junk out there right now. Slop might be the word.
Matt: AI slop.
Lauren: The AI slop. Which I do, I do love, I do, I that's a –
Matt: Slopification?
Lauren: – the – yes.
Matt: I think we can breeze through the the eye slop ification of content, but.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Again, suffice to say everybody's talking about it right now. Like what's the best way to differentiate yourself? It is to show that you are a human being. It is to show that through your writing, through your content, through whatever it is you're making. And again, there's a great way to prove that you're a human being, and that the content you create is not fully generated by Elon Musk's army of robots. And that is to put it into a printed book and get that into people's hands.
Lauren: I do think it's also important to acknowledge that this is supposed to be a piece, and not the whole plan. Because I can absolutely hear people saying like, yeah, okay, but people are putting out books that are generated by AI all the time. Like, there are easily books out there right now that are POD books that somebody generated in ChatGPT and then threw up on Amazon. And you're right, those do exist. But this is a, this is a piece of the larger ecosystem that is working to prove your authenticity and prove your humanity.
Matt: Yeah. And they're generally different in terms of the circles that they're being promoted within.
Lauren: That too.
Matt: So the bad actors that are out there using AI to create books for a quick buck, a quick sale. A. they're typically relegated to Amazon only, and B. again, they're typically creating content that is almost a fiction in nature, ripping off other authors, because that's where the the quick turnover lies in making money. So I get it. I understand the argument, and it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But you know, I will put my print book, let's say, any day up against a couple of pieces you find on LinkedIn around the same topic. Because I can almost guarantee you what you found on LinkedIn was probably written completely by AI and probably doesn't make quite as much sense. Because, you know, again, there wasn't necessarily a human being that was fully invested in that content. Like there was just a content scheme, if you will.
Lauren: I think that it's – I think that people are still very quick to differentiate between AI content and real human content.
Matt: Or try to.
Lauren: Or I mean, or try to.
Matt: Yup.
Lauren: Yes, it is insane that we're all sitting here playing the like, ancient faerie rules of how many fingers do they have and –
Matt: The what?
Lauren: Faerie lore. Like old, like not – I'm not talking about like, romantasy faeries. I mean, like, actually like old English faerie lore of, like. Like you're not supposed to... Like, if a faerie says, like, asks for your name, you're not supposed to give them your name. Because names have power.
Matt: What? You have absolutely –
Lauren: Learn your folklore.
Matt: – gone off the rails. You might want to edit that out.
Lauren: Absolutely not.
Matt: I have no idea what you’re –
Lauren: There is at least one person listening that understood that reference.
Matt: First of all, if there was anybody left listening, even one person, they have now exited this podcast.
Lauren: Absolutely not.
Matt: I don't, I'm – faerie lore? Give them your name? Like, I don't understand.
Lauren: That's okay. That's okay. We can we can dive into this later. But we are –
Matt: What were we talking about?
Lauren: AI. And how –
Matt: AI.
Lauren: – people are still, people are still taking a moment to try to parse out AI content and human content.
Matt: And how did you get to faerie lore from that?
Lauren: Because –
Matt: I missed that bridge.
Lauren: Because one of the things that, like this is less of a problem now, but one of the like, original things that people were doing with AI generated images was they almost always had the incorrect number of fingers. Or there was some kind of, like they had an extra hand –
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: – or whatever.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: So like that, that is one of the like, tricks there is like, is there something uncanny about –
Matt: You're a mess.
Lauren: This is why we got to stop recording in the afternoons.
Matt: I never thought –
Lauren: It gets weird.
Matt: – I would hear you talk about fairies. Okay.
Lauren: Okay.
Matt: But, I mean, you said it with full conviction, like it's a real thing.
Lauren: I guarantee you, if I googled this right now, other references would come up online. Other, like –
Matt: Yeah, you could also Google the reality of, of the Loch Ness Monster. And it would – like, it's fairies. Come on.
Lauren: Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster? No, I do not. Do you believe in any of that? Do you – Bigfoot?
Matt: No.
Lauren: Mothman?
Matt: I also don't believe Tinkerbell is real.
Lauren: Those are completely different.
Matt: It’s – she's a fairy. Is she not?
Lauren: The fairies that I'm talking about would be disgusted by the comparison.
Matt: So the – Okay, let's just move on. Because I can feel myself wanting to go down this path with you. And I really don't think we should.
Lauren: And that is some folklore right there.
Matt: I mean, holy cow. So yeah, let's just, I'm not –
Lauren: Alright. The point is that one way or another, there are people out there that, that your book is going to solidify, whether it's your value, your authority, your like, humanity, whatever it is. Having a book, having printed content, having something that exists outside of your phone or the internet or a non-existent digital space is going to help you a lot more than it's going to hurt you for whatever reason.
[41:07] - Making Money and Adding Value
Lauren: But I also think to go back to the idea of actually adding value with books, because that's really what Matt wanted to talk about from the very beginning. Right?
Matt: Making money with books.
Lauren: Making money.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And the way that you make money with books, whether that is as a, as a product type. Or as a value add to your other monetization efforts.
Matt: Yeah. Like a lead generation tool.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So obviously product types, you can absolutely turn any of your content into books. We've talked about this once or twice.
Matt: Probably a few times, yeah.
Lauren: Probaby. Probably a few times. But there's also a lot of other ways that you can use a book to... I hate using the phrase USP. I hate that, I hate being like, like add a unique selling point to one of your existing things. But I do think that it is something that genuinely, like, if I was down to two different courses, let's say. If I was looking for an online course that I wanted to learn how to get better at podcasting and staying on track in a podcast and not going off on twenty-seven different tangents. And I came down to two different online courses, and one of them came with a workbook that was a companion workbook that I could take notes and have these references and resources and maybe included like, next steps for hey, after the course is over, here's what you do here. And maybe even if you have a series of courses, it kind of funnels them into your next course. They'll be a returning student. That to me is enough of a value add that I would choose that course over a book that didn't have – or, I'm sorry, over a course that didn't have a book –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – attached to it.
Matt: I like that Lou’s event, Momentum. He always does a pretty big workbook. And I like that we always includes sections from each of the speakers in there, and I think that's extremely valuable. I still have it on my desk –
Lauren: So do I, and I reference it.
Matt: – from a couple of years.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I – I yeah, I think that's, that's a really cool idea.
Lauren: And it was actually to, to that point. So not just online courses but also events. Which, there are other ways you can use books in events too. But for that specific example, a lot of the content in that workbook from the individual speakers was content that they said this is for later. Including me. A lot – like my session, the content that's in that workbook from my session was all, none of this is going to be useful to you right now, but in six months when you're –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – working on a book and you're at the the editing or the publishing or the formatting stage, this reference guide is going to be useful to you. And a lot of the other speakers did that too, and that is long term value add. This event was six months ago, and I'm still going back to that book, that workbook.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So.
Matt: I think we've seen it used in a lot of ways. The only other one that I think is is really popular right now that's worth touching on is probably subscriptions. And or when you have like a membership circle or something like that. Having a tier where, you know, once a quarter or once a month, if you're ambitious, those subscribers that are at that tier would get something in the mail, whether that's a cool journal or notebook or a small book. We've seen people take, you know, a larger bucket of content that is meant to maybe be a series, like you talked about, and break it up into little micro books, you know? Forty pages or so, small book on whatever, you know, social media marketing or AI prompting or whatever. And then each month their, their membership circle at the highest tier will get one of those little books. And those little books cost the creator a dollar something to produce, you know? But you're talking about memberships that sometimes can range, you know, $150 a month or more. And so, while that book only costs you, as a creator, maybe a dollar or something, you know? And shipping is a couple of bucks. The value ratio there for you versus them is high on each side. You know? As a, as a subscriber, not only am I getting access to your content through your platform, but if once a month I'm getting a cool, you know, little package from you or even just a small book or something like that, it's just, it's a whole experience. It just takes it to another level. Or like you said, there's other options out there for, for, you know, communities that could be a part of or, or workshops or master classes, but every little thing you can do to set yours apart from the next creator's, that's really important. So again, cutting through the noise.
Lauren: Not only cutting through the noise compared to other creators, but also just within your own community. I think that is a great way to give people a reason to keep coming back. If you've got subscribers that you're like, okay, it was only $5 a month for them to subscribe to my Patreon, and it gives them exclusive access to digital content that I create on a regular basis plus like, community forums and stuff like that. Okay, maybe for $10 a month they can get print copies of your digital downloads, or maybe for $15 a month, you can kind of like add –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – not replacing the older ones, but you can add new tiers. And maybe that's how you get people along the pipeline is when they first come in, they say, oh yeah, $5 a month, easy peasy, no problem. And then, you know, maybe after a year of that, they're saying, oh, you know, I really do wish I had this in like print form or whatever. So now it is worth it.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: To bump it up to that next tier. And then when those people six months from now, you say, hey guys, I published a full book. Well, okay, I've already proven the value of my content. I've been happily paying $10 a month for your content. Sure. Let me let me throw more money your way for that book or that online course or –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – whatever. So that's again, if you're – to go all the way back to the beginning – if you're kind of stagnating at that point where you're like, I've got people here and now I don't know what to do with them.
Matt: Yeah. Which –
Lauren: This is a way to kind of drive that.
Matt: – I think actually is a, is a bigger problem than most people realize.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: There's a lot of creators we talked to where they hit that stage and that just that's paralysis for them. Like, you know? Even if they've been collecting emails, which puts them a step ahead of a lot of people, they're not sure how to then push into monetization. Or they're afraid to ask, you know, for money in exchange for something. You know what I mean? Like, so I do think, again, in that instance where you're, you're new at it, and you're afraid to introduce monetization. A tangible product is the easiest way to to not only provide value, but at least provide the perception of value. Because there's something tangible in your hands. So, I think that's a really great point as well.
Lauren: I think this... I think we've kind of made the same argument so many times, just with different pieces of – like different elements of the argument. Like, when you’re selling –
Matt: Yeah, but this is the first time you've ever brought fairies into it.
Lauren: Honestly, that seems a little out of character for me, considering we've been doing this for 110 episodes. But. I guess there's a first time for everything. Sure. But, you know, we've talked about like, for, for authors, the idea of maybe, maybe you started off with selling on Amazon and then we're trying to convince you to go wide with your book sales and then hopefully sell direct as a part of that. And, you know, we've made the argument of, okay, we understand the value of those third party retailers. It’s a discoverability tool. It's a good way for you to test the waters. It's a good way for you to, to kind of, you know, go at this on your own until you've built up an audience. And then you have to, you have to move them along the pipeline if you want to keep that audience.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: If you want to keep establishing that relationship. This is, this is that same argument, just with different things. If you are creating digital content, if you are a content creator or content entrepreneur who is creating digital content in any format, that is absolutely how you, how you find your audience, how you reach new people, how you put yourself out there. But the way that you keep them and the way that you continue to build on that is by creating something that 1. you own and control, and 2. will last longer than that digital content. And that's print.
Matt: I agree.
[50:12] - Episode Wrap Up
Lauren: Wow. Do you have anything else that you would like to add or should we, should we quit while we're... I don't want to say ahead, but while we're still here?
Matt: I feel like I'm just fully invested in this fairy thing. But I will say, I do think that, you know, of all the creators that we've spent time with over the years, and – I've yet to come across one who implemented some sort of print product into their monetization strategy and regretted it.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So, you know, there are benefits to doing it with somebody like Lulu where it's print-on-demand. You're, you're not putting any money up front. And so that does kind of limit any barriers that might exist in terms of, you know, financial risk or inventory needs. But, you know, I've also never met a creator that put print into play and came back and said, you guys are full of it. This is no good.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Like – And maybe they were just being nice, or maybe they were worried that you might send a bunch of fairies after them if they, if they talk bad about it, but. I think honestly, you know, in an age where everybody's attached to devices, the obvious play is to do something different. And that's print. So.
Lauren: And if you don't believe us, there's only one way to prove us wrong. And that's to try it.
Matt: It's probably a bunch of ways, but sure.
Lauren: No. The only way to prove us wrong –
Matt: Oh.
Lauren: – that print books would flop, would be if you implemented it and it flopped. So.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Try it.
Matt: Why not?
Lauren: And then tell us all about it.
Matt: And if you actually got this far in the episode, hit the like button and subscribe.
Lauren: Leave us a comment. Leave us a review. Maybe.
Matt: I don't know.
Lauren: I don't know about this one. But no, please, please do like and subscribe. Come back for another episode. We promise they're not all this crazy. We promise we'll start recording in the morning again, so that we're not both out of our minds by the time we're sitting in this studio.
Matt: So it's just in the afternoon that you think about fairies?
Lauren: You've already thought about fairies more in the last half hour than I have in the last, like, calendar year.
Matt: But you're the one that brought it up, so I don't know how that statement could be true.
Lauren: We got to cut this. We gotta – We got to end this...
Matt: Alright. Let's go.
Lauren: Thanks for listening, everyone. Please come back next week. I promise there will be no fairies in whatever episode comes out next week.
Matt: Thankfully.
Lauren: Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever. Like, subscribe, leave us a review. And until then, thanks for listening.
Matt: Later.
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As we announced earlier this year, Let’s Encrypt now issues IP address and six-day certificates to the general public. The Certbot team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been working on two improvements to support these features: the --preferred-profile flag released last year in Certbot 4.0, and the --ip-address flag, new in Certbot 5.3. With these improvements together, you can now use Certbot to get those IP address certificates!
If you want to try getting an IP address certificate using Certbot, install version 5.4 or higher (for webroot support with IP addresses), and run this command:
This will request a non-trusted certificate from the Let’s Encrypt staging server. Once you’ve got things working the way you want, run without the --staging flag to get a publicly trusted certificate.
This requests a certificate with Let’s Encrypt’s “shortlived” profile, which will be good for 6 days. This is a Let’s Encrypt requirement for IP address certificates.
As of right now, Certbot only supports getting IP address certificates, not yet installing them in your web server. There’s work to come on that front. In the meantime, edit your webserver configuration to load the newly issued certificate from /etc/letsencrypt/live/<ip address>/fullchain.pem and /etc/letsencrypt/live/<ip address>/privkey.pem.
The command line above uses Certbot’s “webroot” mode, which places a challenge response file in a location where your already-running webserver can serve it. This is nice since you don’t have to temporarily take down your server.
There are two other plugins that support IP address certificates today: --manual and --standalone. The manual plugin is like webroot, except Certbot pauses while you place the challenge response file manually (or runs a user-provided hook to place the file). The standalone plugin runs a simple web server that serves a challenge response. It has the advantage of being very easy to configure, but has the disadvantage that any running webserver on port 80 has to be temporarily taken down so Certbot can listen on that port. The nginx and apache plugins don’t yet support IP addresses.
You should also be sure that Certbot is set up for automatic renewal. Most installation methods for Certbot set up automatic renewal for you. However, since the webserver-specific installers don’t yet support IP address certificates, you’ll have to set a --deploy-hook that tells your webserver to load the most up-to-date certificates from disk. You can provide this --deploy-hook through the certbot reconfigure command using the rest of the flags above.
We hope you enjoy using IP address certificates with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot, and as always if you get stuck you can ask for help in our Community Forum.
Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances.
The test just makes sense. In the analog world, a person is free to tell others where they may view a third party’s display of a copyrighted work, without being directly liable for infringement if that display turns out to be unlawful. The server test is the straightforward application of the same principle in the online context. A user that links to a picture, video, or article isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world, nor are they in a good position to know whether that content violates copyright. In fact, the user doesn’t even control what’s located on the other end of the link—the person that controls the server can change what’s on it at any time, such as swapping in different images, re-editing a video or rewriting an article.
But a news publisher, Emmerich Newspapers, wants the Fifth Circuit to reject the server test, arguing that the entity that embeds links to the content is responsible for “displaying” it and, therefore, can be directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. If they are right, the common act of embedding is a legally fraught activity and a trap for the unwary.
The Court should decline, or risk destabilizing fundamental, and useful, online activities. As we explain in an amicus brief filed with several public interest and trade organizations, linking and embedding are not unusual, nefarious, or misleading practices. Rather, the ability to embed external content and code is a crucial design feature of internet architecture, responsible for many of the internet’s most useful functions. Millions of websites—including EFF’s—embed external content or code for everything from selecting fonts and streaming music to providing services like customer support and legal compliance. The server test provides legal certainty for internet users by assigning primary responsibility to the person with the best ability to prevent infringement. Emmerich’s approach, by contrast, invites legal chaos.
Emmerich also claims that altering a URL violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on changing or deleting copyright management information. If they are correct, using a link shortener could put users at risks of statutory penalties—an outcome Congress surely did not intend.
Both of these theories would make common internet activities legally risky and undermine copyright’s Constitutional purpose: to promote the creation of and access to knowledge. The district court recognized as much and we hope the appeals court agrees.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.
The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.
The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
Spike in Strikes
Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.
Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
In 2015, twodozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.
A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.
Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.
In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.
Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.
During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.
“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.
The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”
Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involvingboat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.
At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.
Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.
Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.
To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.
“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”
Reforms Unraveled
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”
At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”
By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.
Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.
Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.
Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.
Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.
“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.
After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.
“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”
In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.
One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.
Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”
“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”
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And this week, I’m launching a video course that covers the ideas in the book. You can find the course, and how to get it at no extra cost, here.
We’re surrounded by problems. Problems create the arc of our days, and solving them creates value for ourselves and for others. There are big problems, the ones that are on a grand stage, and local problems, related to our career, our peers or our projects. If it’s a problem, it can be solved.
The best reason for me to publish a book is to help inspire conversations and the momentum that leads to change. Books give us an excuse to engage, and they create a portable bundle of ideas that are easy to share.
Several hundred people have already read and listened to the book, and the conversations it’s creating (and the stuck that’s disappearing) are thrilling to see.
In talking with folks over the last year and a half, the same theme returns–the frustration of being stuck. We see our world changing and feel the tension, but it’s easy to lose sight of what we can do and how we can show up to make an impact.
Without a doubt, there are situations everywhere. Situations are uncomfortable and unhappy, but they have no solution. We can’t do anything about a situation, so our best course of action is to acknowledge it and get back to work on the problems we can solve instead. Gravity is a situation, getting to the moon and back is a problem.
My approach to bringing this book to the world is to give booksellers the confidence they need to support it by enrolling as many pre-orders as I can. By creating digital interactions and courses, I’m giving readers a chance to engage with the ideas now, and then receive the book/audiobook when it ships in September.
I appreciate your trust, and I hope you find the book and the course useful.
Object permanence: Eggflation x excuseflation; Haunted Mansion stretch portraits; "Lost Souls"; Time Magazine x the first Worldcon; Obama v Freedom of Information Act; Ragequitting jihadi doxxes ISIS; OSI v DRM in standards.
AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (permalink)
Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
That's "Ed, the financial sleuth." But Ed has another persona, one we don't get nearly enough of, which I delight in: "Ed the stunt journalist." For example, in 2024, Ed bought Amazon's bestselling laptop, "a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage" and wrote about the experience of using the internet with this popular, terrible machine:
It sucked, of course, but it sucked in a way that the median tech-informed web user has never experienced. Not only was this machine dramatically underpowered, but its defaults were set to accept all manner of CPU-consuming, screen-filling ad garbage and bloatware. If you or I had this machine, we would immediately hunt down all those settings and nuke them from orbit, but the kind of person who buys a $238 Acer Aspire from Amazon is unlikely to know how to do any of that and will suffer through it every day, forever.
Normally the "digital divide" refers to access to technology, but as access becomes less and less of an issue, the real divide is between people who know how to defend themselves from the cruel indifference of technology designers and people who are helpless before their enshittificatory gambits.
Zitron's stunt stuck with me because it's so simple and so apt. Every tech designer should be forced to use a stock configuration Acer Aspire 1 for a minimum of three hours/day, just as every aviation CEO should be required to fly basic coach at least one out of three flights (and one of two long-haul flights).
To that, I will add: every news executive should be forced to consume the news in a stock browser with no adblock, no accessibility plugins, no Reader View, none of the add-ons that make reading the web bearable:
But in all honesty, I fear this would not make much of a difference, because I suspect that the people who oversee the design of modern news sites don't care about the news at all. They don't read the news, they don't consume the news. They hate the news. They view the news as a necessary evil within a wider gambit to deploy adware, malware, pop-ups, and auto-play video.
Rawdogging a Yahoo News article means fighting through a forest of pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplay video, interrupters, consent screens, modal dialogs, modeless dialogs – a blizzard of news-obscuring crapware that oozes contempt for the material it befogs. Irrespective of the words and icons displayed in these DOM objects, they all carry the same message: "The news on this page does not matter."
The owners of news services view the news as a necessary evil. They aren't a news organization: they are an annoying pop-up and cookie-setting factory with an inconvenient, vestigial news entity attached to it. News exists on sufferance, and if it was possible to do away with it altogether, the owners would.
That turns out to be the defining characteristic of work that is turned over to AI. Think of the rapid replacement of customer service call centers with AI. Long before companies shifted their customer service to AI chatbots, they shifted the work to overseas call centers where workers were prohibited from diverging from a script that made it all but impossible to resolve your problems:
These companies didn't want to do customer service in the first place, so they sent the work to India. Then, once it became possible to replace Indian call center workers who weren't allowed to solve your problems with chatbots that couldn't resolve your problems, they fired the Indian call center workers and replaced them with chatbots. Ironically, many of these chatbots turn out to be call center workers pretending to be chatbots (as the Indian tech joke goes, "AI stands for 'Absent Indians'"):
"We used an AI to do this" is increasingly a way of saying, "We didn't want to do this in the first place and we don't care if it's done well." That's why DOGE replaced the call center reps at US Customs and Immigration with a chatbot that tells you to read a PDF and then disconnects the call:
The Trump administration doesn't want to hear from immigrants who are trying to file their bewildering paperwork correctly. Incorrect immigration paperwork is a feature, not a bug, since it can be refined into a pretext to kidnap someone, imprison them in a gulag long enough to line the pockets of a Beltway Bandit with a no-bid contract to operate an onshore black site, and then deport them to a country they have no connection with, generating a fat payout for another Beltway Bandit with the no-bid contract to fly kidnapped migrants to distant hellholes.
If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole:
So it's no surprise that media bosses are so enthusiastic about replacing writers with chatbots. They hate the news and want it to go away. Outsourcing the writing to AI is just another way of devaluing it, adjacent to the existing enshittification that sees the news buried in popups, autoplays, consent dialogs, interrupters and the eleventy-million horrors that a stock browser with default settings will shove into your eyeballs on behalf of any webpage that demands them:
Remember that summer reading list that Hearst distributed to newspapers around the country, which turned out to be stuffed with "hallucinated" titles? At first, the internet delighted in dunking on Marco Buscaglia, the writer whose byline the list ran under. But as 404 Media's Jason Koebler unearthed, Buscaglia had been set up to fail, tasked with writing most of a 64-page insert that would have normally been the work of dozens of writers, editors and fact checkers, all on his own:
When Hearst hires one freelancer to do the work of dozens, they are saying, "We do not give a shit about the quality of this work." It is literally impossible for any writer to produce something good under those conditions. The purpose of Hearst's syndicated summer guide was to bulk out the newspapers that had been stripmined by their corporate owners, slimmed down to a handful of pages that are mostly ads and wire-service copy. The mere fact that this supplement was handed to a single freelancer blares "Go fuck yourself" long before you clap eyes on the actual words printed on the pages.
The capital class is in the grips of a bizarre form of AI psychosis: the fantasy of a world without people, where any fool idea that pops into a boss's head can be turned into a product without having to negotiate its creation with skilled workers who might point out that your idea is pretty fucking stupid:
For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot. Rather than reading a summer reading list of actual books, perhaps you could be satisfied with a summer reading list of hallucinated books that are at least statistically probable book-shaped imaginaries?
The bosses dreaming up use-cases for AI start from a posture of profound and proud ignorance of how workers who do useful things operate. They ask themselves, "If I was a ______, how would I do the job?" and then they ask an AI to do that, and declare the job done. They produce utility-shaped statistical artifacts, not utilities.
Take Grammarly, a company that offers statistical inferences about likely errors in your text. Grammar checkers aren't a terrible idea on their face, and I've heard from many people who struggle to express themselves in writing (either because of their communications style, or because they don't speak English as a first language) for whom apps like Grammarly are useful.
But Grammarly has just rolled out an AI tool that is so obviously contemptuous of writing that they might as well have called it "Go fuck yourself, by Grammarly." The new product is called "Expert Review," and it promises to give you writing advice "inspired" by writers whose writing they have ingested. I am one of these virtual "writing teachers" you can pay Grammarly for:
This is not how writing advice works. When I teach the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' workshop, my job isn't to train the students to produce work that is strongly statistically correlated with the sentence structure and word choices in my own writing. My job – the job of any writing teacher – is to try and understand the student's writing style and artistic intent, and to provide advice for developing that style to express that intent.
What Grammarly is offering isn't writing advice, it's stylometry, a computational linguistics technique for evaluating the likelihood that two candidate texts were written by the same person. Stylometry is a very cool discipline (as is adversarial stylometry, a set of techniques to obscure the authorship of a text):
But stylometry has nothing to do with teaching someone how to write. Even if you want to write a pastiche in the style of some writer you admire (or want to send up), word choices and sentence structure are only incidental to capturing that writer's style. To reduce "style" to "stylometry" is to commit the cardinal sin of technical analysis: namely, incinerating all the squishy qualitative aspects that can't be readily fed into a model and doing math on the resulting dubious quantitative residue:
If you wanted to teach a chatbot to teach writing like a writer, you would – at a minimum – have to train that chatbot on the instruction that writer gives, not the material that writer has published. Nor can you infer how a writer would speak to a student by producing a statistical model of the finished work that writer has published. "Published work" has only an incidental relationship to "pedagogical communication."
Critics of Grammarly are mostly focused on the effrontery of using writers' names without their permission. But I'm not bothered by that, honestly. So long as no one is being tricked into thinking that I endorsed a product or service, you don't need my permission to say that I inspired it (even if I think it's shit).
What I find absolutely offensive about Grammarly is not that they took my name in vain, but rather, that they reduced the complex, important business of teaching writing to a statistical exercise in nudging your work into a word frequency distribution that hews closely to the average of some writer's published corpus. This is Grammarly's fraud: not telling people that they're being "taught by Cory Doctorow," but rather, telling people that they are being "taught" anything.
Reducing "teaching writing" to "statistical comparisons with another writer's published work" is another way of saying "go fuck yourself" – not to the writers whose identities that Grammarly has hijacked, but to the customers they are tricking into using this terrible, substandard, damaging product.
Preying on aspiring writers is a grift as old as the publishing industry. The world is full of dirtbag "story doctors," vanity presses, fake literary agents and other flimflam artists who exploit people's natural desire to be understood to steal from them:
Grammarly is yet another company for whom "AI" is just a way to lower quality in the hopes of lowering expectations. For Grammarly, helping writers with their prose is an irritating adjunct to the company's main business of separating marks from their money.
In business theory, the perfect firm is one that charges infinity for its products and pays zero for its inputs (you know, "scholarly publishing"). For bosses, AI is a way to shift their firm towards this ideal.
In this regard, AI is connected to the long tradition of capitalist innovation, in which new production efficiencies are used to increase quantity at the expense of quality. This has been true since the Luddite uprising, in which skilled technical workers who cared deeply about the textiles they produced using complex machines railed against a new kind of machine that produced manifestly lower quality fabric in much higher volumes:
It's not hard to find credible, skilled people who have stories about using AI to make their work better. Elsewhere, I've called these people "centaurs" – human beings who are assisted by machines. These people are embracing the socialist mode of automation: they are using automation to improve quality, not quantity.
Whenever you hear a skilled practitioner talk about how they are able to hand off a time-consuming, low-value, low-judgment task to a model so they can focus on the part that means the most to them, you are talking to a centaur. Of course, it's possible for skilled practitioners to produce bad work – some of my favorite writers have published some very bad books indeed – but that isn't a function of automation, that's just human fallibility.
A reverse centaur (a person conscripted to act as a peripheral to a machine) is trapped by the capitalist mode of automation: quantity over quality. Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.
A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes. A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:
AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality. Automation doesn't have to be a way to reduce expectations in the hopes of selling worse things for more money – but without some form of external constraint (unions, regulation, competition), that is inevitably how companies will wield any automation, including and especially AI.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1031 words today, 47410 total)
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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First came the February raid on Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI seized millions of paper ballots and voter roll data from county election offices, with Tulsi Gabbard mysteriously lurking nearby. At the time, election experts and county election officials issued a stark warning: This was a bald attempt to subvert the democratic process and relitigate long-debunked election conspiracy claims.
Now it’s another major jurisdiction in another swing state—Maricopa County in Arizona. Yesterday, the GOP leader of the Arizona Senate, Warren Petersen, announced that on Saturday he had turned over records to the FBI relating to the 2020 presidential election. He gave no prior notice to the public of the official demand for records, which he received on Friday. Instead, he claimed, after the fact, that he was simply complying with a federal grand jury subpoena relating to a Republican-ordered audit of the vote count.
No one doubts that these events in Fulton and Maricopa counties are connected. But what do they indicate about what’s really going on, beyond the general storyline that “they’re messing with the midterms”?
The real reason, once you unpack what’s happened, is quite concerning. A code red, I’d argue. Before we get to that, let’s talk about what just occurred in Arizona.
The federal grand jury subpoena served on Petersen covered “several categories” of documents, though what exactly he turned over to the feds remains unclear. Notably, unlike in Fulton County, the White House saw a compliant and cooperative ally in Petersen, and he put up zero resistance to the subpoena. Indeed, he didn’t even alert the press or the rest of the government before unilaterally complying with it.
Democratic state Attorney General Kris Mayes was outraged, noting that multiple audits, investigations and legal challenges resulted in no evidence of widespread election fraud that could have changed the outcome of that contest. Petersen knows this, Mayes charged, and yet “he remains an unrepentant election denier.”
The use of a federal grand jury to subpoena documents cleverly gets around a chief problem that the Justice Department faced in Fulton County: whether the search warrant actually established sufficient probable cause. That question has already led to a high profile court challenge by Fulton County officials, who are seeking to recover the materials seized by the FBI.
As ABC News reported back in February, those officials had filed a motion in court arguing that
the FBI agent behind the search warrant application “intentionally or recklessly omitted material facts” about purported discrepancies in the 2020 election in Georgia, after the Justice Department last week released the sworn affidavit that was the basis for the search warrant.
“Despite years of investigations of the 2020 election, the Affidavit does not identify facts that establish probable cause that anyone committed a crime,” Tuesday’s filing from Fulton County said.
And two weeks ago, attorneys for Fulton County upped the stakes by arguing that the FBI had misled the judge in order to obtain the warrant used to seize the 2020 ballots. The supporting affidavit had simply rehashed long-debunked election conspiracy claims, making it vulnerable to challenge.
A federal grand jury subpoena to a sympathetic politician like Petersen, however, is a cynical way to avoid this level of judicial scrutiny. A grand jury has significant leeway to conduct “discovery” as part of any “criminal investigation,” meaning it can be leveraged by bad faith federal prosecutors to do their work without having to answer to any judge, or to present and later defend probable cause for a search warrant.
State and county election officials around the country should take note of this new White House strategy, which is a possible end-run around local election officials’ authority. They should immediately take steps to ensure that election records are not simply turned over by Trump’s political allies as part of a bogus grand jury investigation, particularly in states where GOP officials have independent access to election records as part of earlier official audits or investigations.
Twin Trump obsessions
The actions in Fulton and Maricopa counties reveal two things about the Trump election playbook, per election lawyer Marc Elias of Democracy Docket.
First, they show Trump remains obsessed with bringing charges against state election officials who oversaw the counties where he claims, without basis, that widespread election fraud occurred. Such charges can have a deeply chilling effect upon the county election staff, discouraging civil servants from participating in the democratic process and riling up Trump’s extreme MAGA base, with its penchant for threats and violence.
Second, the Fulton raid and the Maricopa subpoena are really about the 2026 midterms and running “practice seizures” of ballots and other materials. Each time they do this, the Justice Department and the FBI learn a bit more about what does and doesn’t work.
This includes things such as resolving evidentiary issues with affidavits and warrants and knowing which judges will and won’t approve them in key counties. It also gives them a preview of the legal challenges Democrats will mount.
The practice runs can also answer basic logistics questions for the White House, including where election materials are located, how to physically seize millions of ballots in a short amount of time, and even how many agents and trucks you would need to haul them away quickly.
As the federal grand jury subpoena just demonstrated, the practice runs can test other mechanisms that could get around pesky things like probable cause and judicial review, even while allowing the FBI to get its hands on the ballots and machines. Quick possession of such items might make it impracticable or even impossible for local and state and county officials to perform critical recounts and audits.
The big steal
Importantly, these twin actions by the feds in Fulton and Maricopa counties aren’t the end of the White House’s planned operations. They are likely just the beginning. Trump has made clear that he wants to move against a total of 15 large Democratic strongholds to sow doubt, cause chaos, and try to steal or nullify the November election. The number he’s thrown out suggests that he and his people have actively discussed something close to 13 other jurisdictions where they want to “nationalize” the election—meaning seize ballots, machine tabulators, and voter roll data from election offices if they can’t obtain them voluntarily.
The likely counties in the list include Wayne County in Michigan, Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania, Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, and Clark County in Nevada—all places in swing states where large Democratic votes totals were challenged in lawsuits after the 2020 election based on unsupported allegations of widespread fraud.
Preparing for the attack and building resilience
There is good news to balance this parade of horrors. Even as the Trump regime learns what works and what doesn’t work in these target counties, state and local election officials are growing wise to the playbook. That means they can prepare well in advance to defend ballots, machines and data from being forcibly seized by or secretly turned over to the federal government.
This includes specific training on how to successfully challenge warrants and subpoenas and buy some critical time in the event of a federal raid. It includes having lawyers ready to seek temporary restraining orders to freeze the status quo and prevent the federal government from getting its hands on critical state election materials.
Our legal system tends to grow more resilient and responsive with each new attack upon our democracy. In particular, judges can and should learn about what’s already taken place in these two jurisdictions. They should view the federal government’s claims of “election fraud” skeptically and refuse to grant the presumption of regularity to federal actions or affidavits, just as they have with ICE’s perjury-ridden court filings.
We the voters can prepare for the inevitable flood of challenges to our registrations and ballots, particularly in GOP-controlled states. This begins by keeping a watchful eye on our own voter status (check yours at this site and do so again in the fall). We can also vote early and in person in overwhelming numbers against the GOP. And we can obtain and share accurate information about where precincts are located, because local GOP officials may have moved them without notice, just as they recently did in Texas.
I’m often asked what else ordinary people can do in this era of democratic backsliding besides donating, letter writing and calls, and making their voices heard online and in the streets. All of those are important, but actual local organizing will likely prove the most impactful use of time. That means helping get out the vote through phone banking and postcard writing, volunteering for campaigns, or even serving as an election worker or monitor where needed.
If the Maricopa subpoena shows us anything, it is that the regime prefers paths of least resistance. Fulton County is currently proving messy and difficult, so the Justice Department sought a far easier route in Maricopa County.
That makes our response to these moves crystal clear, even if challenging. We, and in particular our elected leaders and state and local election officials, must make it hard for the White House everywhere to execute its election takeover plan, so that there are no easy paths for it anywhere.
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Last month we reported on a strange story in two strange parts: first, a coder had his AI agent create an entire smear campaign against a coding repository volunteer because he rejected AI code. Second, an Ars Technica journalist named Benj Edwards used a bunch of quotes made up by ChatGPT in a story about the saga without fact-checking whether or not they were actually true.
Edwards says he first tried to use Claude to scrape some quotes from the engineer’s website, but that was blocked by site code. He then turned to ChatGPT to farm quotes from the site, but ChatGPT decided to just make up a whole bunch of stuff the engineer never said (this is a pretty common issue).
Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images belowarstechnica.com/staff/2026/0…
Just cutting and pasting quotes probably would have saved the journalist a lot of time and headaches. And his job, apparently, since Ars has since decided to fire Edwards, something Ars doesn’t seem interested in talking about:
“As of February 28, Edwards’ bio on Ars was changed to past tense, according to an archived version of the webpage. It now reads that Edwards “was a reporter at Ars, where he covered artificial intelligence and technology history.”
Futurism reached out to Ars, Condé Nast, and Edwards to inquire about the reporter’s employment status. Neither the publication nor its owner replied. Edwards said he was unable to comment at this time.”
There are several interesting layers here. The biggest being that AI isn’t an excuse to simply turn your brain off and no longer do rudimentary fact checking.
The pressure at most outlets for journalists to generate an endless parade of content without adequate compensation or time off creates in increased likelihood of error. The overloading (or elimination of) editors (with or without AI replacement) compounds those errors. That the end product isn’t living up to anybody’s standards for ethical journalism really shouldn’t surprise anybody.
From the very beginning of the DOGE saga, many of us raised alarms about what would happen when a bunch of inexperienced twenty-somethings were handed unfettered access to the most sensitive databases in the federal government with essentially zero oversight and zero adherence to the security protocols that exist for very good reasons. We wrote about it when a 25-year-old was pushing untested code into the Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system. We published a piece about it, originally reported by ProPublica, when DOGE operatives stormed into Social Security headquarters and demanded access to everything while ignoring the career staff who actually understood the systems.
That ProPublica deep dive painted a picture of 21-to-24-year-olds who didn’t understand the systems they were demanding access to, had “pre-ordained answers and weren’t interested in anything other than defending decisions they’d already made,” and were operating with essentially no accountability. The former acting commissioner described the operation as “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run—thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank—screaming all the time.”
These are the people who were handed the keys to the most sensitive databases the federal government holds.
And now we have what appears to be the entirely predictable consequence of all of that: direct exfiltration of data in a manner known to break the law, but zero concern over that fact, because of the assurances of a Trump pardon if caught.
The Washington Post has a stunning whistleblower report alleging that a former DOGE software engineer, who had been embedded at the Social Security Administration, walked out with databases containing records on more than 500 million living and dead Americans—on a thumb drive—and then allegedly tried to get colleagues at his new private sector job to help him upload the data to company systems.
According to the disclosure, the former DOGE software engineer, who worked at the Social Security Administration last year before starting a job at a government contractor in October, allegedly told several co-workers that he possessed two tightly restricted databases of U.S. citizens’ information, and had at least one on a thumb drive. The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names. The complaint does not include specific dates of when he is said to have told colleagues this information, but at least one of the alleged events unfolded around early January, according to the complaint. While working at DOGE, the engineer had approved access to Social Security data.
In the past, this was the kind of thing that the US government actually did a decent job protecting and keeping private. Now they have DOGE bros walking out the door with it on thumbdrives. Holy shit!
And here’s the detail that really tells you everything about the culture DOGE created inside these agencies:
He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.
According to this complaint, this person allegedly understood that what he was doing might be illegal, did it anyway, and had already calculated that the political environment would protect him from consequences. The Elon Musk DOGE bros clearly believed they ran the show and that anyone associated with DOGE was entirely above the law on anything they did.
Perhaps just as troubling, the complaint also alleges that after leaving government employment, the DOGE bro claimed he still had his agency computer and credentials, which he described as carrying “God-level” security access to Social Security’s systems.
The complaint alleges that after leaving government employment, the former DOGE member told colleagues he had a thumb drive with Social Security data and had kept his agency computer and credentials, which he allegedly said carried largely unrestricted “God-level” security access to the agency’s systems — a level of access no other company employee had been granted in its work with SSA.
The Social Security Administration says he had turned in his laptop and lost his credential privileges when he departed. His lawyer denies all alleged wrongdoing, and both the agency and the company said they investigated the claims and didn’t find evidence to confirm them. The company said it conducted a “thorough” two-day internal investigation.
Two whole days! Investigating themselves. On an issue where ignoring it benefits them.
But the SSA’s inspector general is investigating, and has alerted Congress and the Government Accountability Office, which has its own audit of DOGE’s data access underway.
And this whistleblower complaint, filed back in January, surfaces alongside a separate complaint from the SSA’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, which alleges that DOGE members improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud.
A separate complaint, made in August by the agency’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, alleges members of DOGE improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud, putting individuals’ private information at risk. In January, the Trump administration acknowledged DOGE staffers were responsible for separate data breaches at the agency, including sharing data through an unapproved third-party service and that one of the DOGE staffers signed an agreement to share data with an unnamed political group aiming to overturn election results in several states.
We wrote about that other leak at the time, of a DOGE bro sharing data with an election denier group.
All of this just confirms what many people expected and none of this should surprise anyone who was paying attention: Donald Trump allowed Elon Musk and his crew of over-confident know-nothings to view federal government computer systems as their personal playthings, where they could access and exfiltrate any data they wanted for whatever ideological reason they wanted.
And we’re only hearing about this because a whistleblower came forward and because a former chief data officer had the courage to file a complaint. How many similar incidents happened at other agencies where no one spoke up? DOGE operatives were embedded across the entire federal government, accessing heavily restricted databases and, as the Washington Post puts it, “merging long-siloed repositories.” Every single one of those agencies had the same dynamic: young, inexperienced but overconfident engineers demanding unfettered access, career staff pushing back and being overruled, and essentially no security protocols being followed.
Former chief data officer Borges put it about as well as anyone could:
“This is absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Borges told The Post. “There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now.”
Once it’s out, you can’t put it back. We’re going to be learning about the consequences of DOGE’s ransacking of federal systems for years, maybe decades. And we’re finding out that the waste, fraud, and abuse we were told DOGE was there to find, appears to have mostly been in their own actions.
Flooding cities with federal officers more used to dealing with border crossings and customs enforcement has led to multiple killings by these officers. They’re not trained to do what they’re being ordered to do. And their new hires aren’t being given the training they need because, apparently, the job of ejecting non-whites from this country is too important to be done within the constraints of the law.
The end result has been the broad daylight murders of American citizens, which are immediately greeted by official government statements claiming the victims of these murders are “terrorists” who are seeking to kill federal officers. Nothing could be further from the truth, as recordings made by citizens and the officers themselves have shown.
But this administration traffics in lies regularly, and it does what it can to keep these lies from being exposed by refusing to release body cam footage captured by officers at the scene, while simultaneously denying any outside agency’s request to perform the sort of shooting investigations that used be considered “normal” before this highly abnormal administration took over the Oval Office.
The government has constantly portrayed victims of federal officers’ gunfire as violent individuals. These claims have always been repudiated by footage captured by people not employed by the federal government.
Via Radley Balko — who points out federal officers have shot at least four people and “brazenly lied” about it every time — here’s another undoing of the government’s narrative about its officers’ violent actions, brought to us by CBS News, which has obtained body cam footage the administration definitely hoped would never be made public.
Video of the March 2025 fatal shooting of American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez obtained by CBS News appears to contradict claims by federal officials that Martinez was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent because he “accelerated” and “intentionally ran over” another agent with his car.
Much like the government claimed Renee Good was trying to run over officers, before an officer’s own phone recording that he deliberately leaked to a conservative news outlet showed otherwise, DHS spokespeople claimed the victim of this shooting was trying to harm federal officers.
ICE claimed Martinez “accelerated forward” towards an ICE agent and the DHS’s statement insisted the shots that were fired by officers were “defensive.” It also claimed Martinez “intentionally ran over an officer.”
Nearly a year later, body cam footage obtained by CBS News is bringing the truth: this was another unjustified homicide.
But body camera video, which has not been previously reported, shows that Martinez’s vehicle, a blue Ford Fusion, was stationary or going at a very low rate of speed when he was fatally shot. When gunshots are heard in the video, the brake lights of Martinez’ vehicle appear to be on.
It’s unclear whether any of the officers were wearing body cameras during this shooting. And it really doesn’t matter, because the administration is universally unwilling to release footage that might undercut the lies it (and its employed officers) have told in defense of seemingly indefensible actions.
The only reason this footage is available is because it wasn’t captured by federally-owned body cameras. Instead, the footage was recording by a South Padre Island police officer who happened to be on the scene when this shooting occurred.
The recording also shows the standard operating procedure of nearly every law enforcement agency, federal or not. Officers are always more concerned with roughing up and cuffing an impending corpse, rather than seeking immediate medical assistance for the person they’ve just shot.
In this case, two minutes passed after ICE officers shot Martinez, during which they dragged him from the car, threw him face down on the pavement, and handcuffed him. No officer provides medical care of any type. It’s only when EMS shows up two minutes later that anyone tries to save the life of someone who’s now too far gone to be saved.
This administration will lie and lie and lie about its officers’ actions, secure in the knowledge that it controls the recordings, paperwork, and any other actual facts about the shootings its officers engage in. But every time its efforts are undone, either by recordings made by others or — in the Renee Good murder — by an officer who actually was stupid enough to believe his cell phone recording would buttress the government’s bullshit claims.
The killings aren’t over yet. The administration — despite having some second thoughts about its oppressive anti-migrant tactics — still oversees an exceedingly well-funded, extremely large immigration enforcement effort. This sort of aggression — especially when completely divorced from even the most minimal of oversight — is always going to result in people being killed by government forces.
But while the government may have the funding and the power, it can’t prevent outsiders — ranging from legal observers to activists to local law enforcement officers — from exposing the administration’s lies. And it’s starting to have an effect. Some drawdown is happening, and the most visible faces of anti-migrant aggression — Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and former DHS boss Kristi Noem — have been indefinitely sidelined. The tide feels like it’s turning. But expect the administration to continue lying about pretty much everything because that’s its default setting.
The President of Larry Ellison’s “new and improved” Paramount, Jeff Shell, has been conspicuously absent from recent events heralding the company’s problematic acquisition of Warner Brothers. The reason? Shell is being accused by a “whistleblower” and former partner of leaking company info, including early word of the company’s $7.7 billion August 2025 deal to obtain the exclusive rights to stream MMA fights.
Shell, previously fired by Comcast for sexual harassment allegations, allegedly had a… complicated relationship with the man, R.J. Cipriani. Cipriani claims to have been a “crisis communications” specialist who helped Shell plant favorable stories in the media in exchange for Shell’s promise to help fund a TV show. An internal Paramount investigation into the claims is ongoing.
But Cipriani is also now suing Shell $150 million for not following through on his promises:
“The plaintiff, R.J. Cipriani, alleges in the lawsuit that he had a relationship with Shell for 18 months, in which Cipriani would tip Shell off to forthcoming news articles and offer advice. The suit also alleges that Shell would share non-public information with Cipriani about Paramount’s plans.”
The whole story is an interesting read, and includes claims that Shell told Cipriani that Paramount significantly overpaid for Warner Brothers. And that Cipriani seeded the trade press with lots of information favorable to Paramount, including some allegedly peppered into this June 2025 story about a potential fight between South Park’s creators and Paramount.
Nobody in the story comes off as having particularly sound judgment. You also wonder, if Cipriani’s claims are true, who are the people at these media companies who are so easily manipulatable.
“It’s an echo of the feelings-don’t-matter, no-coddling ethos that powers Silicon Valley, where Ellison was raised and watched his father, Larry Ellison, grow Oracle into one of the most valuable companies in the world (and make himself one of the richest people on the planet). Multiple sources say Ellison is building a more brash culture that’s defiantly upending the circumspect, politically correct style that has defined Hollywood in the post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd eras. It’s a studio reborn, where blunt feedback is the norm, canceled talent is welcome (cheaper on the dollar, and yearning to prove themselves) and no one is walking on eggshells.”
I bring all of this up because the previous three mergers related to Warner Brothers (spanning two decades) have been absolute disasters. Usually because the people acquiring the company were broadly incompetent (see: AT&T), had terrible judgement, and bit off way more than they could chew in terms of both depth, collaborative creation, and competency.
With a mammoth $111 billion price tag for Warner Brothers, thrown atop the debt acquired through the CBS and other deals, this new Paramount is a towering mountain of financial obligation that’s going to result in dysfunction, layoffs, and chaos likely to make past Warner deals seem quaint. All overseen by people who apparently (and quite proudly) have some of the worst judgment imaginable.
I’ve spent a lot of digital ink detailing just how bad RFK Jr. has been in his post at HHS. Everything from his attempts to entirely remake vaccine policies in the country, to his neutered response to the ongoing measles outbreak in the country, up to and including his attempts to strong-arm the entire federal health workforce into following his tinfoil-hat theories has been horrible for the country. Fortunately, because we live in America, we have a way to check his power. There are checks and balances in place here and one of those places is the United States court system which…
A lawyer for the Trump administration told a federal judge Wednesday that anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has such ample authority over the country’s vaccine policies that he is “unreviewable.” His unfettered powers even allow Kennedy the freedom to recommend, if he chose to do so, that people ditch vaccines and actively expose themselves to infectious diseases, the lawyer argued, according to Reuters.
US District Judge Brian Murphy overseeing the case in Boston appeared skeptical of the suggestion that Kennedy has seemingly limitless authority over federal vaccine policy.
“Is it your position that [Kennedy] is totally unreviewable?” Murphy asked Belfer, according to Reuters. “If the secretary said instead of getting a shot to prevent measles I think you should get a shot that gives you measles, is that unreviewable?”
“Yes,” Belfer replied.
Well, I certainly appreciate Judge Murphy for putting as fine a point on this whole thing as possible. Still, I don’t expect this argument to land particularly well with the very court system that would be involved in the reviewing of what the DOJ is arguing is “unreviewable.”
The context for all of this is a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups seeking an injunction barring several of HHS’ altered vaccine policies. This challenge is being made under the Administrative Procedure Act, which charges the court as responsible for the following when a legal challenge is made.
To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action. The reviewing court shall-
(1) compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed; and
(2) hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be-
(A) arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law;
(B) contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity;
(C) in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right;
(D) without observance of procedure required by law;
(E) unsupported by substantial evidence in a case subject to sections 556 and 557 of this title or otherwise reviewed on the record of an agency hearing provided by statute; or
(F) unwarranted by the facts to the extent that the facts are subject to trial de novo by the reviewing court.
And, yet, despite that law describing precisely how the courts shall review federal agency actions upon legal challenge, the DOJ is explicitly saying that HHS’ and Kennedy’s actions are “unreviewable”. It makes no sense.
Belfer, arguing on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the medical organizations were merely seeking to use the courts to enact their favored vaccine policy. But the lawyer for the groups, James Oh, countered that the vaccine policy changes—which were not carried out with typical processes and lack supporting scientific evidence—were done improperly and without reasoned decision-making.
Kennedy’s vaccine policy changes are the “actions of someone who believes he can do whatever he wants,” Oh said, according to Stat News.
Put more precisely, the complaint is that Kennedy seems to think he can enact whatever policy he wants without following proper procedure or evidence-based decision making. That’s what APA allows these medical groups to challenge and that’s exactly what they’ve challenged in this particular lawsuit.
The DOJ suggesting Kennedy is above such checks and balances is purely make believe.
In March of 2024, the Dallas-based IPTV operator William Freemon 
As pirate IPTV services have continued to grow in recent years, TV broadcasters and distributors have intensified their efforts to combat the problem.
