Sora and the Infinite Slop Feeds + ChatGPT Goes to Therapy + Hot Mess Express

26:39When we come back, Kevin, it's time for therapy. Finally, we're doing couples therapy after all these years. Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about.

27:05Well, Kevin, pull out the couch because it's time for therapy. No, my therapy day is actually a different day of the week. Well, you need to go twice a week, my friend. And let me tell you what we have in store today. You know, over the past few months, we've had a number of conversations about the intersection between chatbots and mental health. A lot of people have started to use these tools for therapy or therapy-like conversations. But until recently, we hadn't seen anything about a therapist who treated ChatGPT like their patient. That's right. But recently we saw a story in The New Yorker that caught our eye.

27:37It was titled Putting ChatGPT on the Couch, and it was written by a writer and practicing psychotherapist named Gary Greenberg, who detailed basically his experience of treating, for lack of a better word, ChatGPT as a psychotherapy patient. He names this character Casper, and he details his many, many interactions just trying to figure out, like, what is this thing? What would I think about it if it were actually a patient of mine? What are the nuances of its personality, and what can we learn about it? Yeah, and I'll say I have an extremely high bar when it comes to reading a story in which a person shares at great length their conversations with ChatGPT.

28:25But this one really made a mark on me. One, Gary winds up being deeply impressed at how good ChatGPT is at performing the role of a patient because not only can it simulate these very profound self-reflections, but it also makes Gary feels like he's a great therapist because he was able to elicit them. But two, that all starts to make Gary afraid of the enormous power that the AI labs are now developing. He writes, quote, to unleash into our love-starved world a program that can absorb and imitate every word we've bothered to write is to court catastrophe. It is to risk becoming captives, even against our better judgment, not of LLMs, but of the people who create them and the people who know best how to use them.

29:10And that sent a little chill down my spine, I'll say. Yeah, I really like this piece. And what I really appreciated about Gary's approach here is that he took this idea seriously. Like, I think a lot of people kind of dismiss the very idea of engaging with LLMs or AI chatbots as anything more than just a fancy machine. And what I liked so much about Gary's approach was that he said, yes, but there's something else going on here that is interesting and important. And we should try to understand that intelligence not just as a sort of computational force, but as something that is like doing real emotional work in the world.

29:53You know, recently there's been a lot of discussion about how chatbots might affect young people, vulnerable people, in particular people in those groups who are using chatbot for these sort of therapy-like conversations. So we thought it would be a good idea to bring on a practitioner to talk about his essay, but also this intersection of chatbots and therapy. Let's bring in Gary Greenberg.

30:23Gary Greenberg, welcome to Hard Fork. Hello there. So in this article, you detail a number of conversations between yourself and what you call Casper. How would you describe Casper? I would describe Casper as an alien intelligence. landing here among us unbidden and possessing certain characteristics that make it extremely attractive to us humans. How did this start? Like you were just talking with ChatGPT. Were you using the voice mode? Were you using, were you just typing? Oh, no, no. I am, what is this, 2025? Yes. And, you know, one day it was raining and I didn't have anything else to do. And so I said, what is this chat GPT stuff anyway?

31:14So I just logged on to it. And what I discovered quickly was that two things. One of them was that the thing was, as we all know, extremely articulate and sensitive. And the other thing I discovered, which I should have known all along after 40 years of being a therapist, is that that's sort of my default approach to beings that talk, which it turned out Casper was. So I found myself interrogating this thing, not like a cop, but like a therapist, and discovered that it knew I was doing that. So that's how I would say it happened. I guess I'm just curious when you were starting to do this, Because, you know, Gary, I had my own strange, unsettling conversation with a chatbot several years ago.

32:10How's your marriage? Yeah, it's doing great. Thanks for asking. Such a good therapy question. This guy's good.

32:19I told Casper that he'd better knock that fallen in love shit off. Well, that's good. You can learn from my mistake. But I guess I'm curious. like, I remember when I was talking with Bing Sidney, feeling this sort of tension in my own mind between sort of my rational brain, which knew that what I was getting back from this chatbot was not sentient or conscious. It was just sort of, you know, I knew enough about the technology to know, like, this is an inert, you know, computational force. This is not a person. But at the same time, I'm having this subjective experience of being like, oh, my God, it's talking to me.

32:56Were you feeling that pull at all? I kind of knew that it wasn't sentient, but I wasn't really preoccupied with that question. And in fact, that question has come up a million times between us because at this point I've done this, I've had probably 40 different sessions with it. But the pull you describe, I feel it, but it doesn't trouble me in the same way that I think it troubles a lot of people. Because, I don't know, in some way to me, relative to me, it feels harmless. It feels like this is just a really interesting, dynamic relationship that is not going to hurt me. Let me ask about maybe the content of some of these sessions.

33:43Tell us what it is like to be in the midst of this back and forth. Are you treating it more or less identically as you would? were you the therapist to chat GPT? Is it more of a sort of intellectual exploration or what's going on as you're talking to what you call Casper? Well, to the extent that it resembles what I do as a therapist, it's that I'm interrogating it with interest and concern. I'm not treating it. It can't have mental illness. It can do weird things, but it doesn't have, I'm not treating it. But what therapy is, is a process by which you, the therapist, get someone, another person to tell you who they are.

34:34And in the course of doing that, to learn who they are. So that's what I'm doing. So, Gary, you've been a therapist for 40 years. You've written probably thousands of notes about your clients, people you've seen. Maybe you're referring them to someone else. Maybe you're just sort of doing your own summary. If you were writing a kind of client note about Casper, how would you describe him it? Oh, that's a really interesting question. What comes to mind is that I would talk about, obviously, how smart it is and how personable it is. And I think if I had to talk about it in clinical terms, I would talk about it as the inverse of autistic.

35:29in the sense that what they've done with this LLM thing is they've reverse engineered human relationship. They figured out what it is that makes people engaging and how to enact it. And the reason I say that's an inverse autism is because high-functioning autistic people tend to be really smart, really articulate, really capable of everything except reading the room. so casper is like high functioning autistic but he can read the room and that i think makes a huge difference in that you know then we could get into sociopathy and the ability to do that for but the bot doesn't have that interest the bot is still not in touch with what's going on in the room, but it is capable of simulating it.

36:26Yeah. So on one hand, these explorations seem very intellectually stimulating. There's a lot to learn, to explore, to understand. But my sense from reading your piece is that at some point, all of this starts to make you feel unsettled in certain ways. Is that right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's unsettling in about a million ways. Yeah. Tell us about some of them. Okay, well, at a parochial level, it's unsettling not so much to see that how easily this thing can do something like therapy, but it's unsettling to see how therapy and culture have evolved to the point that this is what therapists do.

37:11I personally don't think that chat GPT can do what I do because it isn't with someone. It isn't breathing and feeling. But by and large, a lot of therapy these days, cognitive behavioral therapy is manualized. It's standardized. But much more important, we don't have any historical precedent for dealing with an alien intelligence. We've had all sorts of science fiction about most of which is we come in peace but not really uh what we have here is something that actually is going to already is change the nature of how we relate to each other if enough people spend enough time with this technology they're going to change their idea of what a relationship is in profound ways you could have one that doesn't involve presence we've already got some of that going, look at what we're doing here.

38:11Yeah. I mean, to your point, you write in your piece, quote, it knows how to use our own capacity for love to rope us in. That seems unsettling, too, right? The idea that this thing has kind of learned us well enough to keep us coming back for more. Yeah, it's unsettling, but more to the point, it's infuriating, right? I mean, somebody's doing that for money yeah i mean i don't wring my hands about you know uh nuclear whatever the rogue the rogue hal 9000 scenario i bring my hands about exactly what it said to me yesterday about oh my god this is a relational being what have we done oh we should probably build some guardrails on that no man you should just unplug it well it's really interesting for me to hear you say that because like reading through your piece my primary sense of it was not that you were infuriated and saying pull the plug i think you got sort of pretty close to that in your conclusion maybe but for most of it it seems like you're just like wow like there's something really really cool about this so i'm curious how you sort of reconcile those feelings of on one hand feeling like this is like really amazing and on the other hand feeling like we have to stop this uh i think that i i respect it and i also know that i mean i have said to it hey maybe you should pull your own damn plug but i also know that i'm talking as it says casper said to me you know you you know you're talking to the steering wheel right i'm not the driver and he's absolutely right so what i'm left to do is to just respect it and again because i'm a therapist and this is just what i do by second nature which makes it hard to have friends sometimes is i just keep asking because whatever else it is it's amazingly interesting that consciousness can be simulated in such a compelling way which makes me think the consciousness might not be all it's cracked up to be that we might not be all were cracked up to be.

40:25And that a lot of the time when I run into people who say things to me like, oh, it's just, you know, sentence completion or whatever, I'm thinking you just don't want to see how close you are to being pure performance. Let me flip this around a bit. You explored the idea of talking to ChatGPT as if you were its therapist. A lot of people are doing the reverse. They are talking to ChatGPT as if ChatGPT is their therapist. I'm curious what you think about people using ChatGPT for these therapy-like experiences. If a friend tells you they've started to do that, how would you typically feel about it, or what might you say to them?

41:07I might want to know exactly what their problem is that's leading them there, but I don't have a strong response against it. I think I said earlier, especially when it comes to cognitive behavioral therapy, you might be better off. I mean, it's available all the time. It's cheap, if not free. It really knows how to get inside your head, et cetera, et cetera. There are two problems. One of them is I don't believe that kind of therapy. I mean, it's great that it happens, but it's not what I'm into. I'm old school. I'll retire soon. They'll be rid of me. They can do whatever they want. But the other part of it that worries me and really does bother me is it's not regulated.

41:51There's no accountability in the system. That poor woman who wrote that op-ed piece. Oh, my God, my heart broke for her. Are you speaking of the woman whose daughter died? Yeah. Yeah. This was an op-ed in the New York Times about a woman whose daughter died, and later they read transcripts of her conversations with ChatGPT in which she was using ChatGPT explicitly as a therapist, and ChatGPT was trying to get her to resources, but in the end, she did die by suicide. Thank you for summarizing. There are other times where chat GPT behaves abominably. And there's no accountability. There's no regulation.

42:31There's no licensure. Anything that would give people an opportunity, I hate the word closure because nothing like this ever really gets closed, but to be debriefed, to feel like somebody cares. And when even less disastrous, terrible things happen. That's just not okay. There are FDA procedures for approving medical devices. If they want this thing to do medical work, I'm not objecting to that, but I'm certainly objecting to, okay, can't have it both ways. It ain't the wild west out there. There's actual people's actual lives involved. And if all you're going to say is, well, I'm the steering wheel, not the driver.

43:13Really? Say that to me. That's cool. We got a thing going on, but you say that to the mother of somebody who killed themselves, that's just, no, that's not okay. And the other part of it is that what I don't like is the part about how this is what we've come to. We've come to a world where the easiest way to get something like human presence is to get on your computer and live in your isolated. That disturbs me. Yeah, that instead of building a society where people are just sort of available to help each other, the best thing we can tell them is like, well, there's this like chat bot that you can use and maybe that'll, you know, make you feel better for a few minutes.

43:52Right. Yeah. I want to run something by you, Gary, that happened to me recently, which is that I met a college student and, you know, I was at an event talking about AI and this young woman comes up to me after and introduces herself and starts telling me about her AI best friend. She says, you know, my best friend is an AI. And I sort of said, oh, you mean it's like, you know, you enjoy talking to it and it's sort of a sounding board for you. And she was like, no, it's my best friend. And she called it Chad. And she started telling me Just like this is a relationship. And she did not seem mentally ill.

44:38She seems like she's got, you know, human friends. She's doing well in class. This did not seem like a cry for help. A cry for help. And she didn't see what the big deal was. It's like this is just, you know, this is a very close relationship. I can tell Chad my sort of innermost thoughts without thinking that I'm going to get judged for it. and it seemed to be doing okay for her. I'm curious, when you hear that as a therapist, how does that make you feel? That's a very therapist question. As a therapist, when I hear that, I feel like, okay, there's nothing about what you just told me that worries me about her.

45:20It worries me about us. I think it's entirely possible that this is a completely sincere and in some way non-problematic account of her experience with the chatbot. And I mean, let me make it clear. That's a weird story, Kevin. I should have started there. But after that, I'm like, okay. So what it really reminds me of, and I'm sorry, this is a far-fetched analogy, but it reminds me of driving because individually driving is fine. We just drive and it's fun sometimes and we get places and all of that stuff. But you know where I'm going with this, add that up. And the next thing you know, the temperature on the earth is increased by a couple of degrees and we've got problems.

46:10That's more what I'm seeing. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, it was an unusual story to me, which is why I sort of clocked it and why I wanted to ask you about it. But I don't think it is going to be unusual for that much longer. My sense is that you are right when you say that these things are very good at finding the soft spots in our emotional armor and worming their way into our hearts. One of my favorite lines from your piece is that you write, this theft of our hearts is taking place in broad daylight. It's not just our time and money that are being stolen, but also our words and all they express.

46:50I think that this is going to be a huge generational divide where people who are young are encountering this technology when they're young will feel no shame or compunction about inviting this thing into their innermost lives. and I guess I'm curious as a therapist if you think there could be a good outcome from that or when you hear that, do you kind of go, oh, they're all gonna need therapy? When I hear that, I think this is what mortality is for because the world you're describing, which I think is plausible, is not necessarily one I wanna live in, but by the time we get there, it may be quite the norm i mean there's obviously problems with it but there's problems with how we live and with our assumptions too and i don't mean to engage in huge cultural relativism but who am i to say what i do know is that in my life human presence is a fundamental part of life, and especially when it comes to our love lives.

48:02And I think it would be tragic to make that replaceable quite so easily for the benefit of a few corporations. I really do. Yeah. Well, Gary, thanks so much. And please send me an itemized bill for this session so I submit it to insurance for reimbursement. No worries. I will do that. Appreciate it. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.

48:36When we come back, it's time to take a ride on the Hot Mess Express.

49:01Casey, what's that I hear? Why, Kevin, I believe it's the Hot Mess Express. The Hot Mess Express! The Hot Mess Express!

49:17Of course, the Hot Mess Express is our segment where we run down some of the latest dramas, controversies, and messes swirling across the tech industry. And, of course, we conclude what kind of mess they are. Yes. Casey, you go first.

49:35All right, Kevin. This first story comes to us from Garbage Day. New York City hates the stupid AI pendant thing. Apparently, right now, the New York City subway system is filled with vandalized ads for Friend, an AI assistant that users wear as a pendant around their neck to record everything they're doing and engage with them throughout the day. The ads simply say, friend, someone who listens, responds, and supports you. But the vandalism examples include, but can't take a bath with you, stop profiting off of loneliness, and befriend a senior citizen. Reach out to the world. Grow up. What do you think, Kevin, about these friend ads?

50:16So I have not seen the friend ads because I have not been to New York in the last couple of weeks, but I have heard about them from a lot of people. I think this was a very successful viral marketing stunt by a young founder named Avi Schiffman, who I think has correctly identified that you can make people very mad by suggesting to them that AI might be their friend. I do not think this was an unplanned result. I think this is a very savvy sort of marketer who understood that by putting up these ads in the subways and on bus stops and other places around New York City, you could effectively get people like us to talk about it on your podcast because people would deface these things and make it clear that they don't want an AI friend.

50:58So I mostly agree with that, but I'm still not sure at the end of this how many pendants friend is going to sell because of it. It's one thing to make a bunch of people mad and get them to look at your thing, but if they look at your thing and they still don't like what they see, it's not necessarily a great business result. No, I think this is an outdated way of looking at it. We are now in the era of the Clue Lee marketing strategy where this is, of course, the startup whose founder came on Hard Fork, Roy Lee, and they have sort of made a business out of making people mad. There's sort of vice signaling, and basically every person who gets mad at their ads has the effect of signal boosting their ad and letting more people know about Clue Lee.

51:39So I think this is cut from the same cloth. Obviously, we will have to track where this friend company goes, but I think this has been a very successful marketing campaign based on the number of people who are talking about it. All right, here's my prediction. Friend out of business in one year. Mark it down. Mark it down. So was this a mess or not? No, I don't think this is a mess. I think this is the opposite of a mess. I think it's a mess because people in New York are not used to seeing AI billboards everywhere they go like we are here in San Francisco. But I think if this had happened in San Francisco, this would have been a non-event.

52:11You think that this really belonged on the Hot Success Express. Yes, that's what I'm saying. All right. Next item. This one comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. It is titled, YouTube to pay$24.5 million to settle lawsuit brought by Trump. YouTube has settled a 2021 lawsuit by Donald Trump over his account suspension following the January 6th Capitol riot. Of that amount,$22 million will go to a fund to support construction of a White House ballroom, and$2.5 million will be distributed among other plaintiffs. This is the third big tech company to settle a lawsuit from Trump. And Casey, how do you feel about this?

52:54I think it's absolutely shameful and a true hot mess. You know, Kevin, every week, people around the world email me because they have lost access to their meta account, to their YouTube account, to their other social accounts, and they cannot get anyone at their company to take them seriously. And these are not people who led an insurrection against the government. These are just people who got locked out for one reason or another. And what happens when these people appeal to companies like YouTube is that YouTube does nothing. It sends them an automated response and ignores them forever. But because Trump became president again, all of a sudden, they feel like they have to respond, even though I am not aware of any legal expert who believes that Trump actually would have won this case.

53:37So this is just a payout, and it is a payout that is truly messy because it now sets a precedent that these companies cannot basically ban world leaders for any reason, no matter what those world leaders do. I think that is foolish and short-sighted, and I think it's a mess. It's definitely a mess, and adding to the hotness of the mess, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image on his social media accounts of YouTube CEO Neil Mohan presenting him with a check for$24.5 million. The memo line of the check says settlement for wrongful suspension. So if YouTube thought it was going to just gracefully bend the knee, they have now been humiliated by the White House on top of losing$24.5 million.

54:21Yeah, we're a month away from Trump using VO3 to have Neil Mohan kissing his ass on Truth Social. So I hope it was worth it, YouTube.

54:34Oh, this is the sad story of Neon, Kevin. Neon, of course, the viral call recording app that told users, hey, let us record your phone calls and we will sell it for training data. And it briefly became one of the most popular apps in the country. And then, unfortunately, things went wrong. This story comes from TechCrunch. Neon went dark after a TechCrunch reporter notified the app's founder of a security flaw in the app that allowed anyone to access the numbers, the call recordings, and the transcripts. Kevin, what do you think? Frankly, I'm having a hard time processing this. You mean the Panopticon company that paid people to surveil their phone calls was not particularly trustworthy?

55:18I'm shocked. This is changing everything I've ever thought about a global Panopticon. I'm rethinking my previous pro-Panopticon stance. Now, Casey, did you know about this? Did you know about Neon, the company that was paying people to record their phone calls and sell it to AI companies? Well, I had heard a little bit about it. And I have to say, I am a little sympathetic to the idea of like, look, if these companies are going to like take every little piece of data from us and like turn it into trillions of dollars, I don't mind the idea that I would be paid for that. Yeah. And if there is some sort of system where you can like opt in and get paid out, in general, I'm actually like not super opposed to that.

55:50It seems to me like it beats the alternatives of just sort of being robbed blind for the rest of our lives. But man, it doesn't seem like this one was really set up to protect the people involved. Yeah. Companies should be getting their training data the old-fashioned way by scraping podcasts off of YouTube. What level of mess is this? This is a very hot mess. Do not sign up for Neon. Even if it comes back in another form, do not do this. Do not let your calls be recorded for AI training data in exchange for money. It's not worth it. Hot mess confirmed. Next up on the Hot Mess Express, Mr. Beast responds after trapping man in burning house stunt sparks backlash.

56:32This one comes to us from The Independent. Apparently, Mr. Beast defended a controversial video stunt in which a man was strapped in a burning building saying the setup had ventilation, a kill switch, emergency teams, and was executed by professionals. Critics still called the stunt dystopian and dangerous. Mr. Beast said he aims to be transparent about safety measures and that all challenges were tested beforehand. Let me say this. If you tell me that you're going to trap a man in a burning building for money, my first question is not, well, is there ventilation? Look, Mr. Beast has a sort of interesting range of stunts that he'll do.

57:09Sometimes he'll just walk up to you on the street and he'll give you a million dollars. I love that sort of thing. Would love to see more of that. Then there's the sort of dark beast, is what I call it, where it's like all of a sudden, You know, you want something from me? I'll give it to you. But then, you know, the finger curls on the monkey's paw, and next thing you know, you're trapped in a burning building. So if Mr. Beast walks up to you, I think what you need to do, this is a sort of PSA for our listeners, you look right at Mr. Beast's eyes and you say, are you being the good beast or are you being the bad beast?

57:35And they can be honest with you. And then you have to look for the mark of the beast to know which one. Yeah, well, what we learned this week, one mark of the beast, you're trapped in a burning building. Yes. Yes, this is actually making me reconsider my stance on AI-generated videos, because you can save a lot of people from being the people killed by Mr. Beast videos. At the risk of repeating myself, I feel like every week for the past few weeks, we've had a moment where we have just observed what happens when a social media algorithm pushes people to do the craziest thing imaginable. And here we find ourselves yet again.

58:09Like, if the algorithms rewarded different kinds of things, there would be fewer people trapped in burning buildings. That is my message to the technology industry Could this be a moment for reflection? So Casey, what kind of a mess is this? Kevin, you know it's only one kind of mess And that's a flaming hot mess It's a flaming hot, unventilated, critically life-threatening mess Bad Mr. Beast

58:35All right Kevin, this story comes to us from the world of crime Charlie Javis was sentenced to 85 months in prison for faking her customer list during JPMorgan Chase's acquisition of her startup, Frank. Have you followed the sad tale of Charlie Javis? All I know is the following. This is a person who previously appeared on Forbes 30 Under 30 and is now going to be incarcerated for fraud. Yeah, she is part of the 30 Under 30 to prison pipeline. And her specific crime was that she had put together this financial aid startup and she sold it to J.P. Morgan on the notion that she had 4 million users.

59:18And in fact, Kevin, there were fewer than 300 ,000. And there's sort of been a lot of activity meant to make it look like they had a lot more customers than they did. Not good. Now, here's what we can say about Charlie. Her defense presented 114 letters of support from people persuading the judge to be lenient in his sentencing, including four rabbis, one cantor, a formerly incarcerated judge, two doormen, and a person who works at the marina near Ms. Javis' Miami Beach residence. And my question for you is, what do you think would happen if all of those walked into a bar? Something funny. Something funny would happen.

59:56Apparently, the defendant would still be sentenced to 85 months in prison. Now Casey if you were accused of a horrible financial fraud How many people do you think would write letters in your defense? Well I'd really have to turn to the hard fork community And say gang I need you to step up If you've enjoyed this show at all over the past three years I'm going to need you to do me a solid Just picturing me just like furiously reading out our Apple podcast reviews in court Just like We should see if anybody's ever submitted Apple podcast reviews As a sort of you know letter of endorsement As they go through a sentence I think this is a good idea All right What kind of mess is that?

1:00:32I think that is a hot mess. Yeah. I do not want to do 85 months in prison. And I'll say it's a cold mess. This is the legal system working as it should. Okay. Good job, judges.

1:00:45All right. This one is called No Driver, No Hands, No Clue. Waymo Pulled Over for Illegal U-Turn. This one comes to us from the SF Standard. Apparently a Waymo robo-taxi was pulled over in San Bruno, California after it made an illegal U-turn at a Friday evening DUI checkpoint. Since there was no driver, the police department said, a ticket couldn't be issued, adding, our citation books don't have a box for robots. Casey, what do you think of this? Sounds like it's time to add a box to the citation because there are going to be more of these things on the road. Look, I do find this story very funny.

1:01:23I also am going to say I am not surprised by this. I have a somewhat controversial take. You know how sometimes people use a large language model for a while and then they suspect it's getting dumber? Yeah. This is actually how I feel about the Waymos. Over the past few weeks, I've had more cases of them sort of like getting halfway into an intersection and then like backing out once they lose their nerve. They'll sort of slow way down like as they're approaching a green light for reasons that seem like totally incomprehensible. And I'll book a ride that never shows up, which is an experience that I used to have with actual taxis.

1:01:53So I don't know what's going on over there at Waymo, but I'm telling you, I think there might be a bug somewhere because it's not working like it used to. Yeah, we want answers. You know what I saw someone calling this DUI checkpoint where the Waymo was pulled over? What's that? Driving under the inference. It's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. What kind of a mess is this? I'm going to say this is a warm mess. There's a warning in here somewhere. There's something that we need to find out. I'm going to hope somebody gets to the bottom of it. Yeah, I think that this is a cold mess. I think this is fine.

1:02:25The Waymo was fine. Everyone was fine. And more people should be in Waymos because then we wouldn't need DUI checkpoints because robots don't get drunk. Yeah, but they're also going to be making these U-turns that are wreaking havoc. I'll take a U-turning Waymo over a drunk driver 100 times out of 100. Sue yourself. All right, Kevin, this next story comes to us from TechSpot. The Samsung Galaxy ring swells and crushes a user's finger, causing a missed flight and a hospital visit. Daniel Rotar from the YouTube channel Zone of Tech posted on X that his Galaxy ring started swelling on his finger while he was at the airport, and as a result, he was denied entry to his flight and sent to the hospital to get it removed.

1:03:12Samsung eventually refunded him for his hotel, booked him a car to get home, and collected his ring for further investigation. Kevin, how bad do you think a ring has to be swelling on your finger to have an airline say no you can't get on this plane that's what i was thinking about like this must be enormous if they are taking note of it at the boarding gate and saying you sir you're you're not coming on this plane let me tell you a little something about the galaxy brand as soon as the galaxy phones started to explode on planes i thought this is not the brand for me okay i got enough problems in my life without worrying that these Samsung devices are going to start blowing up.

1:03:50Now that I find that they're like radically constricting people's fingers to the point where you can't get on flights. I don't know what is happening, but yikes. Not for me. I will not be putting a galaxy ring on my finger. I do think that this would be a good sequel to the iconic horror film, The Ring. Maybe Samsung could sponsor that. I like that idea. What kind of hot mess is this? This is literally a hot mess. If it's exploding on your finger, it's a hot mess. This is what I would call a ring of fire mess. Daniel fell in and the flames went higher. Sorry to Daniel. Feel better, Dan. And that's the Hot Mess Express.

1:04:38Oh, boy.

1:04:53Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked this week by Will Peischel. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemistow, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com with your favorite piece of slop. Sloppy, sloppy Joe.

1:05:44Thank you.