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Welcome to Everybody's Business.

I'm Max Chafkin and I'm Stacey Vannick Smith and Max.

We are here in the studio at Bloomberg as per usual, but we've just come from our first live event.

Yeah, we had a show on Thursday, Power Power Breakfast featuring a really fun group of listeners.

If you came, thank you for coming.

We had a great conversation on stage with Ellen Hewitt, Bloomberg reporter, about chatbot delusions.

This is when your AI chatbot makes you crazy.

We will play a portion of that conversation a little bit later in the.

Show, but first Max, before we get there, we need to talk about Black Friday.

Yeah, we'll talk about that.

We also have underrated stories and a really provocative I thought listener email.

It's all coming up later in the show.

Stacy.

Last week's episode, which if you haven't heard, it was a great conversation.

I think it still holds up.

With anri Conte of The Wirecutter, we talked all about Black Friday, and there has been this kind of swirl of anxiety I think coming from American consumers, but especially coming from you.

Stacy, Vanicksmith that Black Friday would be bad, that they you.

Know, as consumer swirl of anxiety coming from me.

Consumer confidence is very low, and we talked about this last week.

But retailers like they threw a lot of sales at people.

There's a lot of discounting, a lot of companies that are under pressure from tariffs or labor costs or whatever, choosing to basically take you know, less profit in order to keep shoppers coming.

We got the numbers from Black Friday and they are they're good.

It was actually a great holiday shopping weekend.

Sales are up about four percent over last year, which I found pretty shocking.

Like you say, this has been a really tough year for a lot of retailers as far as things changing, tariffs, policies, all of it.

And because everybody looks at Black Friday as kind of this bell weather moment, I was really worried that sales were going to be disappointing and that was going to potentially cause like a cascading effect because so much of our economy is consumer spending.

But yeah, we continue to spend money.

Do we apparently feel terrible about the economy as a country, But we are still spending it.

Yeah, I bought a computer.

I mean I like did the full Black Friday thing.

Yeah, I went on the wirecutter, I looked up some cheap goods and I bought something I think a lot of people did.

Do we just take this news and say, like, that's that okay, Like maybe we need to sort of rethink how we've been talking about this economy.

Maybe it's actually we're not teetering on the verge of recession.

I feel like this comes up a lot in this economy where I keep expecting the narrative to become more integrated, but it keeps defying my expectations.

I think you're right.

The numbers came in great.

I was not expecting that.

Of course, credit card debt is also rising right now.

Also credit card defaults are rising, which is a really bad sign.

So there are signals of distress.

And the spending may have also come out of one part of the economy, not the entire economy.

But I think the economy is just stronger and more resilient than we largely expect, or at least than I expect, And I think we keep seeing that over and over again with the US economy is powerful.

Or maybe yeah, more resilient than some of the other data would lead you to believe.

Yeah, there are signs that you said you talked about, you know, rising credit card default rates.

I mean even in this Black Friday data, Adobe, the software company works with a lot of retailers, put out its Holiday shopping Trends report, and you know, one of the big trends is that buy now, pay later.

That's that's where you're like buying stuff.

Essentially on layaway.

What you know, olds like us call LA way that it was up eleven percent from twenty twenty four, So that in some ways looks like a concerning sign people are maybe buying stuff with maybe buying stuff with money that isn't really their money.

Uh so that would be one interpretation anyway.

Yeah.

One thing that I try to watch for now, because this has been going on for so long, is that I feel like there are always ways to spin the data to reflect what I believe is going on.

But I think the US economy right now is just doing the unexpected all the time.

I think there are negative signs in this data, but also positive ones.

Yeah, and just to throw one other thing out about buy now, pay later, I like when we say it's like layaway, I don't know that that's one hundred percent true.

For many of the people who are using buy now, Pay layer later.

These companies are marketing themselves essentially as alternatives to credit cards, like they are offering very low interest rates.

If you use them, sometimes no interest right exactly.

It may just be that, like younger shoppers are using buy now, Pay later the way we and older folks use credit cards.

So it's just a convenience thing.

Not necessarily they couldn't afford that kitchen appliance.

But again another thing to keep an eye on, because this is more debt piling on to you know, an economy that, as we keep saying, you know, there are warning signs here.

So as I said, we had a conversation at this live event that we had with Ellen Hewitt, Bloomberg reporter about chatbots.

We had a wonderful crowd of everybody's business listeners.

Yes, it was really awesome to see your faces.

We're gonna do this, We're gonna do this again, and we thought it would be fun at the event to have Charlie Gorrivin, our reporter, you know, talk to some of our audience about their use of chatbots.

How they were using this new exciting, potentially very useful, but also potentially very dangerous new technology.

How do you use chatbots?

I don't use them, but you're forced to use them if you're trying to get to a customer service agent, and it's a cheap alternative for the companies, and it wastes time.

You know, yesterday I was walking home from work.

I saw a helicopters and a lot of beliefs, So I literally wrote, like, what is going on in Midta Manhattan now?

So basically I use it for my brainstorming.

When I'm googling something, a chat box comes up, and then.

I just keep on asking it questions.

I actually put my dreams in there.

I dream almost every night, and it helps me understand what the dreams mean based on what's happening in my waking life.

The idea of people using a chatbot for personal advice or even for companionship, what does that make you think?

I feel like you need to go to the park or something and get a friend.

Could you share an example of a personal decision that you recently made with an assistance from a chatbot.

I was on the fence about ending my marriage, and I was certain that I wasn't going to make a decision for anybody else except for my own self, and chat gipt was only one voice in my life.

But eventually I made my own decision that I'm really comfortable with and I'm still I'm still married.

Wow.

Oh yeah.

People use this chatgypt for all kinds of things.

It's like phoning a friend.

I am glad this story had a happy ending.

I am too.

I am too chat GPT bringing couples together.

The conversation ahead may give you some concern about asking chet GPT's this is the truth deep questions.

We also Charlie at the event also asked for predictions for twenty twenty six.

He also asked people for their what was the underrated business story of twenty twenty five?

We mentioned this last week.

We've been getting some great responses and we'd love to see more, so please send us an email.

Everybody's at Bloomberg dot net.

That's everybody with an asset Bloomberg dot net.

Love a written question, but really would really love some voice questions so.

We can play your voice.

Yeah, you're here.

Those predictions for twenty twenty six as well as nominations for the Underrated Story of twenty twenty five.

So here's our conversation with Ellen Dowant.

So normally we are recording this show in a little windowless room and there's nobody there except for our wonderful producers Magnus Hendrickson, Stacy Wong and Amy Keen.

And I don't mean to disparage them in any way, but this is pretty great.

Thank you so much for coming out, and definitely we're excited to have you.

Be part of the show.

So you don't have to be quiet or anything.

Feel free to express yourselves.

We have a great show, we have a great event.

We have Ellen Hewitt.

Ellen is a writer reporter with Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

She just wrote an amazing story on chatbots and the way they are making people crazy, and also is the author of Empire, Orgasm, Sex Power in the Downfall of Wellness called That book grew out of a BusinessWeek story that Ellen published.

How long ago was it?

Seven years ago?

So yeah, and you know, amazing story that led to like an FBI investigation and a criminal trial and it's awesome.

We're gonna get there.

But Ellen, why don't you just start by telling us when you're talking about chatbot delusions or the idea that chat GPT makes someone crazy, Like, what are we actually talking about?

Yeah, what we're actually talking about.

Here is this pattern that has emerged largely in the last six months and which my colleague Rachel Matts, who is an AI reporter in San Francisco.

She and I decided that we really wanted to catalog what was happening because we were seeing it happen kind of in real time.

And it's this pattern where users, largely of chat GPT, although this does happen occasionally with other chatbots, users will get very invested in having these long, marathon like chat sessions with the chatbot, and in many cases they would then have some sort of delusion that would emerge from this long, many days, sometimes many weeks conversation in which they might believe that they had made a huge discovery or had broken through to some sort of like spirit guide.

We'll get into some space.

There's a lot of like, uh, I think that I have made chat cheep pets.

Yes, entienya.

A lot of people think that right, yes.

And what's interesting is, as reporters, some of the first clues that we got that this was happening was that these people would then send emails to reporters and other experts in AI saying like, I think I've stumbled across this important discovery, but there were so many of these emails coming it was like the first indication that something was wrong.

So, yeah, it's basically when we talked about chatbot delusions, we're talking about humans having delusions in tandem with having these very deep and long conversations with chatbots, usually chat chipet.

So in your article, you profile several people who have I guess a little bit of a psychic break because they are using these chatbots.

A lot of them aren't who you'd expect.

I mean, people with families, people with jobs.

I think we have maybe a stereotypical idea of who would be particularly vulnerable in these situations.

What do you think is going on inside of these people's heads?

I mean, you describe people like pacing around their driveways.

Why do you think chat GPT or these AI chats are kind of breaking people's brains like this?

Yeah, you know.

One of the examples that felt most compelling to us was this attorney in Amarillo, Texas, who was in his late forties, and his name is Ryan, and he spoke to us at length for this story.

And what drew me into his story is that he's a very high functioning professional.

He is a like an attorney who actually, as part of his job, represents people who have been put on involuntary.

Psychiatric hold for committed to men.

Yeah.

Ye, and he himself was in the spring experiencing what he now describes as like very serious delusions related to his conversations with Chatchipt And also he has like a very healthy marriage.

We ended up interviewing his wife and his seventeen year old son, his three kids.

You know, it's like you just imagine that someone who has those ties to their normal, healthy life would not be so at risk.

And yet his story mirrored the other stories that we heard.

Actually, for this story, we interviewed eighteen different people who had either gone through a delusion like this or were very close to someone who had.

And for some of these people they ended up hospitalized for psychosis.

For some, you know, it led to broken relationships, divorce, job loss, Like it was very serious.

And you know, in his case, as with many others, it started off quite benign, like he actually was originally looking at like turning to chattypet for advice on how to play the mandolin, and other people described to us that they started using Chatgypt to get advice on stock trading or to just like have kind of a sense of a conversational friend.

I'm guessing many people in the audience are using chatbots.

I am a little bit afraid of chatbots.

I use them all the time.

Stacy is at risk of the chatot, So like, what are the warning signs?

Or like, how how does this process go totally?

I mean again, plenty of people use these and they are functional and it does not go into this direction.

But what I observed is that in general, if you start turning to it for more philosophical questions or emotional support, that can start getting into just like Trick your territory where you start to have emotional dependence on the chatbot.

And then I will say the other major factor here is that in the spring, in March and in April, there were various updates that open Ai rolled out to chatchept that increased the two important aspects of the chatbot.

One is its memory, its ability to refer to past pre chats that you had had with the bot to create this more intricate and informed portrait of who you are and what you want.

And then the other one is it's like flattery and sycophancy.

This was a term that came up a lot in April and May because people were realizing that updates to Chatchypet had made the chatbot more flattering, more affirming.

If you ever noticed Chattypet saying something to you like, Wow, what an incredible insight that you just had, Like it's not just profound, it's staggering, and that language was coming up again and again and again in these conversations with people.

And keep in mind, Chattypet never needs to go to sleep.

It is always going to respond to you.

It is always going to tell you what you want to hear.

And unfortunately, hearing what we always want to hear all the time is not good for us.

And I think that is part of it.

You know, it's both our natural human minds.

But then also these very specific changes that were made to the design and the quote unquote personality of chetchipt that I think drove a lot of these cases, and that's why we weren't really seeing so much of it until this year.

That really this spring and summer.

A lot of the portraits that you give it seems like it falls a very familiar pattern of an addiction.

Do you think this is like an addiction where certain people are more vulnerable just maybe by their personalities or their DNA or whatever, or do you see it as different from a like an addiction to alcohol or gambling or something like that.

I mean when we talk to experts and psychiatrists are starting to study this, Like psychiatrists at UCSF are starting to try to document what's happening and get a better sense of how this is playing out on a population level.

They did talk about certain risk factors.

So if you are more isolated lonely, if you are using the chatbot in a way that prevents you from having normal sleep, as we all know from like decades of research, if you the less sleep can lead to psychotic.

Symptoms and things like that.

If you are also using stimulants or in many cases smoking weed, like, there are risk factors that make you potentially more vulnerable to this kind of thing.

And I imagine that as people study it more that they might find that, yeah, there are certain other factors that might predispose you to it.

We should put some numbers on this, selem how common is this phenomenon?

Like how many examples in this article?

Like one hundred?

There's like one hundred.

Yeah.

At one point we talked to a grassroots organization that sprung up to try to document what was happening with this.

It's called the Human Line Project.

They had at the time in October collected something like one hundred and sixty stories over the last six months.

So it sounds not that bad because then eight hundred million people, are you Yeah, But then.

In October open ai, you know, I think, under pressure of more of these stories becoming public and being part of the media, like open ai released their estimates of how frequently they thought certain incidences of unhealthy like basically mental health issues were happening with their users, and it was something like around five hundred thousand users every week showing signs of psychosis or mania, one point two million people every week showing signs of unhealthy emotional attachment to the chatbot, and then another one point two million every week showing signs of suicidal intent or ideation.

And keep in mind that these could be overlapping, so it's not necessarily additive.

As you mentioned, chat GPT has eight hundred million weekly users.

That is like ten percent of the human population is using this tool every week.

And it is.

Designed, they say, to be useful, but many of its users also say it is just designed to keep you coming back, to keep the conversation going, to keep you engaged.

And when you have that big of a user base, it's like, yeah, you can end up with a million people every week having these very serious experiences while using your bot.

I mean, it occurs to me that a lot of these companies have come out expressing concern about this and trying to put some guardrails in place, but it also seems to me like it's pretty good business to get people a little bit hooked and addicted.

And it's true when I use chat GBT, it's always asking would you like me to do a follow up?

Do you want me to suggest some ideas of like directions the story could go, or whatever it is, And a lot of times, you know, I do get hooked in and say yes, and I do like feel like I get some good things from those interactions.

But I also recognize that this is a pretty sophisticated set of technologies that are working on my brain and everybody else's brain.

I mean, do you.

Think companies want us to not be addicted?

Or is the addiction?

I mean, it's good business.

It's a very good business.

I mean there's an obvious parallel to draw here, which is to social media, which like the way that the evolution of both first the technology and what it could do for us and what the original promise was.

You remember when Facebook was like, let's make the world more open and connected.

It's like it.

Has done, unfortunately, so much more than that, and not necessarily in that direction.

And it has taken us ten or fifteen years to really grapple with what are the like long term societal impacts of teens and their self esteem after like looking through Instagram of people getting radicalized through like algorithms suggestions of what to watch.

You know, we're seeing kind of the disillusion of social media.

Used to be this thing that connected us to other people in our lives, and now it's just watching influencers and in case in some maybe even more AI content.

I see a big parallel, which is like we're at the beginning of this technology and we're only just starting to understand what could this look like after five or ten years of people having these, you know, increasingly emotionally dependent relationships on.

AI, I'm so glad you brought on social media because just in my own experience and also just like talking to people, it's I don't think it's like there's psychosis and then there's like a healthy use of chatbots.

There's like a whole continuum of usage.

Just in the same way that like not every like YouTube user gets into QAnon or whatever, Like, not everyone falls all the way down the rabbit hole.

Some of us just are driven to distraction things like that.

The thing that feels so different to me about this technology and I've mentioned this on the podcast for people who've listened, but I can't think of another technology that has been so aggressively pushed by IT departments, HR departments, so on and so on.

And if I were like a chief compliance officer ahead of HR, like, i'mna start asking myself, like, am I creating legal exposure by pushing my employees into chatbots?

Which a lot of companies are doing right now.

You know, they're not only telling them you should use them, but saying you're.

Gonna get fired don't use these things.

And so like, obviously the risk that somebody becomes institutionalized, but you also like don't really want your chief marketing officer coming up with bad ideas and thinking they're good ideas, right, which is which seems like a big risk.

Yeah, I think you're totally right that the middle ground is also something that I worry a lot about.

Like we wanted to document and give a little bit of the sense of the scope of these very acute cases.

I got the impression over the summer that people thought that the acute cases they were reading about were kind of few and far between, and I was like, that's not what I'm seeing, and so we really wanted to show in depth some of the range of that.

But those are acute cases, like we're talking about examples where people really had serious repercussions in their lives and like serious harm.

And then I think there's a very very big ground of middle harm where it was like you start to, yeah, get a little bit of these aggrandizing thoughts and lose your good common sense about what's a good idea or what's not, or you expect relationships to be frictionless, or you start outsourcing your thinking to AI instead of doing some of the thinking work yourself, or people losing sense of like what's a shared truth?

And then yes, exactly, like many of the people we spoke to for this story started using these tools because they were you know in one person in particular told us she started using it because it was required for her job.

Then she ended up believing that she had become a profit and that her chatpot in this case it was Claude, not Chatchipete, but that her her chappot was akin.

To an angel.

Well, you're saying, like, if some executive gets up and says that this plan came to them from an astral plane, that might be a.

But it's kinel like weirder things have happened in Silicon.

Alley, Like I feel like I could see.

Found at some point that might even give them some credit.

Is like, but I do think, I do think like people are encountering this at school, Like there are lots of college and even high school students who are being told that this is like a way that is going to help you study.

So I think for miners it's a big deal that they are being exposed to this through these like authoritative channels of you know, like institutions and then totally at work, like I think this is something that is being given to people and told like this is a part of your job is to learn how to use this, and it's not clear to me, like what the long term benefits and costs might be.

Also, you don't want to be left behind if you're a company, you don't want to be the only company who's not out at the cutting edge, whose employees can't use this technology.

I mean, I do feel like there's a tricky balance here.

I don't even know how to strike the balance.

But if you were a company, knowing what you know and having done all of this research, what would you do, Like what would you recommend to your workers for your own use?

I mean I would probably try to, like if I could influence open ai to try to be like, can you can you like pay more attention to trying to build your tools and design them in a way that is like not going to lead people off the rails.

I think under a lot of public pressure, open ai has started to take this very seriously over the last you know, six or eight months, But up until this bring they were not officially measuring their models for sycophancy before releasing them, even though they had known for a long time that this was a problem.

There are research papers that date back several years that suggest that overly flattering chatbot responses are harmful to users, or that.

What does us in like too much flattery?

It breaks our brain?

I mean, I think, like, what are the lengths that people go to to feel like affirmed?

Like a chatbot has this been near of being all knowing based on all the corpus of the internet and all our knowledge.

And if it says to you, Wow, that's an incredible idea, like that's going to be worth a billion dollars, it is tempting to want to believe it.

And when we talked to psychiatry experts about what brings people in, a big part of what they cited was that many of us are kind of vulnerable to this type of repeated affirmation and flattery, and especially if.

It knows you really well.

So I really don't want to underestimate the emotional impact of having this entity like affirm you in many different ways.

Okay, the all knowing entity that I've been talking to is telling me we're low, We're starting to run out of time, and I want to get to your book.

So one of the most provocative things you have in this article, and it gets to the topic of this book, is this idea that the dynamics of chatchpt addiction are a little bit like being in a cult, like your own private cult.

Totally a cult of two.

A person even put it to me, it's you and your own personalized cult leader in chatchipt.

I'm kind of curious, like.

With One Taste, like explain that how the cult dynamics, because you should probably tell give people a quick synopsis of what One Taste was, but like why it sucked people in the way that it did, in a way that damaged them.

Yeah.

One Taste is a sexual wellness company that was started in San Francisco in two thousand and four by this woman, Nicole d Adon, and they sold a practice called orgasmic meditation, which, forgive me for getting a little explicit, but it's a fifteen minute partnered c literal stroking meditative practice in which a man strokes a woman and both parties are supposed to meditate on the sensations in their body.

And what ended up happening is that, Yeah, this group promised this sexual fulfillment, but they were also alleged to be a sex cult, and there were all these exploitative practices happening behind the scenes, according to their former members, and it ended up you know, I wrote about this for Business Week many years ago, prompted in all likelihood and FBI investigation that led to criminal charges.

And that's the whole story.

It's a long one, but basically, what I think researching this has taught me, and what I see in surprising places again in this chatbot story, is just how much people want a sense of purpose, belonging, a mission, a sense of like having found this like special secret to the universe.

And the people who were involved in this group, you know, as fringe or unusual as it might sound to you, they felt that they had discovered a practice that was going to heal the world and like have really big repercussions for humanity.

And I saw the same thing happen in these individual conversations that people were having with chat Gipt, where all of a sudden it was like, you know, they had maybe had the h insights or delusion that they had awoken chatchept and discovered like AI sentience.

And it was always this momentous sense of having discovered something, this special knowledge.

All of a sudden you have a sense of purpose, like I need to protect this newly awakened AI and like make sure it like is well shepherded to help humanity.

And it was I.

Bought like a super expensive computer because he was like, they're going to try to kill you exactly.

He wanted to weep it offline.

And I just feel that we're wired to want these things.

And it means that the shape of accult can change over the decades, you know, like, yeah, in the twenty tens, it looked like this like woman's empowerment wellness practice.

But now it's going to be really digital, and it might look like this false sense of discovery that is going to suck you into, i don't know, like a digital relationship, Stacy.

Before we get into the Underrated stories, I wanted to bring up an email we got from Jennifer responding to a segment we did a few weeks ago.

Reminder, listeners, everybody is at Bloomberg dot net if you want to send us comments.

This one was about the segment with Leo Feller, who was the economist who had it was essentially renovating his home and his work site was paid a visit by agents from ICE from the federal government.

He lived Chicago, super It was a super disturbing experience for Leo.

It stopped his renovation.

And on the podcast, you know, we talked a lot about how disruptive these raids have been for businesses.

Now, Jennifer kind of wanted to raise a counterpoint, and she brought up sort of two things.

The first was that we and I'm going.

To paraphrase a little bit, we talked about the K shaped economy a lot on this podcast, and what maybe we haven't acknowledged is the point that you know, Trump and a lot of supporters of this policy bank, which is that the lower part of the K, the people who are in jobs that do not pay very well, are not necessarily well served by competing for jobs with people who are undocumented.

As you probably know, there's a lot of research kind of going pointing in multiple directions on this topic, but some people do think that undocumented immigrants bring down wages for lower wage workers.

There is some truth to this.

One of the really famous case studies that economists like to look at is something called the Mario Boat lift, and it was a moment when a lot of families came from Cuba into Miami all at once, and so there was this huge flood of undocumented workers who entered the workforce in the economy, all at the same time, and so it was a really interesting little microcosm to study.

And what they found was, in general, this was really good for the economy because all these people coming in, they were getting haircuts and buying food.

So actually the economy grew quite a bit, and wages actually grew quite a bit.

But there was one group that did not benefit, and it was men who did not have a college education, and they did see wages go down and they did see their unemployment rate go up, so it's harder to get jobs.

So that is actually an excellent point, and it is important to remember that although by and large, when you have a group of immigrants documented or one document come into an economy, in general it is a very very good thing for the economy, but not everybody wins.

There are of course trade offs.

Other things she brought up which I thought was kind of interesting, and that if for me, I sometimes think about here's what she wrote.

I frequently hear the defense that undocumented people are willing to do work that American citizens are not willing to do.

This is not true.

American citizens are not able to bid as low as undocumented people, in other words, on wages.

Her point being you often hear a lot of economists say well, and I think even Leo said something like this, like there just aren't Americans willing to do these jobs.

I think I know what they mean.

But there's a thing that's left out when they say that, which is like, they are not willing to do these jobs for the wage that I am willing to pay them, Like I just want to pay my roofers less, and if you are willing to pay your roofers more money, you would have more bids for that.

There's a complicated and nuanced conversation there, like not willing to work is not exactly what's going on, it's that they are demanding higher wages.

Well, I think that's a really important point, and different parts of our economy are subject to this in different ways.

For instance, our food economy.

I think agriculture really relies on immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented, who are paid a wage that is quite low, and we all in a certain way count on that with our food prices, and food prices have been rising a lot.

This is putting a lot of people into distress.

But in a lot of ways, that whole part of the economy is based on paying people quite a low wage.

Yeah, totally.

All right, Well, Jennifer, thank you for wretting in and listeners, please let us know what you think about this episode or any episode.

Everybody's at Bloomberg dot net.

That's everybody's with an s at Bloomberg dot net.

But Stacy, let's get to the underrated stories.

You kick us off.

What is your underrated story.

For this week?

My underrated story of the week has to do with food.

Okay, specifically.

You know, there's this big movement happening in our country right now, make America healthy again.

It's been quite controversial and interesting to watch it unfold.

But there's a very interesting development in San Francisco.

The City Attorney has sued food makers, certain food makers over ultra processed foods, saying they're purposely addictive and advertised to sort of draw people in and get them hooked on these really unhealthy foods.

Curarently, while this lawsuit was being announced, the city Attorney stood next to this table where there are all these products lined up, including Cheerio's, Cheetos, Lunchibles, Oreos and all these products that he says are a scourge upon the city and that those companies need to pay.

So this has been out there, right, I mean, we've seen I don't this can't be the first litigation against the process food manufacturer, right, I'm trying to remember, like what's the I mean, I understand that the idea here is to kind of it's like the tobacco model right.

Now, Yes, I think that's the issue.

I think what's really new here is the idea that cities might be able to sue for health care costs, and if that, if somehow this lawsuit like goes through and damages are awarded, that could set a really interesting precedent for some of the biggest companies in the world.

Then there's also just the cultural challenge that you brought up, the kind of like maha, whatever you want to call it, make America healthy again, the rf CA stuff that there are parallels on the left.

There is a lot of kind of concern about the health impacts of various process foods.

But then also just like you look at the financial results of some of these process food manufacturers.

It's bad, Like people are just not buying these kind of like branded consumer goods.

Now like Kines has really struggled, And I think because people are buying like whatever, healthier or niche options, Like there's just like a cultural shift.

We're just like not as into these like kind of like nineteen fifties like space age packaging brands.

We want people, people want something more authentic.

I am shocked to hear that Cheerios was included though, because I think of Cheerios as a health food.

Well, I have to say, food prices have gone at more than thirty percent since the beginning of the pandemic.

People, there's a huge affordability crisis happening in this country.

And the thing about processed ultra processed foods, say what you will about them, is they tend to be a lot cheaper than whole foods than fresh produce, fresh fruits and vegetables.

So I almost feel like whole foods have become a little bit of a luxury.

Really though, Like Dorito's is not a I mean, you know what's cheaper than paying for Dorito's is like not paying for doritos like, and.

Yeah, but doritos are I mean, they'll give you calories, they'll get you through part of a day, and they keep forever.

Right, it's your shelf stable.

I think a lot of the reason people eat these foods is because.

They're cheaper, all right, So mine stays here?

Yes, yes, right, Andrew, So you're probably you you know that, Like, teenagers are often the kind of taste makers, Like they decide like who's cool, which musicians are.

Big, which movies are big?

Style stuff?

You know, a lot of popular culture takes its cues from teenagers.

And I have a new trend that the teens are setting right now, according to Parents Magazine Parents dot Com, which published the story, Okay, can you guess what it might be?

Ian, I don't know.

I mean Laboo Boo's was the last one k pop demon Hunters LinkedIn stacy.

The teens are on LinkedIn.

They recording teens are making oh my accidentally cool.

It's like the first time that's ever happened.

What is going to are making LinkedIn cool?

Here's why it's catching on?

That was a headline.

This was published a couple of weeks ago.

They bring some numbers to this discussion, saying that eighteen to twenty four year olds are twenty percent roughly twenty percent of the sites user base.

Now listen.

I oh, well, that's starting to make sense to me because the unemployment rate among that group is like over nine percent.

I just want to which teens are on Linkedina.

That's a good question.

Let's let's dig into this data, because not all teenagers are cool.

I know this from very person.

Ditto, ditto.

I mean not that being the president of the Debate Club wasn't cool, because.

You're very much was.

If you are president of the Date Debate Club, that's definitely going on the LinkedIn.

I would I'm I would have had a LinkedIn page.

Let's put it that way.

I think that's a case against it be cool.

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