News

Friday 2026-03-13

07:00 PM

“It’s faster to just do it myself” [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Here’s a simple rubric for outsourcing:

If you’re never going to need to do this again, and it’s easier to do it than to instruct someone else to do it, by all means, do it yourself.

If doing it yourself will give you joy or satisfaction that is greater than the productivity boost you’ll get from leverage or better tools, by please do it yourself.

But if you’re going to do it more than once, and the customer can’t tell if you did it yourself or not, perhaps you should have someone else do it or build the tools to get it done more efficiently.

Next time will happen sooner than you expect. Better to invest a bit more now than to spend for that shortcut again and again.

      

Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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Today's links


A cross-section of a man's head. His brain has been replaced with an intricate mass of wooden gearing, being pumped and cranked by three 16th century druges. Behind them is a blown up view of a microchip. Behind the head is a stylized illustration of grey matter, blown out with lots of saturation and blended in places with tumbled rocks.

Three more AI psychoses (permalink)

"AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.

So while we still can, let us revel in this useful term to talk about some very real pathologies in our world.

Formally, "AI psychosis" describes people who have delusions that are possibly induced, and definitely reinforced and magnified, by a chatbot. AI psychosis is clearly alarming for people whose loved ones fall prey to it, and it has been the subject of much press and popular attention, especially in the extreme cases where it has resulted in injury or death.

It's possible for AI psychosis to be both a new and alarming phenomenon and also to be on a continuum with existing phenomena. Paranoid delusions aren't new, of course. Take "Morgellons Disease," a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_a_Friend

Morgellons is both a 400 year old phenomenon and an internet pathology. How can that be? Because the internet makes it easier for people with sparsely distributed traits to locate one another, which is why the internet era is characterized by the coherence of people with formerly fringe characteristics into organized blocs, for better (gender minorities, #MeToo) and worse (Nazis).

Morgellons is rare, but if you suffer from it, it's easy for you to locate virtually every other person in the world with the same delusion and for all of you to reinforce and egg on your delusional beliefs.

Morgellons isn't the only delusion that the internet reinforces, of course. "Gang stalking delusion" is a belief in a shadowy gang of sadistic tormentors who sneak hidden messages into song lyrics and public signage and innuendo in overheard snatches of other people's conversations. It is an incredibly damaging delusion that ruins people's lives.

Gang stalking delusion isn't new, either – as with Morgellons, there are historical accounts of it going back centuries. But the internet supercharged gang stalking delusion by making it easy for GSD sufferers to find one another and reinforce one another's beliefs, helping each other spin elaborate explanations for why the relatives, therapists, and friends who try to help them are actually in on the conspiracy. The result is that GSD sufferers end up ever more isolated from people who are trying mightily to save them, and more connected to people who drive them to self-harm.

Enter chatbots. Ready access to eager-to-please LLMs at every hour of the day or night means that you don't even have to find a forum full of people with the same delusion as you, nor do you have to wait for a reply to your anguished message. The LLM is always there, ready to fire back a "yes-and" improv-style response that drives you deeper and deeper into delusion:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/

It's possible that there are delusions that are even more rare than GSD or Morgellons that AI is surfacing. Imagine if you were prone to fleeting delusional beliefs (and whomst amongst us hasn't experienced the bedrock certainty that we put something down right here, only to find it somewhere else and not have any idea how that happened?). Under normal circumstances, these cognitive misfires might be fleeting moments of discomfort, quickly forgotten. But if you are already habituated to asking a chatbot to explain things you don't understand, it might well yes-and you into an internally consistent, entirely wrong belief – that is, a delusion.

Think of how often you noticed "42" after reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or how many times "6-7" crops up once you've experienced a baseline of exposure to adolescents. Now imagine that an obsequious tale-spinner was sitting at your elbow, helpfully noting these coincidences and fitting them into a folie-a-deux mystery play that projected a grand, paranoid narrative onto the world. Every bit of confirming evidence is lovingly cataloged, all disconfirming evidence is discounted or ignored. It's fully automated luxury QAnon – a self-baking conspiracy that harnesses an AI in service to driving you deeper and deeper into madness:

That's the original "AI psychosis" that the term was coined to describe. As Sam Cole notes in her excellent "How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis,'" mental health practitioners are not entirely comfortable with the "psychosis" label:

https://www.404media.co/ai-psychosis-help-gemini-chatgpt-claude-chatbot-delusions/

"Psychosis" here is best understood as an analogy, not a diagnosis, and, as already noted, there is a large cohort of very persistent people who make it their business to eradicate analogies that make reference to medical or health-related phenomena. But these analogies are very hard to kill, because they do useful work in connecting unfamiliar, novel phenomena with things we already understand.

It's true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn't be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life. I am capable of understanding "autoimmune disorder" as referring to both a literal, medical phenomenon; and a figurative, political one. I have never found myself confusing one for the other.

"AI psychosis" is one of those very useful analogies, and you can tell, because "AI psychosis" has found even more metaphorical uses, describing other bad beliefs about AI. Today, I want to talk about three of these AI psychoses, and how they relate to one another: the investor AI delusion, the boss AI delusion, and the critic AI delusion.

Let's start with the investors' delusion. AI started as an investment project from the usual suspects: venture capitalists, private wealth funds, and tech monopolists with large cash reserves and ready access to loans during the cheap credit bubble. These entities are accustomed to making large, long-shot bets, and they were extremely motivated to find new markets to grow into and take over.

Growing companies need to keep growing, but not because they have "the ideology of a tumor." Growing companies' imperative to keep growing isn't ideological at all – it's material. Growth companies' stock trade at a high multiple of their "price to earnings ratio" (PE ratio), which means that they can use their stock like money when buying other companies and hiring key employees.

But once those companies' growth slows down, investors revalue those shares at a much lower PE multiplier, which makes individual executives at the company (who are primarily paid in stock) personally much poorer, prompting their departure, while simultaneously kneecapping the company's ability to grow through acquisition and hiring, because a company with a falling share price has to buy things with cash, not stock. Companies can make more of their own stock on demand, simply by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet – but they can only get cash by convincing a customer, creditor or investor to part with some of their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

Tech companies have absurdly large market shares – think of Google's 90% search dominance – and so they've spent 15+ years coming up with increasingly absurd gambits to convince investors that they will continue to grow by capturing other markets. At first, these companies claimed that they were on the verge of eating one another's lunches (Google would destroy Facebook with G+; Facebook would do the same to Youtube with the "pivot to video").

This has a real advantage in that one need not speculate about the potential value of Facebook's market – you only have to look at Facebook's quarterly reports. But the downside is that Facebook has its own ideas about whether Google is going to absorb its market, and they are prone to forcefully make the case that this won't happen.

After a few tumultuous years, tech giants switched to promoting growth via speculative new markets – metaverse, web3, crypto, blockchain, etc. Speculative new markets are speculative, and the weakness of that is that no one can say how big those markets might be. But that's also the strength of those markets, because if no one can say how big those markets might be, then who's to say that they won't be very big indeed?

There's a different advantage to confining your concerns to imaginary things: imaginary things don't exist, so they don't contest your public statements about them, nor do they make demands on you. Think of how the right concerns itself with imaginary children (unborn babies, children in Wayfair furniture; children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, children undergoing gender confirmation surgery). These are very convenient children to advocate for, since, unlike real children (hungry children, children killed in the Gaza genocide, children whose parents have been kidnapped by ICE, children whom Matt Goetz and Donald Trump trafficked for sex, children in cages at the US border, trans kids driven to self-harm and suicide after being denied care), nonexistent children don't want anything from you and they never make public pronouncements about whether you have their best interests at heart.

But as the AI project has required larger and larger sums to keep the wheels spinning, the usual suspects have started to run out of money, and now AI hustlers are increasingly looking to tap public markets for capital. They want you to invest your pension savings in their growth narrative machine, and they're relying on the fact that you don't understand the technology to trick you into handing over your money.

There's a name for this: it's called the "Byzantine premium" – that's the premium that an investment opportunity attracts by being so complicated and weird that investors don't understand it, making them easy to trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

AI is a terrible economic phenomenon. It has lost more money than any other project in human history – $600-700b and counting, with trillions more demanded by the likes of OpenAI's Sam Altman. AI's core assets – data centers and GPUs – last 2-3 years, though AI bosses insist on depreciating them over five years, which is unequivocal accounting fraud, a way to obscure the losses the companies are incurring. But it doesn't actually matter whether the assets need to be replaced every two years, every three years, or every five years, because all the AI companies combined are claiming no more than $60b/year in revenue (that number is grossly inflated). You can't reach the $700b break-even point at $60b/year in two years, three years, or five years.

Now, some exceptionally valuable technologies have attained profitability after an extraordinarily long period in which they lost money, like the web itself. But these turnaround stories all share a common trait: they had good "unit economics. Every new web user reduced the amount of money the web industry was losing. Every time a user logged onto the web, they made the industry more profitable. Every generation of web technology was more profitable than the last.

Contrast this with AI: every user – paid or unpaid – that an AI company signs up costs them money. Every time that user logs into a chatbot or enters a prompt, the company loses more money. The more a user uses an AI product, the more money that product loses. And each generation of AI tech loses more money than the generation that preceded it.

To make AI look like a good investment, AI bosses and their pitchmen have to come up with a story that somehow addresses this phenomenon. Part of that story relies on the Byzantine premium: "Sure, you don't understand AI, but why would all these smart people commit hundreds of billions of dollars to AI if they weren't confident that they would make a lot of money from it?" In other words, "A pile of shit this big must have a pony underneath it somewhere!"

This is a great narrative trick, because it turns losing money into a virtue. If you've convinced a mark that the upside of the project is a multiple of the capital committed to it, then the more money you're losing, the better the investment seems.

So this is the first AI psychosis: the idea that we should bet the world's economy on these highly combustible GPUs and data centers with terrible unit economics and no path to break-even, much less profitability.

Investors' AI psychosis is cross-fertilized by our second form of AI psychosis, which is the bosses' AI psychosis: bosses' bottomless passion for firing workers and replacing them with automation.

Bosses are easy marks for anything that lets them fire workers. After all, the ideal firm is one that charges infinity for its outputs (hence the market's passion for monopolies) and pays nothing for its inputs (e.g. "academic publishing").

This means that the fact that a chatbot can't do your job isn't nearly as important as the fact that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job. Bosses keep replacing humans with defective chatbots, with catastrophic consequences, like Amazon's cloud service crashing:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/recent-aws-outages-blamed-on-ai-tools-at-least-two-incidents-took-down-amazon-services

Bosses are haunted by the ego-shattering knowledge that they aren't in the driver's seat: if the boss doesn't show up for work, everything continues to operate just fine. If the workers all stay home, the business grinds to a halt. In their secret hearts, bosses know that they're not in the driver's seat – they're in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI dangles the possibility of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train, so that the company's products go directly from the boss's imagination to the public without the boss having to ask people who know how to do things to execute their cockamamie schemes:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

This is a powerfully erotic proposition for bosses, the realization of the libidinal fantasy in which sky-high CEO salaries can be justified by the fact that everything that happens in the company is truly, directly attributable to the boss. Like the delusional person who can be led deeper and deeper into a fantasy world by a chatbot, a boss's delusion that they are worth thousands of times more than their workers makes them easy prey for a chatbot salesman that pushes them deeper and deeper into that delusion, until they bet the whole company on it.

Now we come to the third and final novel AI psychosis, the critics' psychosis, that AI is an abnormally terrible technology. This is a species of "criti-hype," which is when critics repeat the hyped-up claims of the companies they're targeting, but as criticism (think of all the people who believed and uncritically amplified the ad-tech industry's self-serving claims of being able to control our minds by "hacking our dopamine loops"):

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI is a normal technology. The people who made it, and the circumstances under which it was made, are normal. Its uses and abuses are normal. That doesn't make it good, but it does make it unexceptional:

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/a-guide-to-understanding-ai-as-normal

The exceptional part of AI isn't the technology, it's the bubble. There's nothing about AI per se that makes it exceptionally prone to devouring our natural resources, or endangering our jobs, or abetting war crimes. That's all because of the bubble, and the bubble relies on the idea that AI is exceptional, not normal. Repeating and amplifying claims about AI's exceptionalism helps the AI companies, because they rely on exceptionalism to keep the capital flowing and the bubble inflating.

AI is a normal technology. It's normal for a technology to be invented by unlikable and immoral people and institutions. Not every technology is invented by a shitty person, but shitty people and institutions are well represented (and possibly disproportionately represented) in the history of technology. Charles Babbage invented the idea of general purpose computers as a way of improving labor control on slave plantations:

https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/

Ada Lovelace wasn't interested in making slavery more efficient, but neither was she driven by pure scientific inquiry. She invented programming to help her bet on the horses (it didn't work):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

The silicon transistor was co-invented by William Shockley, one of history's great pieces of shit, a eugenicist who was committed to exterminating all non-white people that he never managed to ship a commercial product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

IBM built the tabulators for Auschwitz. HP were the Pentagon's go-to contractors for any tech project that was so dirty no one else would touch it. We only got Unix because Bell Labs committed so many antitrust violations that they weren't allowed to productize it themselves.

It's not exceptional for AI companies to have terrible, piece-of-shit founders. It's not exceptional for these companies to participate in war crimes. It's not exceptional for these founders to want to pauperize workers. It's not exceptional for these companies to lie about their products, bankrupt naive investors through stock swindles, and pitch themselves to investors as a way for capital to win the class war.

None of this means that AI companies are good, it just means that they are not exceptional. And because they aren't exceptional, the same dynamics that govern other technologies apply to AI companies' products. Their utility is a function of what they do, not who made them or how they were sold. The utility of AI products is based on whether people find ways to use them that make them happy – not whether the people who made those technologies are good people, or whether the funding for the technology was fraudulent, or whether other people use the technology to harm others.

Automation comes in two flavors: there's automation that produces things more quickly (and hence more cheaply), and there's automation that makes better things. Generally, capital prefers to use automation to increase the pace at which things are made, while workers prefer to use automation to improve the quality of the things they make.

Think of a hobbyist who pines for an automated soldering machine. That hobbyist longs to make board-level repairs and modifications that require precision that humans struggle to match. The hobbyist is a centaur, using a machine to help achieve human goals.

Now think of a factory owner who invests in an assembly line of the same machines: that boss wants to fire a bunch of workers and make the survivors of the purge take up the slack. The boss want to achieve corporate goals, to "sweat the assets," making maximum use of the soldering machines. The pace at which the line runs is set to be the maximum that the workers can match. The workers on the line are "reverse centaurs" – humans who are pressed into service as peripherals for machines, at a pace that is constantly at the very limit of their endurance.

Reverse centaurs are trapped in capital's automation plan – to make everything faster and cheaper. But that's the result of bosses. It's not the result of technology.

This is not to say that technology is apolitical. Only a fool would imagine that there are no politics embedded in technology. But you'd be a far greater fool if you asserted that the politics of a technology were simple, clear, and immutable.

Nor is this to say that when workers get to decide when and how to use technology, we will always make wise decisions. Perhaps the hobbyist who opts for an automated soldering machine will lose out on the opportunity to refine their hand-eye coordination in ways that will have many other benefits to their practice.

Or perhaps attempting to improve their hand-eye coordination to that point will wreck so many projects that they grow discouraged and give up altogether. Others' choices that seem unwise to you might have perfectly good explanations that aren't visible from your perspective. Ultimately, the world is a better place where workers get to decide which parts of their jobs they want to automate and which parts they want to lean into.

This is an extremely normal technological situation: for a new technology to be promoted and productized by shitty people who have grandiose goals that would be apocalyptic should they ever come to pass – and for some people to find uses of that technology that are nevertheless beneficial to them and their communities.

The belief that AI is an exceptionally bad technology (as opposed to an exceptionally bad economic bubble) drives AI critics into their own absurd culs-de-sac.

There are many, many skilled and reliable practitioners of technical and creative trades who've found extremely reasonable, normal ways in which AI has automated some part of their job. They aren't hyperventilating about how AI has changed everything forever and the world is about to end. They're not mistaking AI for god, or a therapist.

They're just treating AI like a normal technology, like a plugin. Programmers' tools have acquired useful automation plugins at regular intervals for decades – syntax checkers, advanced debuggers, automated wireframe utilities. For many programmers – including several of my acquaintance, whom I know to be both thoughtful and skilled – AI is another plugin, one they find useful enough to be modestly enthusiastic about.

It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

They're just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won't always choose wisely, but that's normal too. There's plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray. A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.

It's only the belief that AI is exceptional – exceptionally wicked, but exceptional nevertheless – that leads critics to decide that they are a better judge of whether a skilled worker should or should not use certain automation tools, and to make that judgment not based on the quality of the work in question, but on the moral character of the tool itself.

AI is just normal. The bubble is what drives the environmental costs. If the only LLMs were a couple big data-centers at Sandia National Labs, no one would be particularly exercised about the water and energy demands they represented. Big scientific endeavors – from NASA launches to the large Hadron Collider – often come with immense material and energy needs. The bubble causes massive, wasteful, duplicative efforts that chase diminishing returns through farcical scale.

Nor are AI bros exceptional. The stock swindlers who've blown $700b (and counting) on AI aren't cyber-Svengalis with the power to cloud investors' minds. They're just running the same con that tech has been running ever since its returns started to taper off and survival became a matter of ginning up enthusiasm for speculative new ventures.

That doesn't mean those people aren't awful shits. Fuck those people. It just means that they're normal awful shits. We don't have to burnish their reputations by elevating them to the status of archdemons who taint everything they touch with unwashable sin. Sam Altman isn't Lex Luthor. He's just a conman:

https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/breaking-sam-altmans-greed-and-dishonesty?r=8tdk6&utm_medium=ios

The fact that these bros are just normal assholes means that we don't have to treat everything they do as a sin. Scraping the entirety of human knowledge to make something new out of it isn't "stealing." Depending on why you're doing it, it can be archiving, or making a search engine:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Too many AI critics have started from the undeniable fact that these guys are odious creeps who boast about wanting to ruin the lives of workers and then worked backwards to find the sin. The sin isn't performing mathematical analysis on all the books ever written. That's actually kind of awesome. It's the kind of thing Aaron Swartz used to do – like when he ingested every law review article ever published and used it to trace the way that oil companies' donations to law schools resulted in profs writing articles about why Big Oil can't be held liable for trashing the planet:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111129181943/https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/print/article/punitive-damages-remunerated-research-and-legal-profession

AI bros' sin isn't making copies of published works. Hammering servers with badly behaved crawlers is a dick move and fuck them for doing it. But if these jerks made well-behaved scrapers that placed no abnormal demand on servers, it's not like their critics would say, "Oh, I guess it's fine, then."

AI bros' sin is running an economy-destroying, planet-wrecking stock swindle whose raison d'etre is pauperizing every worker and transferring 100% of the dying world's wealth to a small cadre of morbidly wealthy, eminently guillotineable plutes. Making plugins? That's not exceptional. It's just normal.

The fact that something is normal doesn't make it good. There's a lot of normal things that I'd like to throw into the Sun. But we don't do ourselves any favors when we amplify our enemies' self-aggrandizing narratives by accusing them of being exceptional, even when we mean "exceptionally evil." They're normal assholes.

Fuck 'em.

(Image: ZeptoBars, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Notorious financier gets a “super-injunction” prohibiting the press from revealing that he is a banker https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8373535/Sir-Fred-Goodwin-former-RBS-chief-obtains-super-injunction.html

#10yrsago Shortly after her death, Harper Lee’s heirs kill cheap paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird https://newrepublic.com/article/131400/mass-market-edition-kill-mockingbird-dead

#10yrsago Web security company breached, client list (including KKK) dumped, hackers mock inept security https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/after-an-easy-breach-hackers-leave-tips-when-running-a-security-company/

#10yrsago Microsoft spams corporate users with messages denigrating their IT departments https://web.archive.org/web/20160309195537/https://www.infoworld.com/article/3042397/microsoft-windows/admins-beware-domain-attached-pcs-are-sprouting-get-windows-10-ads.html

#10yrsago Cycle and Recycle: gorgeous photos of the European recycling process https://www.wired.com/2016/03/paul-bulteel-cycle-recyle-europe-recycles-tons-of-waste-and-its-pretty-gorgeous/

#10yrsago Fellowships for “Robin Hood” hackers to help poor people get access to the law https://web.archive.org/web/20160304221459/https://labs.robinhood.org/fellowship/

#10yrsago 3D printed battle-armor for cats https://web.archive.org/web/20160311224139/http://sinkhacks.com/making-3d-printed-cat-armor/

#10yrsago Great moments in the history of black science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20160308034421/http://www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com/a-crash-course-in-the-history-of-black-science-fiction/

#1yrago Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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 (1081 words today, 48461 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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02:00 PM

MAHA Institute: Nix The Entire Childhood Vaccine Schedule [Techdirt]

If you agree with me that what RFK Jr. has done at HHS — particularly when it comes to altering vaccine schedules, approvals, research, and access — is bad well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Kennedy road Trump’s coattails, building his own Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement on the back of the wider MAGA orgy of fascism Trump has constructed. The MAGA people are generally those who have followed Kennedy’s checkered career for years and not only act as his public ally for all the crazy shit he says and does, but also serve to push him even further than he’s already gone. And while not every idea coming out of the MAHA people is horrible, the majority certainly are.

So, back to vaccines. Kennedy has already done immense harm to vaccination policy and research in America, particularly when it comes to children. But the MAHA Institute, a D.C. think tank that pushes Kennedy’s wider agenda, would like to please just do away with all childhood vaccine schedules until each shot can “be proven” to be safe.

Leaders of the MAHA Institute, the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-allied think tank pushing Make America Health Again movement policies, stated their position on vaccines unequivocally on Monday: “The childhood vaccination schedule needs to be eliminated,” the policy group’s president, Mark Gorton, said.

“All vaccines need to be removed from the market until they can be proven to be safe and effective,” Gorton told an audience of supporters gathered in the Willard Hotel’s Crystal Room for a panel discussion on the “Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury.”

Now, Kennedy didn’t attend the event. He doesn’t determine its agenda. He isn’t directly responsible for what is said by this group. But if you go through all the other nonsense these people are saying, you will recognize that much of it aligns directly with claims Kennedy has made over the years and into the present. And the history of MAHA Institute events and its guests certainly portrays a sense that the government listens to these people.

The event, just a block from the White House, comes at an interesting time for the MAHA movement in Washington. It is clear that the institute, and the movement it is part of, have the administration’s ear; attendees of past events have included senior HHS adviser Calley Means and Food and Drug Administration official Sara Brenner.

And that should be particularly terrifying, given that you can very easily get these same people to admit that they just make shit up when it suits them.

Gorton displayed slides with titles like “The Polio Fraud” and “The flu shot has given 1,900,000 Americans Alzheimer’s,” and, simply, “VACCINES ARE THE GREATEST SCAM IN MEDICAL HISTORY.”

At another moment, Gorton claimed that HHS had commissioned more than 100 studies into vaccine injuries. When asked by NOTUS where he got that number, he said Kennedy had previously stated his desire to further study vaccines.

“I don’t know much more than they’re commissioning a bunch of studies,” Gorton told NOTUS.

So what would eliminating approval for childhood vaccinations in a full sweep in America mean if it happens? Healthcare facilities would be entirely overrun. Hospitals would have to exponentially increase the size of their pediatric wards. Trillions of dollars would need to be spent to deal with the illnesses that would result. Real estate would have to be set aside to serve as graveyards filled with tiny little coffins.

This is from the CDC’s own website in 2023.

Among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.

Gone are the days of any of us thinking that an idea or plan is just too crazy for this particular administration to enact. We simply can’t afford to bet on that sort of minimal sense-making occurring any longer.

So sit up and pay attention, because anything that remotely looks like the eradication of childhood vaccines in America would be no less than a childhood healthcare holocaust.

09:00 AM

Sell Books Without Sacrificing Brand Control [The Business of Printing Books]

Sell Books Without Sacrificing Brand Control

Take a moment now and look at the books on your bookshelf. Spines out, titles running down them. And there, usually at the top or the bottom, is a publisher logo. Random House, Tor, Bantam—these little indicators of the publisher are so common that they’ve become ubiquitous. Just a part of a book cover, right? 

Pull one out and flip to the back cover. You’ll see a little blurb, almost always next to the barcode at the bottom. It likely has more info about the publisher, maybe even a URL to their main site, and a callout for the cover artist. 

This is important for branding efforts publishers do to build customer recognition. Brand consistency plays a huge part in business growth. If you read ten books and you see the same publisher logo on the spine of seven of them, you’re likely going to want more books from that publisher. Right? Likewise, if you read something and didn’t care for it, you might shy away from other books from that publisher.

Even in a time when browsing the bookstore is less and less common, your book’s cover is still a key marketing asset. 

So why would you let some other business steal your real estate?


Brand Consistency Is a Must for Growing Businesses

I wrote that H2 and stared at it for a long time. Because I’ll be damned if it doesn’t read like something ChatGPT would churn out. But no, that buzzword-rich phrase is all me.

Anyway, it’s true. Branding is trust. You trust Nike to sell you high-quality sneakers. You trust Apple to offer sleek, easy-to-use tech. 

That trust starts when each company delivers on its promise. But it persists because we begin to associate that brand with that promise. Your brand is what you use to associate a positive user experience or quality product with your business. 

For books and publishers, branding is often less emphasized. There are dozens of fantasy publishers out there, and every one of them has published great books and mediocre books. This was true—in the age of traditional publishing.

But we’re evolving. And that branding is more important now than ever before. 

Think about the way you would buy a book in 2010. First, you’d be on Amazon. So you’re already getting slapped with their branding. Then you get the book, and it’s got the publisher's branding on the cover. And on the description. You would see the author’s image on the sales page, but it’s tiny. In this example, the person who actually wrote this book is, at best, third in line for branding.

Now think about how independent authors operate in 2026. They’re building a following for themselves, usually through social media or email subscribers. They’re sharing content through owned channels. And what about if you’re a business that relies on selling books? Being in third place in the branding race is not at all ideal.

How On-Demand Production & Fulfillment Are Changing the Game

In the last ten years, we’ve experienced a monumental, though somewhat gradual, shift in the way content, services, and products are shared and sold. Historically, anyone who created anything relied on a retailer of some kind to distribute that product. This created a situation where people who had content to share were reliant on rented land to get exposure and earn money. 

Thanks to platforms like Shopify and Lulu, you can take control and own your content distribution. Not to mention capturing customer data in the process. 

Print-on-demand was initially a focus for individual creators. It’s affordable, with very low cost to entry, and gives anyone access to print and sell books. Now, as digital printing matures, we’re seeing businesses and publishers taking advantage of this method. 

Automated printing is a lifesaver for publishers’ backlists. Custom integrations, particularly when paired with AI tools, have led to an entirely new industry built around offering one-off, custom books. 

Availability and personalization are both reasons print-on-demand has become such a popular way to sell and dropship products. But another crucial, though often less acknowledged, factor is inventory. For publishers, inventory costs and management are a constant concern, particularly for backlist titles. On-demand production means no warehouses, no handling, and no costs that come with them.

How On-Demand Production Enables Brand Consistency

Okay, so I’ve outlined why print-on-demand is such a powerful method for growing a business, and the inherent problems with relying on another brand to sell your products. Now let’s bring it all together.

The bottom line is: you don’t need retailers to sell your book. Which is great, cause Amazon, and its ilk are becoming less and less appealing platforms.

With today’s tools, you can create your own storefront and product catalog pretty easily. With your books uploaded to Lulu, our APIs and direct ecommerce integrations (with Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce) connect our powerhouse print-on-demand and fulfillment network to your store. All you need are the customers.

This is the backbone of direct-to-consumer retail, a growing trend among creators and businesses. You get control over your products, more data than a retailer would ever imagine sharing, and you’ll have far better margins because you’re not splitting your revenue with a retail site.

Finally, you’ll be able to center everything you do around your singular brand. Here’s how. 

Sell Books Without Sacrificing Brand Control

Sell Your Book, Your Way

Sell books on your Wix, Shopify, or WooCommerce website with Lulu Direct.
Or use our Order Import tool for your next book launch.

Learn About Lulu Direct

White-Label Printing: Keep Your Brand Front and Center

This is, quite possibly, the most important thing you can do for brand consistency with your products. 

You’ve got your logo and business name on your site, in your book, in your emails, and you’re using them on your social media profiles. Why would you want some other company’s logo on the packing slip when they get your book? 

When we built Lulu Direct to simplify ecommerce integrations, we asked a lot of booksellers and creators what they needed most. 

The list was long. But one thing that popped up often was branding.

Digging into this, we discovered that a lot of people using Lulu to sell books wished they could remove our branding from their packing slips and present their own. So we built white-labeling into Lulu Direct.

Presenting your own brand on your customer’s packing slips is part of delivering a seamless shopping experience that keeps the focus on you and your brand. It also helps build and reinforce brand recognition, something important if you want readers to suggest your book to their friends or otherwise spread the word about your works. 

This is how individuals and businesses create a holistic brand experience, a proven tactic for direct-to-consumer sellers.

Customization Features That Protect Your Brand Identity

Along with helping you provide a cohesive brand experience based entirely on your brand needs, Lulu also provides a range of product customizations that further ensure you’re putting your brand at the center of your business. 

That means you can define a distinct size, ink, paper, trim, and layout for your books. If you use that same format for every book you produce, you’ll develop a signature look or style that readers will instantly recognize. 

Creating your books from your files means you can align those books with your digital branding. Use the same color palette, apply your logo, and add your brand information to the cover and interior, all as you see fit. 

Along with that, using our APIs allows you to request a unique printing (called a ‘print job’) every time an order is placed. Unlike the traditional Lulu system, where you upload a single interior and cover file to be used for every order, our API connections allow you to specify a unique file.

The benefit of this is the option to offer customization and personalization. This opens a whole new world of possibilities. Some companies, like Adorabooks, use custom printing to offer unique children’s books. The possibilities are pretty much endless, though, with the right tools on your site to gather information and generate the personalized file for printing.

Personalization, especially in an on-demand world, is likely the next big thing in dropshipping products. Lulu makes sure it's an option for you and your brand.

Bundling and Product Variants for a Cohesive Brand Offering

Another important way to keep your brand in focus is to ensure your site and product pages are cohesive. Lulu offers two options that are big for streamlining your product catalog:

Both of these features are pretty common ways to upsell and cross-sell that traditional retail sites have utilized for years. Here’s a pretty common example from Bookshop.org.

Sell Books Without Sacrificing Brand Control

Each version—hardcover, ebook, and paperback—is a product variant. This cuts down on store pages since you can offer all versions of your book on a single page. Which is a big deal when you’re running a business with numerous products to sell or if you’re a solo creator trying to manage your entire business by yourself.

Similarly, you can create bundles of multiple products to increase your order value and entice readers. Think about the trilogy sets of books you see in bookstores. Or maybe you bundle a short story or snippet from a new book along with a popular product.

Both variants and product bundles might seem more like marketing than branding, but it’s crucial to have these offerings to provide a simple, cohesive, and on-brand experience for your customers. 

Scaling Your Business Without Losing Brand Control

Lulu’s inventory-free model with global distribution and automated workflows might sound like a very technical platform. At the end of the day, what we do is print and ship books. Scalable fulfillment is a challenge we solve for growing businesses.

If you’re selling books and find yourself at a point that demands growing to meet demand, brand control is an easy-to-overlook pitfall. What I mean is that it is easy to get into the weeds of technical work to grow your business. That work is time-consuming and can be tedious. Like building out a website or developing new products.  

Your brand can get lost in there. 

This concern is one we’ve heard from booksellers a lot in the last few years. And it’s the reason we’ve built in tools like automated white-label shipping to help you keep your brand front and center.

Sell Books Without Sacrificing Brand Control

Your Free Lulu Account

Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world

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Kanji of the Day: 犬 [Kanji of the Day]

犬

✍4

小1

dog

ケン

いぬ　いぬ-

愛犬   (あいけん)   —   pet dog
子犬   (こいぬ)   —   puppy
盲導犬   (もうどうけん)   —   guide dog
柴犬   (しばいぬ)   —   shiba inu (dog breed)
犬猫   (いぬねこ)   —   dogs and cats
飼い犬   (かいいぬ)   —   pet dog
犬種   (けんしゅ)   —   dog breed
負け犬   (まけいぬ)   —   loser
小型犬   (こがたけん)   —   small-breed dog
大型犬   (おおがたけん)   —   large-breed dog

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 征 [Kanji of the Day]

征

✍8

中学

subjugate, attack the rebellious, collect taxes

セイ

遠征   (えんせい)   —   expedition
征服   (せいふく)   —   conquest
出征   (しゅっせい)   —   going to war
征伐   (せいばつ)   —   conquest
東征   (とうせい)   —   eastern expedition
征討   (せいとう)   —   subjugation
征服者   (せいふくしゃ)   —   conqueror
征く   (ゆく)   —   to conquer
長征   (ちょうせい)   —   lengthy military expedition
遠征軍   (えんせいぐん)   —   expeditionary force

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

07:00 AM

Over the top [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

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.

      

Weasel Words: OpenAI’s Pentagon Deal Won’t Stop AI‑Powered Surveillance [Techdirt]

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.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

The Trump Blunder Pattern [The Status Kuo]

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.”

Add Me To The Big Picture

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!

Jay

06:00 AM

Don’t Ban Kids From Using Chatbots [Techdirt]

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 companies already have policies 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.

The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing Under Section 702 [Techdirt]

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 stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.

You can see the full video here if you want.

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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04:00 AM

Docs Expose CBP’s Use Of Ad Data To Track People’s Movements [Techdirt]

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.

The extent of this surveillance hasn’t always been clear. 404 Media has obtained some information via FOIA requests that reduces a bit of the fog of war on privacy.

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.

Court Officially Orders U.S.-Based IPTV Operator to Pay Amazon & Netflix $18.75 Million [TorrentFreak]

tvnitroIn 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

default

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.

Thursday 2026-03-12

10:00 PM

David Ellison Pinky Swears CNN Will Retain Editorial Independence, Points To CBS [Techdirt]

We’ve already all seen what the Ellison family’s version of “editorial independence” looks like over at CBS, where contrarian troll Bari Weiss has turned the already very Republican friendly news giant into a safe space for right wing zealots and autocrats. All overseen by a Brendan Carr chosen censor tasked with ensuring the channel always makes Donald Trump happy.

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.

After being gifted two Hollywood studios and two major news empires by daddy and Donald Trump, fail-upward nepobaby David Ellison made the rounds last week to insist that CNN’s “editorial independence” would be retained under Paramount/CBS ownership. His evidence? CBS:

“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.”

Of course, if anybody had actually been paying attention to CBS, they’d see how the network under Weiss has already tried to repeatedly kill stories that aren’t favorable to Donald Trump, gone out of its way to normalize right wing opportunists like Erika Kirk, and has driven away a lot of remaining CBS journalists with Weiss’ obvious efforts to pander to Trump and Netanyahu.

Like CBS, CNN already goes well out of its way to be extra friendly to authoritarians. The network has routinely faced criticism for consistently airing sneering MAGA devotee Scott Jennings. Under Ellison ownership there’s zero serious doubt, by anyone, that CNN will become even more friendly to autocrats. After they get done firing untold thousands of people to try and pay down the deal’s immense debt.

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.

07:00 PM

Henry Ford knew how to drive [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

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.

      

05:00 PM

Court Dismisses DISH’s $25 Million IPTV Piracy Lawsuit Against UK Hosting Provider [TorrentFreak]

ukflagAs 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.

conclusion

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.

—

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.

01:00 PM

Beavers Are Not Moose: Buc-ee’s Sues Competitor Over Cartoon Moose Branding [Techdirt]

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.

10:00 AM

09:00 AM

Why Print is the Missing Piece in Your Creator Ecosystem [The Business of Printing Books]

Why Print is the Missing Piece in Your Creator Ecosystem

Publish & Prosper Episode #110
Published March 11, 2026
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Complete List of Channels


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).

Episode Chapters

💡 Listen to These Episodes

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Complete Episode Transcript

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: Yeah.

Matt: – get better. It's getting worse.

Lauren: It's, it's absolutely getting worse. It's constantly whether it's –

Matt: Ugh, it’s disgusting.

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.

Why Print is the Missing Piece in Your Creator Ecosystem

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Kanji of the Day: 長 [Kanji of the Day]

長

✍8

小2

long, leader, superior, senior

チョウ

なが.い　おさ

社長   (しゃちょう)   —   company president
会長   (かいちょう)   —   president (of a society)
長の   (ながの)   —   long
市長   (しちょう)   —   mayor
成長   (せいちょう)   —   growth
幹事長   (かんじちょう)   —   chief secretary (usu. of a party)
長い   (ながい)   —   long (distance, length)
市長選   (しちょうせん)   —   mayoral election
委員長   (いいんちょう)   —   chairman
部長   (ぶちょう)   —   head (chief, director) of a section or department

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 桟 [Kanji of the Day]

桟

✍10

中学

scaffold, cleat, frame, jetty, bolt (door)

サン　セン

かけはし

桟橋   (さんきょう)   —   wharf
桟敷   (さじき)   —   dress circle (of a theater)
天井桟敷   (てんじょうさじき)   —   gallery (in a theater)
窓の桟   (まどのさん)   —   window frame
障子の桟   (しょうじのさん)   —   frame of a shoji (paper sliding-door)
浮桟橋   (うきさんばし)   —   floating pier
桟道   (さんどう)   —   plank path (on a steep mountainside, cliff face, etc.)
聾桟敷   (つんぼさじき)   —   being kept uninformed
浮き桟橋   (うきさんばし)   —   floating pier
桟竹   (えつりだけ)   —   sheathing (under thatched roofing)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Six-Day and IP Address Certificates Available in Certbot [Let's Encrypt]

This was also posted on EFF’s blog.

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:

sudo certbot certonly --staging \
  --preferred-profile shortlived \
  --webroot \
  --webroot-path <filesystem path to webserver root> \
  --ip-address <your ip address>

Two things of note:

  • 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.

08:00 AM

The U.S. Built A Blueprint To Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It. [Techdirt]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

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, two dozen 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.

“Do It Right Now”

Under pressure from lawmakers, Trump’s then-Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.

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 involving boat 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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