OpenAI 的战争迷雾 + 押注伊朗 + Hard Fork 对 Slop 的评析

Something horrible has happened.

What's that?

My wife has fallen in love with an AI.

Which AI?

For background, my wife is not a very techy person. She's not an early adopter. She works in city government.

She's a regular adopter.

Yes.

When it gets good, she's interested. But don't talk to her before then.

Exactly. It just got good enough for her to take an interest. Yesterday, she discovered Claude Code—

Hmm.

—and started using it to do some stuff at work, and now it's all she wants to talk about. We were out at a party last night, and she's like, "I just can't stop thinking about my coding." She had a dream about vibe coding last night.

Really?

Maybe all of this is some karmic revenge for the Bing Sydney episode, but I do feel like I'm getting a taste of my own medicine here.

I mean, to me, this seems like your dream come true. What does any man want more than his wife taking an interest in his hobby? This could be one of the best things that's happened to you in a long time.

It's true. I think we've always benefited in our marriage from the fact that we are—

Are you speaking about our marriage or your marriage to your wife?

My marriage—

Oh, okay.

—to my wife, we're interested in different things, and we can cross-pollinate. I guess I want to ask you, as someone who's in a relationship—

Mm-hmm.

—with someone who works in AI—

Mm-hmm.

—how do you stop talking about it? Do you have set hours where you're like, "We're not going to talk about AI for this next hour"?

Here's what I'll say: If I ever figure that out, you'll be the first to know.

Okay, thank you.

In my house, the few respites we get from AI during the week would involve Friday night episodes of RuPaul's Drag Race. That's a good, solid 1 hour—

Okay.

—of not talking about AI.

Okay.

Outside of that, we're really monitoring the situation, Casey. We are fully locked in.

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork.

This week, OpenAI scrambles to contain the fallout from its deal with the Pentagon. Then, how prediction markets have become one of the most controversial parts of the US attack on Iran. And finally, it's a Hard Fork review of slop for children.

You'll never guess what Peppa Pig is doing now.

Well, Casey, we are now in week 2 of this incredible, high-stakes drama that's been playing out between the Pentagon and America's leading AI companies. There's been a lot going on. We now have more clarity on why the deal between Anthropic and the Pentagon fell apart. We also know how this Anthropic supply chain risk designation is actually going into effect and impacting the way that government agencies are responding. And we have been learning this week about how OpenAI's deal with the Pentagon is shaping up.

So, lots to discuss here, but first, we should make our disclosures. I work at The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations.

And my fiancée works at Anthropic.

Okay. Let's start with OpenAI, because they are sort of the late arrival into this story, but in some ways the most dramatic. Since Sam Altman announced last Friday that OpenAI had arrived at an agreement with the Pentagon, we have learned a little bit more about that agreement. As a reminder, according to Sam Altman, this agreement did include some prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems—basically the same 2 red lines that Anthropic had set out, which were causing them so much trouble with the Pentagon.

I think it's fair to say this provoked one of the biggest backlashes in that company's history.

It really did. We've seen it across social media. Many top-upvoted posts on OpenAI-related subreddits have been condemning this move. OpenAI has been scrambling to try to rebuild trust. But at the end of the day, Kevin, I think both the Pentagon and OpenAI are saying to the public, "You're just going to have to trust us," and the public is saying, "Well, we don't."

Right. A lot of people have been canceling their ChatGPT subscriptions and switching over to Claude as a result of all of this—people who don't agree with the Trump administration or the stance that the Pentagon has taken here. Presumably because they're seeing some pain in the cancellations department, as well as a general feeling that this narrative is not going well for them, Sam Altman has been doing some damage control.

On Saturday, he hopped on X to talk about this and answer questions about the Pentagon deal along with 2 other employees. These questions were the kinds of things you'd expect: people asking, "What did you guys agree to that Anthropic didn't? Where are your red lines? Who's going to be making the kinds of hard decisions during something like a war about how these models can and can't be used? What about this domestic mass surveillance thing?"

I think he answered some of these questions, but the thing that they also did was release the language of this contract that had been in dispute and had been the subject of so much speculation.

Well, they released what they called the relevant portion of the contract, but we would see later commentary from experts in government procurement that said, essentially, "Until we see the entire contract, it's just very difficult for us to take at face value the idea that this is the only relevant language here."

Right. They did not release the whole contract, but they did release some relevant language from this contract with the Pentagon in a blog post. Then, on Monday, Sam admitted that he made a mistake. He said, "We shouldn't have rushed to get this out on Friday." He also added that it looked opportunistic and sloppy.

Or slopportunistic, to coin a phrase.

Yes, it was slopportunistic. He announced that OpenAI was going to amend its deal with the Pentagon to explicitly rule out the use of OpenAI's tools for domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals. It includes the following language: "The Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of US persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information."

I found this all slightly confusing. Casey, do you understand what OpenAI has said and the various evolutions of its position on this?

I think the key takeaways here are that they are saying they have put in some amended language that will prohibit certain uses of their systems by the government. For example, they're going to prevent the government from using commercial data that they acquire legally and running that through GPT models for domestic surveillance.

I just want to say, though, that there is always a high risk here for what I would call Jedi mind tricks, Kevin, and for the government, because we have seen Democratic and Republican presidents do this, right? They go to the absolute limit of what the law will allow when it comes to surveillance of Americans, and one way they'll get around that is by saying, "Well, we're not doing surveillance, Kevin. We're doing some intelligence gathering," right?

As annoying as it is to fixate on the semantics here, I'm telling you that whether or not you personally are surveilled will come down to semantics. That's why we're digging in the way we are.

Okay, so there are still lots of questions about some of the details here. I think there's a lot of doubt and concern among some OpenAI employees that this actually ended up in a place they're comfortable with.

Boy, is there. Some of that employee discontent spilled over onto X, where you had some employees saying, essentially, that they didn't trust their leadership either. An employee named Leo Gao called the contract language window dressing and pointed out that it still seems to give the Pentagon control over when to deploy autonomous weapons and just doesn't do much to address some of the other loopholes.

Then, maybe more dramatically, Kevin, on Tuesday, Max Schwarzer, who was the post-training lead for OpenAI and a vice president of research at the company, announced that he was leaving. In his X post, while pretty vague, he suggested that this was an important time and that he had come to really respect Anthropic's values. He said he's going over to work there.

Yeah. So what's your take on how the damage control is going for OpenAI? Do you think they have warded off the most heated criticism, or are people still really mad?

1. OpenAI Damage Control

I do not think that they have stemmed the tide.

I think they put a lot of effort into changing the narrative here. When I saw that they were doing that X AMA, that they had put up a blog post, and that they were quoting at least some of the contract language, I thought, “These guys are really going for it.” That also told me that they were really scared.

But here’s the thing to remember, Kevin: Most Americans just don’t like AI very much. They didn’t in the first place. They didn’t like it for all the normal reasons: My social media feed is filling up with slop, but my manager’s telling me I have to use it every day or I’m gonna get fired.

When you add into that mix the possibility that it’s also going to be used by your own government to spy on you or maybe kill you with a murder bot, of course Americans are gonna say, “Well, this fricking sucks,” right? So I think this was the strategic miscalculation that Sam Altman made. At least according to him, he thought he was gonna get into this dispute, be able to deescalate it, and come in as the white knight and save the AI industry from the overreach of the US government. What he found out instead is that they’re kind of holding the bag of all of the discontent that the Pentagon whipped up with this forced policy change.

Yeah, it’s really interesting to me because I think my assumption had been that we were over the era of worker empowerment in Silicon Valley, right? Years ago, pre-COVID, we had all these Google walkouts and employee protests over military contracts, and I think a lot of CEOs and leaders at these companies said, “We’re not doing that again.” They said, “We’re not gonna give our employees veto power over the deals that we make or the contracts we sign.”

And it suggests to me that what’s going on at OpenAI right now is that, at least in their specific case, where you do have this staff of elite technical talent that is not easily replaceable, there aren’t that many people who know how to build and train these models, you actually do need to keep them happy. Those people, maybe only those people, still have significant leverage.

Yeah. Let me make a sort of sweeping generalization, right? I think there are 2 major camps at OpenAI. One is the camp that has been there for, let’s say, 3-plus years: the real experts you just mentioned who have this critical knowledge for how to build next-generation frontier systems that almost nobody else in the world has.

Those people tend to care a lot about how the technology is used. These are people who joined OpenAI in part because it was a nonprofit, right? There is a solid core of those folks who are still working there. And then there’s a group at OpenAI that I’m just gonna call the Meta people—the people who came over from Meta a little more recently who may be a little more flexible in what they’re willing to see their company do. I don’t think they’re gonna raise a big stink about this.

The problem for OpenAI leadership is that you actually need that original core, right? If you’re gonna build a GPT-6 and GPT-7 that are gonna blow everybody’s minds, those are the people you’re gonna need. And so, yes, almost everything that we have seen over the past few days in their attempts at damage control is aimed at those people.

Okay, so that’s a little bit of the drama going on at OpenAI. What is happening at Anthropic?

Printing money—in 2 words, I would say. I wrote this in my newsletter this week, Kevin, but has an American technology company ever had such a good week and such a bad week at the same time?

Explain.

On the bad side, obviously they’re in a very heated fight with the Pentagon, and that continues, by the way. It seems like there is still some risk that perhaps the president will try to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to make the version of Claude that it does not want to make, which would do its bidding.

It also seems that the supply chain risk designation is now official. We learned on Thursday that the Pentagon sent a formal letter to Anthropic. So if nothing else, this is going to result in a long and costly legal battle as Anthropic tries to ensure that American companies can still use it for nonmilitary purposes, right? There is actually an existential threat to the company buried somewhere inside there, and it is by no means over.

Right. But on the good side?

On the good side, Bloomberg reported this week that Anthropic is on track to hit $20 billion in annualized revenue. At the start of 2025, Kevin, they were on pace to earn about $1 billion in annualized revenue. So this company has 20x’d over the past year.

They were on pace to make about $9 billion by the end of 2025, so it has doubled in barely over 2 months. That speaks to the rise of Claude Code and the overwhelming adoption of Claude in the enterprise. In that respect, this really has become maybe the fastest-growing American technology company of all time.

Yeah, and what’s so strange about this sort of dual quantum state at Anthropic right now is that, at the same time that they are printing money, people are signing up for Claude, they’re switching from ChatGPT, and things appear to be going well for them, they are also being pulled out of the federal government, right? Forcibly.

There was some reporting this week by Reuters that the US State Department has started to comply with President Trump’s order to stop using Anthropic’s models. They have switched the model powering their in-house State Department chatbot from Anthropic’s models to OpenAI, according to a memo seen by Reuters.

Furthermore, this Reuters report said that the State Department is going back to GPT-4.1. If you have not been tracking all of the model names and numbers as closely as we have, that is several generations ago. That’s an early-2025 model.

Basically, what that means is that the average college freshman with a ChatGPT subscription now has access to substantially better AI tools than the Department of State.

Yeah. It’s not great for a lot of reasons, Kevin, and one of them, as the blog Lawfare covered this week, is that there appears to be no statutory authority for the president to do what he did. There is not a statute that lets the president just declare that federal agencies cannot use individual software. But because this is just the way the Trump administration works, everyone has decided to defer to the president.

Yeah. I want to ask you about this other interesting piece of OpenAI’s response over the last week, which is that Sam Altman has said multiple times that he wants the Pentagon to extend the same deal to Anthropic that it extended to OpenAI. Do you think that is sincere? What is going on here? Why is Sam Altman saying, “Hey, if you’re making these terms available to us, you should also make them available to other AI companies”?

I think that is the part of Sam that appears to be sincere in saying that he wants to deescalate this conflict. He does not want the United States government to come in and nationalize the AI companies, at least not right now, right?

Maybe if OpenAI could reach some sort of agreement that would provide at least some protections for Americans, and other AI companies would sign on to it, that would release the pressure on the industry overall. Now, of course, at the same time, it would buy him a lot of cover, and all of a sudden people wouldn’t be mounting these “Quit ChatGPT” campaigns because Sam could be on X saying, “Well, you know, Claude is doing the same thing.”

Do you think that’s real? How big a deal do you think this consumer opposition is? I’m somewhat jaded on this point because I can’t count the number of times that people have said, “Oh, we’re all gonna cancel our subscriptions to this thing,” or, “We’re gonna delete Uber,” or, “We’re gonna quit Facebook in protest,” and it never really seems to have much of an impact. But do you think in this case that enough people are mad about this at the consumer level that it could actually impact their business?

Not really. I think you’re exactly right. Usually these things just tend to blow over in a few days, and I’m sure that OpenAI is counting on that.

At the same time, though, Kevin, I think back to the lesson that Meta learned. As it had its own series of controversies, by and large, people did not quit Facebook or Instagram. But you know what they did do? They just started to hate Meta as a company and developed really low trust in that company, and that winds up hurting Meta in all sorts of ways.

The particular way, by the way, that I think this is gonna hurt OpenAI is that they’re gearing up to go out and build a lot of data centers around this country, and there’s already enormous backlash that we’re seeing. We’re starting to see it creep into our politics.

If they are not able to reverse the narrative and convince people that AI is gonna have hugely positive outcomes in their lives, I think you’re gonna see the data-center opposition ramp up as a proxy for people’s general distrust of that company.

Right. It's the visible, physical symbol of all of this, and for most people, the only one that's anywhere near them. I think you're right. It could turn into a political problem for them, even if people aren't canceling their ChatGPT subscriptions en masse.

2. The Nationalization Threat

I want to ask you about something else that I've been thinking a lot about this week, which is this idea that you mentioned of nationalization. There's been a debate happening on social media about this idea that if we are headed to a world with very powerful AI systems in it, as Dario Amodei calls it, a country of geniuses in a data center, eventually that will just not be allowed to happen inside a private corporation.

The US government, whether a year or 2 years or 5 years from now, at some point will step in and say, “Hey, you guys built this really cool thing that's really useful and has all these important geopolitical and national security implications. We're going to just take that now, and you work for us now.” I'm curious what you make of that as a possibility, because some people who I consider quite serious and credible have been talking about this threat of nationalization for several years now.

Yeah. If you go to the nerdy AI conferences that Kevin and I do, this comes up a lot at the tabletop role-playing games that people do during lunch, right? At some point, a government of 1 or more countries steps in and takes over the AI lab.

I understand in this moment that feels like a sci-fi scenario. Most of the time when you're using ChatGPT, you probably don't think this is a dangerous superweapon and we need to ensure that this is being controlled by the president. At the same time, we are now at war with Iran. We know that these systems are embedded in the command-and-control operations of the military, and so to some extent they are already becoming weapons, right?

If you say to me, do I think that once these systems become 3, 4, 5, or 10 times more powerful, the government will want to take an interest in them and potentially oversee their development and deployment? I absolutely believe that will happen. I see no reason why that wouldn't happen. Unfortunately, how that goes, I think depends a lot on the quality of the government that is overseeing that AI and what they want to do. Do they want to use it to create opportunity and safety and democracy for all? Or do they want to mount an authoritarian takeover of the globe?

So if you are a leader at 1 of these companies and you know that, at least until 2028, we are likely to have the same administration in power, if you believe that the technology is rapidly accelerating such that a year or 2 or 3 from now we might have something like a superhuman country of geniuses in a data center, what does that mean you should do?

One thing that I've been thinking about is, should these companies be doing deals with the government at all? If the lesson of the past couple of weeks is that the federal government is not a trustworthy counterparty in these negotiations and is going to insist on total control and obedience, or else they're going to try to nuke your company, I think a very rational response from these AI companies will be, “Well, we're just not going to make any more deals with you. You're going to have to use some open-source models for your State Department, your military, and your Treasury, because it's just too risky for us as a business risk, and you can't be trusted with it.”

I could see why that may seem somewhat rational to them, but I don't think that's the tack that they're going to take. Even this week, after everything that has happened with Anthropic, Dario Amodei is still out there saying, “We were very close to an agreement with the Pentagon. We liked working with the military. We want to work with the military again,” right?

I think that's very important to note. Dario did not throw up his middle fingers on his way out the door. He is still trying to reach some sort of agreement, and I think in part that likely is to avoid the exact sort of scenario that you are describing. You want to keep the tigers at bay for just a little while longer, at least, while you think through the rest of that scenario, which is admittedly a very difficult one.

Yeah. I've been rereading The Making of the Atomic Bomb this week, which is Dario Amodei's favorite book. He used to give it to all Anthropic employees, and there's still a bunch of copies at their headquarters. It's the company book as far as their mission goes. They see a lot of parallels between what they're building and the Manhattan Project.

I went back and reread it, and the piece that struck me from that experience was that right before the bombs were dropped in 1945, there was this point where the scientists got really worried about how their creation was going to be used. A number of them from the Manhattan Project created these petitions and reports and tried to get them to the government and say, “Hey, could you guys not use this against a city, at least as a first-line act of war?”

The military and the government pretended to hear them out, and then they just went ahead and bombed Japan anyway. There was this moment where it was, “We hear you. You're the scientists. You're the geniuses who made this all work. But now you're playing in our turf, and so we're going to control the technology from here. Thank you for your input.”

I think the comparison between the Manhattan Project and the AI industry is somewhat overstated, and I think it breaks down in some key ways. One of them is that the Manhattan Project was a government project. It was paid for by the government, and these were government employees. What we're talking about now are private companies that have been developing this thing outside the public sector.

I think there are some important differences, but I do worry that we are headed toward a moment where this stuff just gets so useful to governments and militaries and confers such a decisive advantage to the countries that control it that the US government, no matter who is in power, is just going to say, “This thing is too important to be left to the private sector.”

Well, keep in mind that 1 of the original ideas for OpenAI was that it should be a government-funded project. Sam Altman and his cofounders just came to the conclusion, correctly, by the way, that no government would give them the amount of money they needed to build this technology, right? They quickly came to the conclusion that it was going to have to be a private enterprise.

Going back to the earliest days, there was thinking among the people who created this technology that the government was going to take an interest in it eventually. Another reason, though, Kevin, why I find the current situation so vexing is that you and I both covered President Biden's executive order on AI, which I personally felt like was a pretty gentle way of attempting to regulate the industry.

Very gentle.

It was sort of, “Inform us about your safety testing when you test these new models, please,” and told federal agencies to get ready for this technology. The howls of protest on the right said, “How dare this administration come in and try to put these fetters on capitalism? We are going to lose to China because of this nanny-state behavior.”

Then to see those same people come to power and now say, “We are going to tell you exactly how you are going to build your models, what they're going to do for the military, or else we will destroy you,” is just—I don't know. The whiplash is insane.

Yeah. We didn't like that government trying to control the tech industry, but this government trying to control the tech industry? That's just business as usual.

Right.

That's fine.

Right.

So I guess my worry, zooming out from all of this stuff that's been going on for the past 2 weeks, is that we are sort of living through an early dress rehearsal for what something like nationalization of the AI companies could look and feel like.

I don't think it's going to be as cut-and-dried as it was during World War II, where the government showed up to a bunch of steel plants and was like, “Hey, we run these now.” I think it's going to be this soft nationalization, like we've been seeing over the past week, where it's a little pressure to build your models differently. “Maybe could you remove some of those safeguards? Maybe this is actually so strategically important that we need to be the people putting the clauses in the constitution of Claude or whatever that dictate how it will behave in these high-stakes situations.”

I think that is a more likely direction, but I would not take full, brute-force nationalization off the table entirely. I think there's a decent chance that something like that happens.

Hmm. Well, maybe we should set up a prediction market for it.

Speaking of prediction markets, when we come back, we'll talk about how prediction markets have made it to war.

So predictable.

3. Prediction Markets Enter War

Okay, Casey, so the other big news from the past week is that the United States is now at war in Iran, and one angle that really has been sticking out to me about this is the role that prediction markets are playing in this conflict, because I think that is something that we truly have not seen before.

Yeah, it seems like every new war brings along some grim new technology, and I would say that prediction markets are maybe grim technology number one for this conflict in Iran.

Yes, it's a grim technology already, even absent the war, and now, just with the war, it has become even grimmer. We've talked about prediction markets on the show. We talked about them way back in 2023, when they were sort of this new thing that was in a legal gray area that wasn't really being done at any scale yet. It was sort of an interesting idea. Now, of course, you cannot walk down a street in a major American city without seeing one, and probably multiple ads, for prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.

Yeah, the sort of gambling mania that has taken over all media and advertising, from DraftKings to FanDuel, has now extended even further into these prediction markets.

So both Polymarket and Kalshi, the 2 leading prediction-market platforms, took a lot of heat this week on bets they were allowing their users to make on questions related to Iran. Kalshi, which is the more regulated, U.S.-based prediction-market company, does not allow bets on war or assassination, but it did allow the question “Khamenei out as Supreme Leader?”—basically, a careful proxy for betting on the outcome of a war or a strike on Iran.

Yeah, and “out,” I suppose, could have many meanings. Perhaps there would be a sort of gentle democratic revolution in Iran. But I'm going to assume that most of the people who were wagering on that one assumed that he was going to be killed in war.

Yeah, so people got really mad at Kalshi for allowing these bets on the fate of the Iranian leader. They also got mad when Kalshi voided this market and said that it was going to reimburse anyone who may have lost money on this—basically, make sure everyone ends up in the black. But people who were supposed to make a bunch of money because they correctly predicted the death of Khamenei were mad that they didn't get paid out their expected winnings. So, just a big cluster all around.

And I just want to say, if you were one of the traders who did not get your expected winnings from the death of the Ayatollah, I just want to say, I don't care. It doesn't matter.

So Polymarket, the other, less regulated, offshore, crypto-based prediction market, was even more permissive. They allowed people to bet on the dates of strikes on Iran and other details related to the war in Iran.

Their policy was really like, “Imagine the worst thing you could do on our platform. You can do that.”

Actually, they did draw a line when it came down to markets that allowed users to bet on the likelihood of nuclear detonations by specific dates. So, sorry to anyone who was trying to cash in on nuclear war.

These woke liberals that won't let me bet on nuclear explosions need to go, Kevin.

Okay, so no one was happy about this. Senator Chris Murphy posted that, quote, “It's insane this is legal. People around Trump are profiting off war and death,” and also said that he was introducing legislation to ban this. There are also a bunch of people looking into whether any of this has been done via insider trading. Basically, do you have people in the military or close to the decision-makers in this conflict placing bets once they have this sort of nonpublic information about what is going to be happening?

4. The War Betting Problem

Yeah, and I think it speaks to why allowing prediction markets to take bets, at least around war and death, is so corrosive and bad, Kevin. Because not only is it grim—how do we live in this society where gambling on war and death has become a form of entertainment?—but you're also creating incentives for the worst things in the world to happen, which doesn't seem logical to me.

Well, and it's not even a theoretical harm here. Recently, Israel arrested a number of people who were accused of using classified information to bet on military operations on Polymarket. So this is already starting to happen, and I think this is why people like Senator Chris Murphy are so alarmed about this—not just because it's gross and aesthetically offensive to have people betting on wars.

Although it is.

But, yeah, although it is, also because it could create direct incentives. If you're a member of the military and your commander gives you an order to go do an airstrike on an Iranian compound, you could log onto your phone, head over to one of the prediction-market platforms, and say, “You know what? I could make a couple grand off this.”

Yeah, that's your little Kalshi bonus. This is not theoretical at all, Kevin. In fact, your colleague Amy Phan at The Times wrote that, “It is relatively uncommon for someone to bet a significant sum of money that a U.S. strike will happen within the next day. But last Friday, more than 150 accounts placed hundreds of bets of at least $1,000 correctly predicting that there would be an American airstrike on Iran by Saturday.”

Yeah. So I think one of the interesting things here is that I'm not a blanket opponent of prediction markets, right? I bought some of the theoretical arguments for why something like a prediction market could, for example, outperform political polls, because it would incentivize people to come up with really good polling data and use that to trade on. You could end up with a better picture of a given election.

Or people will say what they really think because their money is at stake, and they're not just trying to impress a pollster.

Yes. And you've actually had some of the people who are in charge of these prediction markets talking about the fact that insider trading can be good because it can get the best information to the markets as quickly as possible and give people an unfiltered understanding of what the real insiders are thinking.

Mm-hmm.

Now, of course, officially, you are not supposed to be able to insider-trade on these platforms, right? They all have policies against it. Kalshi says they've investigated people, and that it is actually illegal per the CFTC, which is their main regulator, to place bets using inside information. But there are a couple of problems with this. One is that the CFTC is a tiny agency. It doesn't have a huge team of enforcers going out to investigate what I assume must be hundreds or thousands of trades using inside information on its platform every day.

It's also not clear what is public information and what is private information. There are certain types of information in the stock market that are considered material nonpublic information that it is illegal to trade on. But it is also legal to fly a drone over an oil facility to see how their production is going, or to park outside a store and see the foot traffic going in and out and use that to calculate how well their sales must be going.

I find it suspicious how much you know about the insider-trading rules, I have to say. I didn't know you had this much facility with the law here.

I'm calling my lawyer.

Mm-hmm.

But, of course, this is part of the appeal of prediction markets in general: They incentivize people with good information to trade on that information.

Yes. And if you allow people to wager on almost anything, how are you ever possibly going to police the entire platform to understand who is insider-trading and who isn't?

Yes. So I think in this specific case of war, it is very dangerous for some of the reasons that we've talked about. Not only do you have military officers and service members disclosing classified information in some cases to make a little extra for themselves, but you also have this incredibly strange war-profiteering innovation where you can just go on one of these platforms and try to make a bunch of money from something that involves a lot of devastation and destruction.

The other thing that comes to mind for me, Kevin, is that, as you say, the prediction-market backers’ argument is, “This just helps us understand the world better,” right? “This is a new kind of information that helps us see more clearly.” And yet, as I look across all of the trades that you just described, I don’t understand what I was supposed to see more clearly, right? Maybe you get a brief heads-up about something horrible that is about to happen. Maybe that’s useful in at least some circumstances. But for the most part, I just don’t feel like we actually have a much better understanding of the world because all of these bets are happening.

Yeah. And I think in this specific case, that’s especially true because if you actually look at the markets that were being traded before this strike on Iran, the conventional wisdom of the crowd was that this was not going to happen. It was a very low probability—I think something like 17% probability—on one of these platforms an hour before the strikes. So these markets aren’t actually distributing the best possible information at all times. They’re just aggregating vibes until someone with inside information shows up and makes a fortune.

Well, I think that’s exactly it. It isn’t as if these have been adopted by the mainstream and everybody’s placing these sort of casual bets, and now we have this beautiful, perfect understanding of the world. What we have, as you say, is a bunch of vibes plus some insider trading. And it just doesn’t actually seem that useful to me in practice for most things.

Yeah. I want to try to steelman the defense of prediction markets here and see what you make of it. So I think someone who believes that these prediction markets are good in the aggregate might say something like the following. People have been betting on war forever. They bet on the stock prices of defense companies. They bet on things like oil prices. That is all legal. We consider that sort of part of the normal markets. Those things all fluctuate when you have a war break out. How is this any different? Your response.

Well, I think that it is actually really meaningful that these are indirect ways of betting on war, right? It seems very unlikely to me that if I buy oil stocks assuming that they’re going to go up, that I’m creating an incentive for somebody to assassinate the supreme leader of Iran.

But wasn’t this the whole conspiracy theory about the war in Iraq, that it was just motivated by Dick Cheney owning a bunch of stock in Halliburton?

Well, yes, that was the conspiracy theory. I don’t know that that was what was actually driving it. I think that, as with most wars, at least at that time, there were a number of interrelated factors that were going on. Maybe oil was one of them. But my point here is just that when you have the betting at some sort of meaningful remove from the action, it just feels better to me. It doesn’t create the same horribly grim incentives that this particular approach does.

Right. I think the difference for me is the directness that you mention. And one thing that came up over and over again when I was talking to people about prediction markets a couple years ago for this story is that the assassination markets get really dark. Because if you have something like, “Will this world leader be removed from power,” in air quotes—

Wink, wink.

—before a certain date, that could actually create a bounty on that person, where someone might go out and say, “Hey, if I want to make money on this, I need to kill this person before this date.”

And what is going to be the first thing that actually takes action on that, Kevin? OpenClaw. Mark my words. One of these bots plugged into a Mac mini is going to see a prediction market for the assassination of a world leader, and it’s going to say, “Well, I have some ideas about that.”

Oh, God.

So I think most people agree that the assassination prediction market is, you know, out of bounds and is a bad idea for lots of reasons. But I think there are still a lot of gray areas around these questions about conflict and war and politics. The risk here is that these prediction markets have gotten so popular so quickly, with so little regulatory oversight, that it is just kind of legal to do a bunch of stuff on them that it’s not legal to do in the regular stock market.

Yeah. Well, you mentioned that some lawmakers have talked about introducing legislation. My experience is that that kind of legislation typically doesn’t go anywhere. What, if anything, do we know about what is going to happen as this war continues to unfold in Iran when it comes to these prediction markets?

I mean, I think the Trump administration is very unlikely to do anything to stop the growth of prediction markets. We’ve already seen them signal, via these regulatory actions that they’ve dropped against Polymarket, that they are not going to take a firm line against these prediction markets. We’ve also seen them adding members of the Trump family to their advisory boards. So I think all of these prediction markets are becoming entangled with the administration in ways that are going to make it very hard for them to do anything. But I certainly expect Democratic lawmakers to stand up and say, “What the hell are we enabling here? Why are we allowing people to bet on the assassination of world leaders or the outcomes of a war in Iran?” This just feels all incredibly fraught to me.

Hmm. My fear is that we’re in a sort of time race, where, if Democrats were able to somehow advance some legislation, maybe they win some seats in the midterms, maybe they retake the presidency, maybe sometime within the next few years they could meaningfully rein these prediction markets in. I think, though, if they continue to grow, my fear is that they will become a massive entrenched interest group, like the crypto world, and they will then lobby to ensure that Democrats and Republicans both feel like they have a vested interest in these things sticking around. So my fear is that if we’re to do anything about some of these excesses we’ve been talking about today, it needs to happen soon, or otherwise platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket might just have too much money for that to happen.

Yeah. I have a proposed rule for these prediction markets.

What’s that?

Which is that you should have to go to a physical place, like you do for a casino.

Mm-hmm.

I think that putting this stuff on people’s phones and making it super easy for them to do it is a mistake. If you want to go bet on the war in Iran, you should have to go to a seedy OTB betting place to do it. You should have to put in some effort. It should not be as easy as whipping out your phone.

All right. Well, it’s very interesting, Kevin. I predict we’re not going to try that.

I know. I also predict we’re not going to try that. But it’s a good idea.

People should listen to me. When we come back, slop, collaborate, and listen. YouTube is back with a disturbing new invention.

5. Kids Slop Review

All right, Casey. Well, it’s time to look at some kids’ slop.

Yeah, Kev, we have recently been alerted to the fact that YouTube has been beset by a bunch of AI-generated slop for toddlers, and it’s time to take a look and see what we’re dealing with.

My colleague at The New York Times, Ariella Leka, has a new story about this called How AI-Generated Videos Are Distorting Your Child’s YouTube Feed, and I read the story. I loved it. I thought, “I’ve got to see some of this slop for myself.” So today, let’s take a look at this emerging new genre of AI slop directed at kids with a new installment of The Hard Fork Review of Slop.

Guest

The Hard Fork Review of Slop.

All right. What do we have up first? First is a video about the alphabet. Do you know the alphabet?

I keep meaning to learn it.

Okay.

Let me—

Let’s see how the AI-generated alphabet videos are doing.

Yeah.

Guest

Kids TV. ABC farm animals.

So far, so good.

Guest

A is for alpaca. A, alpaca. Mm-mm-mm.

Okay.

Guest

E is for—

Why are they being squirted out of a little paint bottle?

Guest

C is for sea cat. Meow, meow, meow.

Oh, I’m deeply uncomfortable with this.

Guest

D is for duck. Quack, quack, quack.

I'm going to have to answer so many questions from my 3-year-old about why ducks come out of toothpaste tubes.

Yeah, this is—if you're 3 years old, you need to know this. That is not how a duck is made. So this video depicts the alphabet, showing a series of animals whose names begin with a letter. And then a hand holding, I guess, a tube of paint squirts out a little dollop of gross goo that then transforms surreally into an animal while demented SLOP children sing the name of the animal in the background.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, like if you've ever seen the TV show Alex Mack from the '90s on Nickelodeon, where she assembles herself out of goo on the floor. It's sort of like that, but for animals.

That one was a little before my time, I'm afraid, but I'll research that one back in the archives. In any case, a very strange one. Let's take a look at this next video, Kevin.

What do we have now?

I believe we're going to see some animals appearing out of colorful clouds.

Guest

I is for impala. Green impala says boing, boing, boing. Joing, joing, joing. J is for jackal. Yellow jackal says ahoo, ahoo, ahoo. Hoo, hoo, hoo.

Oh, boy.

Guest

K is for kudu. Pink kudu says spin, spin, spin. Mm, mm, mm. L is for lion. Purple lion says roar, roar, roar.

He's rolling the Rs on his roars.

Guest

Colorfulness all around.

Why is the other animal a doctor? Why are they running toward the camera? Why is the kudu pink?

And what is a kudu? Now, I have to say, I'm a little older than the target age for these videos, but I'm learning things myself.

This is for you.

I'm learning. So this video shows another series of animals, each one connected to a letter of the alphabet. But this one uses a trope of having this doctor figure inject these animals with color, which—

And the doctor is also an animal.

And the doctor is also an animal.

Is this anti-vax propaganda?

Well, the thing is, whoever is making the SLOP knows that needles are scary to children, so this is effectively just an engagement hack, right? The kid is going to watch the injection because the kid is afraid of needles. So this is just one of these little miniature insidious ways that these SLOP makers grab the attention of kids: by showing them something scary in order to hypnotize them into continuing to watch the SLOP.

It does teach the valuable lesson that giving injections to children does result in them turning into pink kudus and running toward the camera. So all children need to learn that lesson eventually.

All right. This next one, Kevin, shows animals turning into armored vehicles, trucks, and planes. This is going to show once again that a key theme in SLOP for kids in 2026 is the transformation of animals.

Guest

Q is for quail. Quail chirp, chirp, chirp.

Oh, wow. We got sort of mecha quail.

Guest

R is for rhino. R, rhino snorts, snorts, snorts—

Okay.

Guest

Snorts. S is for snake. S, snake hisses. Q, R, S, T. Safari animals say.

I wonder if that's a licensed use of the Thomas the Tank Engine IP.

Okay. Unfortunately—

Looked like fun.

That one slapped for me. My kid would be super into that, and I must never show him that.

This one reminds me of cartoons that I watched as a kid, where there was a lot of Transformers transforming, and so I can understand why a lot of little kids might like that one. But this is making me realize that another reason why SLOP makers love the alphabet is because they can just stitch together a bunch of very short clips.

Yes.

And, of course, most of the AI video generators that we have at this moment can only generate clips of up to a few seconds. So the alphabet just becomes a perfect way to stitch together all of that into one piece that still—

Great point.

At least has some coherence.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I can see a world in which this stuff is not actually that harmful. Maybe it is going to teach some kids the alphabet. But it is just so weird. And it strikes me as: Why? We already had a lot of videos teaching kids the alphabet. Why are people doing this?

But also, listen, I'm no child neurologist, but I wonder about the consequences of essentially just creating images that are designed to overstimulate a child. You know what I mean? At least when you're watching a normal cartoon, there could be moments of relative calm, or a story might unfold over a few minutes. When you're just showing raw visual stimuli and bombarding a kid with it, it just doesn't seem like it's probably that good for them.

This is how I know you do not have a child—

Yeah.

—in the year of our Lord 2026, because if you go onto Cocomelon or any of the other extremely popular children's programs, they are essentially just this. It's a series of very short clips. Maybe they do one song, and then it cuts away to a different song. It cuts away to a different song. It is these same sorts of hyperstimulating environments. So I'm not saying that any of this is good. I'm just saying that we have crossed the Rubicon a while ago, and we are now in the land of hyperstimulating children's entertainment. And the big difference, to my mind, is now that it's just easier and cheaper to create this stuff.

Listen, this is my takeaway. When I have my child, which I do hope to do, the only visual stimulation that I'm going to allow them is a pile of sticks.

An Etch A Sketch?

They can make their own fun with the pile of sticks. But we're not going down this road, Kevin.

All right. Why don't we wrap up with a lullaby about animated children tucking themselves into beds made out of fruit?

Hmm. Love a fruit bed.

What did you call me?

Guest

Princess Blondie in her strawberry bed. Soft dreams around her head and banana bright, swaying gently through the night. Orson snoozes in kiwi green. Elsie fuzz so calm and clean. Super Boy in his orange glow. Drifts to sleep all warm and slow.

Okay, we've got a girl with a crown going into a bed made of strawberries.

Banana bed.

Ariella Leka

Banana bright, swaying gently through the night.

Kiwi bed.

You know, this is just another one that feels a little more surreal than I am comfortable with. It's like, what is the child supposed to conclude from any of it? It just sort of seems designed to confuse children more than to educate or even really entertain them.

Yeah. And there have been, I will say, a few videos in here where I'm like, “Oh, my kid would like that,” but I don't like that he would like that. I don't want him watching stuff that's just a bunch of animals driving buses or lying in fruit beds. It's—

Look, kids like lots of things that are bad for them.

Yeah.

That's why we don't let them use cocaine.

Yeah. Well, now that we've seen the videos, I feel like we are armed and ready to have the conversation about what they all mean, so let's bring in my colleague Ariella Leka.

I don't know. I feel like I need to cleanse first. Maybe go read a play by Shakespeare or something.

Just go watch an episode of Bluey. Very heartwarming. Ariella Leka, welcome to Hard Fork.

Ariella Leka

Thank you so much for having me.

I wanted to just ask, first of all, how did you get interested in this? How did you learn about this? Did you get a tip from a toddler submitting things through The New York Times' confidential tip process? How did this come onto your radar?

Ariella Leka

Yeah, so no toddlers were involved in the making of this story. We had some ethical concerns there about showing them these videos repeatedly. But I started by getting interested in this because there is so much AI slop on all of our social media feeds, regardless of the platform, and I was interested in learning more about how this content is being presented to children and how it's being moderated.

So where do many children watch media? It's YouTube. I started by looking at channels that parents approve of—channels like Ms. Rachel and Bluey, which are considered higher quality and more thoughtful—and other popular channels like CoComelon. I said, “Well, if I click on a CoComelon video and I am a toddler, and I look at the recommended videos right next to that video, what sort of videos would I be recommended?”

We focused on YouTube Shorts because a lot of these AI tools default to this vertical format, and so we just started scrolling through the feed and making a note of the different videos we were seeing. One of my colleagues actually coded a tool where I wasn't really interacting with the screen, so I wouldn't influence the algorithm, and I was just scrolling down, and it was making a note of all the different links I was seeing. We later analyzed these videos frame by frame to determine which videos were AI-generated.

And were you using regular YouTube or YouTube Kids?

Ariella Leka

So we started looking at regular YouTube in a private browser, because a lot of parents tend to put on their own YouTube accounts for their children. But then we also looked through YouTube Kids, because it is a more controlled environment with content that's supposed to be approved for children.

And when you started this process, what were your expectations? And then how much AI-generated stuff did you wind up seeing as a proportion of the total?

Ariella Leka

So I think, especially when I was watching channels like Ms. Rachel and Bluey, I was expecting to see content that would be more in the lines of those programs, right? More Bluey Shorts, and I wasn't really seeing that. I was surprised just about how much AI-generated content was being recommended. In 1 session alone—

Hmm.

Ariella Leka

In 1 15-minute session while we were scrolling, more than 40% of the videos were AI-generated.

Wow. And how are you determining that? Is there a detection system that you're plugging these things into?

Yeah, the detection system is called looking at the videos.

Well, no, I'm saying, if you have a video of an alpaca getting squeezed out of a paint tube, that's very clearly not photorealistic, but it could be made using some CGI software or something like that.

I suppose, yes. I suppose.

How did you determine that this was AI?

Ariella Leka

Right. Some of these videos were a little more obvious, but we looked at them frame by frame and tried to look for inconsistencies. In some cases, the objects were just appearing in the background. There was text in the background that was distorted. If there was an animal in the background, it would morph into something else.

Some of the videos were actually labeled as synthetic media, even though they were animated. Then we would also look at the YouTube channel and get a sense of what sort of content they had been posting in the last few years. Even some of the channels that had been around before the last 2 years, when this technology really improved, were making very simple, low-quality animation that looked nothing like what they had been posting the last few months.

Now, Ariella, I have done a lot of reporting on YouTube, but it's been a few years. What are their actual policies like today on this kind of content?

Ariella Leka

So I sent them a few channels as examples, and I asked them what their policy is around flagging AI content that's being made for children, and that includes animated content. They told me that content creators are required to label content that is realistic-looking.

In some cases, we saw that creators weren't labeling the content, and I'm referring to videos of animals displaying behaviors that those animals don't do, like elephants doing gymnastic maneuvers on a tightrope. Those videos, for example, were not labeled as synthetic media. Some creators were labeling the animated videos, but it's not part of YouTube's policy.

So really, the burden is falling on parents, especially parents who may not want their child to watch AI-generated media, to determine, okay, what sort of video is this? And not only that, but you have to click through the video, and then you see the synthetic media label. When it comes to kids' content on YouTube, YouTube doesn't allow comments. So sometimes when there's an AI-generated video, you'll have people in the comments say, "This is AI," and in this case, parents can't really talk amongst themselves as to what the video is.

Has there been any backlash yet that we've seen from parents against these kinds of videos? Are some parents upset by what they're seeing?

Ariella Leka

Yeah. We came across several Reddit forums where people were asking how to get around this AI slop for kids, whether there was a filter on YouTube. Some parents recommended making a playlist. Other parents were like, "Get off YouTube altogether." And I think a lot of it is also going to fall on parents to closely supervise what kids are watching since the algorithm is pushing so much of this content.

Right. Although, of course, the whole point of YouTube is that it's what you show your kids so that you don't have to spend time with them, right? Not in a mean way, but maybe you have to cook dinner.

Ariella Leka

Right.

Right? But—

Ariella Leka

Parents are busy.

Yeah, if parents were sitting down to watch YouTube with their children, we would not be in this situation.

Ariella Leka

Right.

Yeah, and I'll say, as the parent of an almost 4-year-old, the couple of times that I've found him watching something like this because he went onto the YouTube Kids app when he wasn't supposed to or something, my feeling about it is not, "This is damaging my child." It's just, "This is so bad."

Yeah.

The quality is just so bad. I wonder if you think, Ariella, if there's any evidence. What do we know about the actual effects of this on kids? Is the worry that it's actually harming them, or is the worry that there's just better stuff they could be watching?

Ariella Leka

So there are a lot of factors to consider. These videos contain extraneous effects, and we know that when videos contain all these bedazzling elements, kids can learn as well. They're also devoid of a narrative arc, and it's really beneficial for kids to watch content with a beginning, middle, and end, with characters they can relate to and that they're familiar with, watching content that uses short phrases that they can understand and doesn't feature these abstract concepts. Worst case, a lot of these videos are fantastical, and that could be cognitively overloading for the child.

When it comes to short-form content, experts say that for children under 5, we know their attention systems are still developing. So it's hard for them to follow rapid changes. And it really puts a heavy burden on children to process that information, especially when we see this more realistic, fantastical content of animals showing bizarre behaviors.

When I was growing up, Kevin, in the 1900s, I would watch He-Man.

Mm.

Remember He-Man?

Yes.

It was a cartoon about a gay guy who had a sword and rode a tiger around. And as a young—

Was he gay canonically?

Well, I think not canonically—but read between the lines.

Okay.

Okay? Read between the lines.

Okay.

And, as a young gay kid, I could see that and relate to that, and yes, the stories were fantastical. But to Ariella's point, there was a beginning and a middle and an end.

Right.

And it didn't exactly teach me in the ways of the world, but maybe told me something about storytelling and narrative, and it wasn't just raw flashing shapes and colors.

Yes. I remember, before I had a kid, having this argument with people at YouTube about YouTube Kids because I think there was discussion and concern even back in 2017 or 2018 about these weird videos. They weren't AI-generated at the time, but they were just weird CoComelon rip-offs.

And I remember saying to these YouTube people, "You guys have to change the way that you do this. Instead of just default allowing channels to serve content to very young children, you have to set up a whitelist where, if you prove that your stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and there's some thought being put into them, you are allowed to be on YouTube Kids. And if you're not, if you're just some content farm that's churning out CoComelon rip-offs, you're not going to be allowed on."

So do you get the sense, Ariella, that there's any concern or consideration of this at YouTube? Or are they basically just like, "You know, we got bigger fish to fry"?

Ariella Leka

I mean, these videos and these channels are recommended to me multiple times, and I've been looking at these videos since November.

And what has it done to your brain? I bet you know your alphabet.

Arielle Pardes

I do, yeah. The alphabet and those songs really get stuck in your head, right?

Yeah. Trust me, I know.

Arielle Pardes

And then it's so fascinating to me how much more these videos are recommended to me than more thoughtful content like PBS Kids, for example. PBS Kids also puts out Shorts, but I was seeing more of this than PBS Kids.

I mean, just to echo Kevin's question, this has gotten me thinking about Elsagate, right?

Arielle Pardes

Right.

This 2017 controversy where parents see a lot of really surreal content on YouTube, and they get very upset. It seems like we have not seen that kind of backlash yet, and I'm wondering, is it because we just feel like the content is actually better here in some ways, or are most parents just not actually aware of the volume of slop that might be being served to their kids?

Ariella Leka

Because so many of these videos are animated, it may not be obvious to some parents that these are—

AI-generated, but we were working in a more contained environment. Elsewhere on YouTube, there are so many videos featuring popular characters that children like in very violent scenarios. There's this show called Masha and the Bear, and I remember I typed in Masha and came across videos of Masha's stomach being cut open. That channel was putting up these videos, and YouTube didn't take them down until I linked to one of them in my story.

Wow.

Arielle Pardes

I don't know if any of you know children who are obsessed with that KPop Demon Hunters film, but there are so many horrible videos featuring those characters. Again, it's nonsensical. Sometimes the characters are pregnant, and those videos are all over YouTube as well if you type in those characters' names.

And, by the way, that was the exact scandal of Elsagate: people were seeing Elsa from Frozen pregnant all over YouTube. So this truly is just a sequel to Elsagate, and I think it's interesting that it has flown under the radar until your story, Arielle.

Ariella Leka

Right. Before, you had to have some sort of animation skills to do that, but now anyone can do this in a few minutes, so we're going to be seeing more of this content.

And, again, what is so insidious here is that the people who are making these videos are counting on the fact that regular kids are going to go searching for KPop Demon Hunters and Masha and the Bear, and they are unwittingly just going to be served this slop of the poor bear getting cut open and the pregnant demon hunter just through the recommendation algorithm. This is where YouTube's responsibility lies.

Ariella Leka

Yes.

Right? This is where YouTube should be saying, “We're actually not going to show this incredibly disturbing stuff to kids.”

Yeah. I would say that among the parents of young children that I know, very few of them let their kids watch YouTube, even YouTube Kids, for this exact reason: you might start with Masha and the Bear. You might start with a KPop Demon Hunters video. You might start with Bluey or CoComelon. But you go away for 10 minutes to cook dinner, and you come back and they're on their third hop from the recommendation, and they're watching some weird AI-generated thing with Spider-Man on the surgery table or something. And it's like, what are we doing here?

Yeah. Because it turns out that all of these recommendation algorithms work exactly the same way. They find the video that is the closest to going over the line, and they find that it gets more engagement than any other, and so that's what shows up in the feed.

Right.

Right? So how many times are we going to have to revisit this story?

Yes.

It really depresses me, honestly.

Arielle, until platforms like YouTube take more action on this, what can parents do in the short term? I mean, if you're going to let your kid watch YouTube or YouTube Kids, is there anything you can do to toggle off the AI slop, or do you just have to make peace with it?

Ariella Leka

In terms of filtering it out, there isn't an option to do that right now. In January, YouTube announced that they were going to add some controls where parents can set time limits on YouTube Shorts. We're seeing a lot of this AI content in YouTube Shorts, so that might be an option. But—

They could call it SlopWatch. It's like a stopwatch, but for slop. I just wonder if all of this is a losing battle. I feel like—

Kevin Roose, do not bring your nihilism into the recording studio today.

Oh, well, just look at what is happening to older children with Tung Tung Tung Sahur and all the AI slop from TikTok. I just feel like we're seeing old people falling for AI slop on Facebook, and middle-aged people falling for it on X and Instagram. It just feels like we're creating this lifelong pipeline of whatever slop is going to be most engaging to you.

Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because that is the thought that I'm having as we wrap up: while right now we're talking about the concerns we have for kids, I think that older teens and adults wind up having the same issue, which is that they open TikTok or Instagram Reels and see something that is designed to hypnotize them as well. It might not be colors and shapes and the alphabet, but the basic idea does seem to be just to turn your brain off and experience the raw visual stimuli for as long as we can get you to.

Yes. Well, Ariella, fascinating story. Thank you so much for doing this digging and watching all of these children's videos so that I don't have to—and so that I can protect my child from them.

Ariella Leka

Thank you so much—

Appreciate it.

Ariella Leka

For having me.

Yes.

Way to take one for the team.

Yes. Ariella, you really did take one for the team on this one, I have to say.

All right, thanks so much.

Ariella Leka

Thanks.