• I love Facebook Marketplace, except for this one problem with how it does geographic searches.
• I often see search results that are inconveniently located because they're across a body of water.
• Make the search functions in travel time, not miles radius!

If there is one thing I absolutely love doing, it's buying cheap crap on the internet. But I feel bad about this; I worry about overconsumption and our planet — not to mention the effects on my own wallet.

Which is why I love Facebook Marketplace. It scratches the itch for mindless consumption in a more sustainable way. I'm simply virtuous — my place in Heaven secured! — for buying a used 8-by-10 rug in good condition for $75 instead of a brand-new one.

I probably spend more time browsing Facebook Marketplace than I spend on lots of other interesting and popular things. My iPhone's screen time tells me that I spent more time on the Facebook app last week than TikTok, Slack, or Bluesky. And you'll have to just believe me when I tell you that I spent a lot of time on those other apps.

However, I have a very specific and very real gripe.

Facebook Marketplace shows me listings for items located across a body of water — even if the items are within my specified distance radius.

Let me explain: For local listings, you can select a distance range of a set number of miles — just a few, or even farther, say 50 miles. Facebook Marketplace will then create a perfect circle of that search radius, giving you as-the-crow-flies distance in every direction.

But in reality, 10 miles to the east isn't always the same as 10 miles to the west. Especially in cases where a river or body of water is involved.

Let's say I'm in downtown Brooklyn. If I search a 4-mile radius, Facebook Marketplace will show me items for sale deeper into Brooklyn, easily accessible by car or subway, and it will also show me results in lower Manhattan (more annoying to drive to) — and worst of all, it will also give some results in New Jersey.

This is by no means a knock on the great Garden State. In fact, I've often observed in my Marketplace searching that New Jersey has some of the most desirable furniture and other items. But it is a massive pain to get from Brooklyn to New Jersey just to pick up a used end table— the tolls alone make it not worth it.

Consider searching around suburban Connecticut, where things are more spread out, and 20 miles of driving isn't unreasonable. However, this creates a big enough search radius that it extends across the Long Island Sound, into the northern tips of Long Island. Do you have any idea how long it takes to drive from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Huntington Station, New York? Long enough to drop dead, that's how long.

This isn't just an East Coast problem, either. In fact, for Meta employees, this should hit close to home. Menlo Park, California — where Meta is based — is located along a body of water. That makes it quite annoying to get to the land on the other side of the bay, either by public transportation or car.

I have a proposed solution here: One option could be that instead of making a perfect circle of a search radius, you could draw your own search shape with your finger. Zillow has a version of this that it uses for its home search.

Another option — and my preference — would be to factor in driving distance or public transit access. It would be great to say, "Show me all the coffee tables within 30 minutes driving distance," instead of a perfect circle on a map.

When I asked a representative for Meta if they viewed the water issue as a problem, they seemed slightly puzzled and asked if I was seeing things that were actually errors — results outside the specified range.

Currently, Meta doesn't really directly profit from these in-person Marketplace transactions — when you show up at someone's home and hand them cash for their stuff. (Meta does take a cut if the monetary transaction is completed on Facebook, typically for shipped items.) It may not be a big profit center for Meta, but it definitely is important.

Marketplace is a cornerstone of Facebook's strategy for young people. Despite its sometimes fuddy-duddy reputation, Facebook is actually growing its Gen Z user base. So, improving Marketplace is important to Facebook's overall health. Many young people tend to live in urban areas near bodies of water (rivers, bays, oceans). No one wants to have to drive over a bridge to buy a couch.

My plea to Mark Zuckerberg is to take a break from the kickboxing and focus in on this important issue. End the Marketplace search that goes across water boundaries!

• These days, Hollywood is more focused on animated blockbusters for kids than on live-action movies.
• Although animated movies can be great, I think kids are missing out. They need to see real humans.
• My solution? Getting DVDs of '90s movies from the library for my kids.

Think of your favorite holiday movies as a kid: "Elf," "The Santa Clause," "It's A Wonderful Life," "Home Alone." What do they all have in common? Real people! They're live-action, not animated.

In fact, when you think back to some of your most cherished movies as a kid, assuming you were a kid before the year 2000 — I bet a lot of them are also not animated. "E.T.," "Honey I Shrunk the Kids," "The Parent Trap" (both versions!), "The Sandlot," "The Mighty Ducks," "The Goonies," "Newsies," Hocus Pocus," "The Princess Bride," "The Bad News Bears." And on and on and on.

I don't want to sound like a grump or overly nostalgic — but too many kids' movies these days are animated. I wish Hollywood were producing more live-action kids' movies! You know, with real people!

Please don't mistake this for disparaging the art of animation. I also believe that, overall, kids' movies are far better than when I was a kid. The average kids' movie in 1985 was probably fairly intolerable for an adult; whereas now I am perfectly happy to watch even the most average Pixar or Illumination movie with my kids. "Hotel Transylvania 2?" Totally enjoyable! "Boss Baby?" Fine by me! "Despicable Me 4?" You know what, it's really funny!

I appreciate that animation can create worlds and do things that could never be done in live-action, even with special effects. "Kung Fu Panda" or "Inside Out" simply wouldn't work if they weren't animated, and they're delightful.

In the decades since I was a kid, animated movies for kids have become studio blockbusters. "Inside Out 2," "Frozen II," "The Lion King (2019)," and "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" are in the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time.

Why studios have moved toward animation

These tentpole films are expensive to make and take years of animation work. (For better or worse, it's possible that AI could make the process cheaper and faster.) There's also a low end of this — if you've ever seen some of the crummy animated movies that are straight to streaming platforms … yikes.

The movie business has changed radically because of streaming, and kids' content has been affected in specific ways. No one buys DVDs anymore, and that used to be a big revenue stream for certain genres like comedies and family movies. Now, it means that a movie generally has to earn a lot during its opening weekend. Hence, more sequels, even for animated kids' fare: Franchises are a safer bet.

This is the reason that for adult films, we see fewer romcoms, comedies, and smart dramas than we did 10 years ago, and more action movies and franchises. That same dynamic is playing out with family movies, too. You can imagine why a studio would rather do another "Frozen" movie than take a risk on something weird like "Mrs. Doubtfire."

The business reasons make sense. But I think kids are missing out if they're not seeing many live-action movies or TV shows — they're not seeing real actors showing emotions or real-world situations playing out. Seeing real kids, real adults, speaking, moving, even singing — that's a different kind of experience. I would posit that seeing real humans on film is important for young viewers to become true movie lovers, and to experience the pleasures of the art of film.

A good movie is a transformative and magical experience — and yes, animated movies can achieve this — but there's something to be said about the magic that real, live acting can bring.

I just wish more of these amazing live-action family movies were being made today.

How I find good live-action movies

When I browse the streaming services for movies for my preschool and elementary-age kids, I find that nearly all the movies available are animated. The rare live-action ones tend to be older movies from the '90s, probably put there to appease millennial parents.

(I would like to give a brief shoutout to the rare Netflix original live-action kids movie, "Yes Day," starring Jennifer Garner. It's delightful and a family-pleaser.)

I can't make the movie business work differently, but I can suggest something to my fellow millennial parents of young kids who want to find more good live-action movies to watch: Try your local library's DVD section. I've discovered that there are tons of good '90s and early '00s live-action movies out there that simply aren't on streaming services.

A hidden bonus feature of watching real DVDs instead of streaming is that it eliminates the thing where you open Netflix, and your kids see the thumbnail for a show they've already watched three times and start begging to watch it again.

I've been doing a fairly regular family movie night with my kids with my own hidden agenda: I get to pick the movie, and I always pick live-action movies. So far, it's been a success with my kids and I've even enjoyed movies I hadn't seen since I was a kid, like "Free Willy." It's enough to hold us over until "Paddington 3" comes out.

• "Beast Games" is the Amazon Prime Video game show from the YouTuber MrBeast.
• The show is family-friendly, but its message about the concept of money makes me uncomfortable.
• I'd say to enjoy the show but remind your kids that money doesn't work this way in real life.

"Beast Games," the game show on Amazon Prime Video from MrBeast, debuted Thursday, and I watched along with my elementary-aged son. As an adult, I enjoyed the spectacle and found the show highly watchable. But as a parent, I'm not sure I liked the message about money it was imparting to my young ward.

Elementary-school-aged kids, whether or not they're allowed to watch YouTube, all know who MrBeast is. He's a superstar to Gen Alpha. His candy bars are on grocery-store shelves, and his specter hangs over playgrounds and lunchrooms.

(My colleague reports that his teenage son says MrBeast isn't quite as cool in high schools anymore, perhaps because he's seen as being for little kids.)

Like most parents, I want to teach my kids the value of a dollar: that money comes from hard work and that saving and budgeting are important.

"Beast Games" flies in the face of all that. Money is tossed around as this strange easy-come, easy-go object. It opens with MrBeast standing on a pyramid of cash (allegedly the full $5 million prize in stacks of bills). We are repeatedly told this is the largest cash prize ever in a game show.

The show's premise is that a group of contestants will compete in challenges to win that big prize — a season-long version of some of his popular YouTube videos.

Later in the season there will be physical challenges (we see preview clips of people pulling a monster truck), but in this first episode the games are almost all psychological tests.

This first series of minigames aims to winnow the contestant pool to 500 people from 1,000. The games are variations on the prisoner's dilemma, pitting what's good for an individual against what's good for the group.

In the first game, MrBeast makes this offer: Anyone who quits the game immediately can share a pot of money — but the pot gets smaller as more people choose to take the early out. In another game, each team of about 100 people must have one person sacrifice themselves and leave the game with no prize money at all — or else the whole team is eliminated. People are sobbing, yelling at each other to be the ones to quit.

I worry about the message 'Beast Games' sends

It's a fascinating challenge to watch as an adult. But I'm not sure a kid can really understand what's going on — the wrenching pain of people losing what they thought could be a chance to pay off loans or buy a home.

In the game, money is an object to build into pyramids or toss around in bags — it's funny money; it doesn't feel real.

Representatives for MrBeast declined to comment for this story.

Other game shows have cash prizes, even kid-friendly ones like "Is It Cake?" or even the old "Double Dare" on Nickelodeon. But on other shows, the prize is an exciting treat at the end — it isn't the whole point of the show.

In "Beast Games," money is the point — and even the games themselves are about money. I'm not sure I like what subtle message that's sending to young minds not old enough to earn a real paycheck.

Update: December 20, 2024 — MrBeast representatives declined to comment when contacted by BI; the story has been updated reflecting that.

• Mysterious drones, first seen in New Jersey and now around the US, have everyone talking.
• We're probably not all about to get sucked up by a spaceship — but it's fun to wonder!
• The mystery is bringing people together from across the political spectrum in a true online moment.

Lots of people have one conspiracy theory they kind of believe in. Ideally, this is more on the mild end of things rather than something like the moon landing being faked. A little skepticism toward authority can be healthy.

Which is why the mysterious drones that have been flying over New Jersey and the Northeast — which the federal government tells us are nothing to worry about — are a perfect thread for our conspiratorial minds to pull on.

In this postelection time, the drones have united people across the political spectrum in a shared belief that something weird is going on, and these clowns in government aren't telling us the straight story.

(For the record, there is no evidence that the clowns in the government are, in fact, lying to us.)

Over on the Facebook Group "New Jersey Mystery Drones — let's solve it," which has more than 73,000 members, there's a sharp sense of disillusionment with the local and national government response. There's also a fair number of people who might not normally talk about believing in space aliens saying they think what we're seeing is space aliens.

And I think that's a beautiful thing. We needed this.

We may one day learn the Official Truth. Until then, the drones spotted over New Jersey and other places have become a perfect obsession: an unsolved mystery that has bonded communities and gotten people outside into the fresh December air.

(I would like to give a disclaimer here that I cannot say with 100% certainty that this is not a military attack from Australia as vengeance for our mockery of their Olympic breakdancer. Or that space aliens are not about to invade and harvest our organs.)

What we know about the apparent drones, so far, is that officials seem to agree that it's neither of those threats. The Pentagon has also said they're not drones from an "Iranian mothership." And other officials say what people are seeing is just regular airplanes, helicopters, or stars.

(If you want to get in on the action and check what's flying in the sky above you, flight-tracking apps can help.)

The drone mystery has been healing a wound in our divided nation. We needed something mildly silly but kind of wacky and slightly concerning to focus on collectively.

Unexplained drone activity ticks a lot of boxes of things humans love:

• Small aircraft, a favorite interest of dads.
• Being outside and staring at the night sky — activities that have bonded mankind since days of cave paintings.
• The opportunity to become an armchair expert in a field you read about in two news articles and a Wikipedia page.
• Talking to people in your medium-to-small town.
• A vague conspiracy — but mostly friendly and nice.
• Aliens????

Best of all, discussing drone sightings has been hyperlocal — and has thrived on Facebook. Outside the drone phenomenon, Facebook Groups already had become the nation's hub for suburban news. It's where people go to ask for a plumber recommendation, complain about schools, post activities — and now discuss potential extraterrestrial activity.

Getting in on the drone action

In my small town outside New York City, the local Facebook Group was buzzing about drone sightings — people were thrilled to finally get in on the action after hearing about it in New Jersey for weeks.

An offshoot group was started to discuss drone sightings in Connecticut. (It's much smaller than the New Jersey one.) A recent post showed the vibe: "No sightings yet in Norwalk." See, everyone wants in on the fun.

There's some history of silly panics in the headlines just before something big happens. A series of shark attacks — dubbed the "Summer of the Shark" — dominated the news in the late summer of 2001. Then there was the summer of clown sightings in 2016, right before Trump was elected president for the first time.

Perhaps years from now, we'll all look back at this as the funny moment where we all focused on drones right before [whatever] happened. Or, hey, maybe we'll look back on this and think: "We should've fought off the alien brainsuckers sooner!"

There's so much for middle-aged suburbanites to argue about on the internet — property taxes, politics, Luigi. But for a brief moment, we've gotten to engage in extended Fox Mulder LARP.

I hope the drones stick around a little longer.

• The Nex Playground is a gaming console similar to the old Nintendo Wii — with active-movement games.
• It's marketed as a kid-friendly system with no violence, ads, in-app purchases, or talking to strangers.
• The CEO says it sold out on Amazon on Black Friday. I can see why it's popular.

The Nex Playground might remind you of the old Nintendo Wii — with games played by body movements, like jumping, flapping your arms, and dancing.

It's apparently flying off the shelves — and with backing from Mark Cuban and other VCs — it's got some buzz behind it. It also has the benefit of being a closed system that doesn't allow kids to talk to strangers like some other systems.

You might call it a video game system for parents who don't want their kids playing video games all day. I talked to the CEO after trying the $199 system myself with my own kids and family. (I'll return the unit to the company, per BI policy.)

"We're not calling it a game console," Nex founder and CEO David Lee told me. "We call it active-play system."

It appears to have the momentum to break through as a hit toy. The console launched in late 2023 and sold all 5,000 units through a pre-sale. This year, by December, Nex had sold 100,000 units, Lee said.

"We sold out on Amazon in the morning of Black Friday," Lee said. The company's new problem is having enough units in stock to last through the holidays. He said Nex could easily sell through 250,000 units, though it doesn't have that much inventory at the moment.

The popularity comes as some parents are increasingly worried about their kids and screen time. Jonathan Haidt's popular book, "The Anxious Generation," illustrates these worries — that Gen Alpha kids will become iPad kids. Parents are looking to get their children away from devices — and, in some cases, are willing to pay for other devices to do so.

Nex Playground fits into this idea. A few games come free with the unit, but an $89-a-year subscription unlocks about 40 more games, with new ones being added regularly. It's raised millions of dollars in funding from Cuban, the NBA, and other VC firms.

Earlier this year, shortly after Nex first launched, my colleague Conz Preti tested it out with her kids and loved it. I tested the Nex out with the help of several young testers (my own kids and some of their friends, a cousin, and even a grandparent) and it was a hit — the games were fun, and they were good enough to keep all ages happy.

Unlike other gaming consoles like an Xbox or Nintendo where games can cost $50 to $60 each, the Nex's games are a subscription model — get all the games for $89 a year.

While this added cost might seem unappealing, especially to families already experiencing subscription fatigue, Dr. Emily Greenwald, Nex's pediatrician advisor, noted something I can relate to: It means no negotiating or pleading to buy individual games.

The subscription model also means the games are ad-free, and there are no in-app purchases — no gems to buy to level up or Robux to accidentally charge to your credit card.

None of the games have any violence or guns (an archery game is the closest thing to a weapon). There are no online chats or games you play with strangers on the internet.

The fact that it requires physical activity is an added benefit. "In the end, it's not addictive because you cannot be jumping around for five hours," Lee contended.

It fits into an interesting trend of products that go viral on Facebook among moms (there's an active Nex Facebook Group with almost all women), like the Nugget play couch, the Yoto Player, and Tonie Box audiobook players, or (screen-free) The Mighty music player. These are all products where the selling point is that they're low- or no-screen — made for parents who are willing to shell out money for products that will engage and occupy their kids.

"Realistically in this world, there are screens. And a some point, to participate, at least in the country we live in, you're going to have to learn how to do things on screens," Greenwald said. "You can limit [screen time], and yes, going to a real playground is still better. But for the days where it's cold, it's rainy, you've already done that — this is great."

• Mark Zuckerberg donated one of his gold chains to a charity auction organized by his sister.
• The anonymous winner bid $40,500 — but Aaron White was close with his $38,000 bid.
• The chain was gold-plated, not even solid gold.

How much would you pay to look like Mark Zuckerberg? For someone out there, the answer was: more than $40,000.

Zuckerberg donated one of his gold chains — specifically the one he wore at his well-photographed 40th birthday party — to a charity auction run by his sister.

While the auction website estimated the market value of the gold-plated (not even solid gold!) necklace at $425, the winning bid came in at $40,500.

The winner was an anonymous bidder whose username was simply "near." The runner-up went by the username "ElonRWA (Bureau of Internet Culture) (Crypto bros with infinite money)."

I know, I know.

The money went to Inflection Grants, an organization run by two Silicon Valley venture capitalists that gives small grants to young people. The auction ran as part of a charity poker tournament organized by Arielle Zuckerberg. Other auction items included 49ers tickets and a wine tasting with their father, Edward Zuckerberg.

I might not have been able to track down the anonymous winner or runner-up (I asked one of the charity's organizers whether their payment actually came through but didn't hear back), but I did get hold of the person who came in third in the bidding for Zuck's necklace. He's a real person — a real person who is incredibly sad to be missing out on a chain once worn by a man who wore his own name in a Latin idiom on a T-shirt to a company event.

Aaron White, the founder of AppyPeople, an AI startup, bid $38,000 on the necklace. Almost enough to win, but he lost out at the last second.

But … why bid?

"Zuck, at this point, is a historical business figure by any measure," he told Business Insider. "So it's a tiny, tiny slice of some form of American history."

White was willing to make such a large offer because he approved of the charity's mission. "It's for a good cause, showing people who want to build ... they can! And they can have an impact!" he wrote. "I donate money to similar causes — this is another way to do that but also get that little tiny history slice in the process."

Tragically, White could've bid more — his absolute ceiling was $45,000 — but he didn't want to go all in all at once. And then he ran out of time after the anonymous $40,500 bidder swooped in at the last second.

White has a shared history with Zuckerberg: They both attended Phillips Exeter Academy for high school. White was a few grades older, and while they didn't overlap, White said they had friends in common — and said Zuckerberg joined the same computer club that White had been president of during his time at the school.

Of course, the question is: If you owned Mark Zuckerberg's used gold chain, would you actually wear it?

"One-hundred percent yes — I would've worn it in all my video content/Zooms and around town," White said. "I live in Miami, no one would even notice."

• The Moxie AI robot cost $800 and was marketed to parents to help teach children social skills.
• The company sent customers an email in late November announcing it would be shutting down.
• Parents of children who were attached to their robot now have to explain that it's going away.

Moxie, an AI-powered toy robot aimed at preschoolers and other children, is shutting down — leaving parents in the position of having to explain that a beloved companion is going away.

It's a new wrinkle in our AI-enhanced world after kids became attached to the lifelike robot that promised to help them learn social skills — only to be told the company would no longer support Moxie after it failed to secure additional funding.

The gaming site Aftermath earlier wrote about parents who were venting their frustrations on social media about the company effectively killing their child's robot friend.

When the Moxie robot launched in 2020, it cost $1,500 (later reduced to $800). Its big selling point was helping young children learn social and emotional skills by letting them talk, play, and discuss feelings with the friendly green robot.

Moxie was also marketed as beneficial for children on the autism spectrum. Its website said: "Parents have reported to us that Moxie has helped their child who is on the autism spectrum better regulate their emotions, engage in more conversations with family members, and gain self-confidence."

The robot, which has an expressive face, could offer educational games, play Simon Says, and lead kids through meditation exercises like breathing. And for parents who had been worried about their neurotypical kids falling behind in social skills during the pandemic, the idea of a robot playmate didn't seem so outrageous.

Carlos Rosaly bought a Moxie for his daughter when she finished kindergarten last spring. She had been using it several times a week.

"She used it for various things like helping her deal with emotions in the right way, and teaching her about her emotions and how to express them in a positive way," Rosaly told Business Insider. "I've also noticed better linguistic skills from my daughter and use of proper sentence structure speaking to Moxie."

When he had to break the news to his daughter that Moxie would be shutting down, she cried. Her Moxie toy still works, but it's getting buggy and takes longer to boot up, Rosaly said. An email to customers sent in late November warned the robots would cease working when the cloud servers eventually shut off at an unknown — but soon — date.

Heather Frazier bought a Moxie toy five months ago for herself because she was curious. (It had been discounted to $650 when she bought it.)

"I've grown up loving robots my whole life," she told Business Insider. "As a kid, I used to play with my aunt's 2XL robot — it was a robot from the '70s and '80s that had an eight-track tape deck. Then I had a Teddy Ruxpin and a Cricket doll. I was obsessed with movies like 'Short Circuit.' and new movies like 'Wall-E,' 'Chappie,' etc. I have always just loved robots and wanted one."

Frazier said she mostly played around with Moxie to see what the AI chatbot could or couldn't do, and talked to it about music.

She said she felt a kind of attachment to the robot but was really affected when she saw a video on TikTok that Rosaly had posted of his daughter crying at the news that Moxie would be no longer. Then Frazier's own robot started talking about the end. "When Moxie started talking about missing me and stuff, I just lost it again," she said.

Frazier isn't expecting a refund. She's hoping that perhaps Elon Musk might take an interest in Moxie and take it over. Incidentally, Musk's ex-partner Grimes has her own AI robot toy company called Grok — which isn't related to Musk's Grok. Some customers are trying to create an open-source version of the software that could keep Moxies running, but it's unclear if that's feasible.

In late November, customers received an email from Paolo Pirjanian, CEO of Embodied, the company that makes Moxie, saying a funding round had fallen through and the company couldn't continue operating. Embodied, which only makes Moxie, had previously raised several funding rounds. Pirjanian, who founded the company, had previously been the chief technology officer of Roomba maker iRobot.

Embodied didn't respond to requests from comment from BI.

In the email to customers in November, Pirjanian linked to a page that had a letter to kids, explaining to them about the shutdown.

"Thank you for being the best mentor and friend a robot could ever ask for," it said.

• Spotify's year-end feature has something new: an AI-generated "podcast" about your Wrapped.
• It uses Google's NotebookLM technology.
• It's neat? But WEIRD!! Very weird!!! No thank you!

One of the indignities inflicted on parents of young children is Spotify Wrapped. Each December, thousands of adults open up their year-end treat to discover the sad fact that they listened to "Baby Shark" more times than anything else.

As a parent, this has been my fate for the last few years. (My Spotify account is connected to our Amazon Echo, which means that in some years, my kids' requests for songs about potty words have ended up on my Wrapped.)

I take very little pleasure in Spotify Wrapped, although I know it's a massively popular thing that many people —presumably those who don't listen to Raffi on repeat — really look forward to.

However, this year, there's a new feature. And I struggle to imagine how anyone won't feel mildly weirded out by it: Spotify uses Google's new NotebookLM AI-powered feature to create an individualized AI-generated podcast with two talking heads discussing your listening habits in a conversational, podcast-y tone. Yikes!

I received a 3-minute podcast with a man and woman chatting about how impressive it was that I had listened to "Cruel Summer" by Taylor Swift — my 4-year-old's current favorite tune, narrowly edging out "Let It Go" this year — so many times that I was in the Top 0.02% of listeners. (I should note here that the podcast said I was in the Top 0.02%, while the main Wrapped said it was 0.05%. Possibly the podcast version hallucinated?)

I can understand why people like sharing screenshots from their Wrapped. It's normal to want to share what music you like — and what those lists say about you and your personality.

But listening to an AI podcast about it? Voiced by robots? I'm not sure anyone wants that.

Google's NotebookLM is a fascinating product — I've played around with it a little, and it is very cool, if not uncanny. You can add in text or a PDF or other kinds of data, and it will create a conversational podcast episode with two hosts — "likes" and "ums" and all.

It's got that factor about GenAI that makes you go "whoa," like trying ChatGPT for the first time to have it write a poem.

It's got the dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs element: It's impressive because the dog can do it at all, not because it's doing it particularly well. The idea that AI could generate a chatty podcast that sounds almost real is, admittedly, mindblowing. But would you want to actually listen to it? I'm not really so sure.

I've wondered what this would be used for — I assume some people find listening to something makes it easier to engage with than simply reading it. You could take the Wikipedia page for "The War of 1812," plug it into AI, and generate an engaging history podcast instead of slogging through dry text.

And in a business setting, perhaps a busy exec could upload an accounting report and listen to it while on the putting green instead of reading a stale PDF. (I tried uploading my tax return and created what may be the most boring podcast in human history.)

But NotebookLM is a pretty niche product so far — and Spotify Wrapped is a massively popular feature on a massively popular app. It's likely that this will be many people's first exposure to NotebookLM's abilities.

I imagine it will be mindblowing for many people! But I urge restraint and moderation. Although seeing a screenshot of your friends' top artists might be fun, no one wants to hear a podcast about it.

• Around 60 million households watched Jake Paul fight Mike Tyson on Netflix on Friday night.
• The matchup was vaguely unsettling — a 58-year-old against a 27-year-old social media star.
• Jake Paul's talent for attracting attention is undeniable, and that may be good for the sport of boxing.

On Friday night, 60 million households watched live on Netflix as Jake Paul beat Mike Tyson in eight rounds of a boxing match. It was a sheer spectacle: a controversial social media star and the aging athlete who has been a pop culture fixture for the last 30 years.

No one was really sure what to expect: Would Iron Mike wallop Paul, whose boxing career is mainly about clout rather than pure skill, or would the 27-year-old Paul's youth trump the 58-year-old former champion?

But after the match, as Paul graciously showed deference to the veteran, there was still a larger lingering question: What the hell did we just watch?

Even though I'm not personally a boxing fan, I tuned in. Everyone on my Bluesky feed seemed to be talking about it — the buzz was real. Even though Netflix suffered embarrassing glitches with an overloaded livestream, it seemed to be a real triumph for its forays into live sports events.

Still, the consensus I was seeing on Bluesky (almost certainly from non-boxing enthusiasts like myself) was that this whole thing had a vaguely tragic air with the older man losing to a potentially lesser — though younger — opponent. Tyson's own comments when he was interviewed by a tween before the fight had a morose vibe.

I've underestimated Jake Paul before, and I've learned my lesson. In 2018, Paul started selling an online course on how to be an influencer. I paid for the video courses and discovered that Paul hadn't just stumbled into success with pranks and bad rap songs. He studied platforms methodically and ruthlessly. He advised wannabe influencers on the best time of day to post to YouTube (3 p.m.), shared that Musical.ly (before it became TikTok) was easy to game by posting frequently, and showed that a quick way to grow a Snapchat audience was to put your QR code in a Tinder profile.

He told hard truths like how Twitter was a good way to reach older people (ouch) — and that it was important to have a Facebook profile and page because the old people who run brands that might sponsor you were still on Facebook.

A key thing that the Paul brothers and other early Vine stars learned was that "collabs" with fellow stars would massively boost both audiences. This is still true across a variety of platforms (notice how many video podcasters appear on each other's podcasts). In a way, Paul vs. Tyson was simply the ultimate content "collab."

Jake Paul can give the impression that his brain cells sound like the shaking of a can of Axe body spray. (In fact, he has his own line of body spray, called "W," which he would spray all over himself whenever on camera backstage before a match.) But he knows what he's doing — how to manipulate attention and the lucrative power that attention can bring — much more than you might think.

Jake Paul's relationship with the boxing world is weird. Obviously, his path to 60 million households watching on Friday night came from his fame as a social media influencer rather than working his way up through the ranks of boxing. But he seems serious about the sport — you don't fight Mike Tyson if you're not — and there's a positive way of looking at Friday's spectacle: By leveraging his clout and fame, he's attracting attention — and big-money prizes — to the boxing world. The $6 million purse for the women's undercard match that aired just before the Tyson fight was the biggest amount ever for a women's boxing prize.

It's unclear where Jake Paul goes from here, or where boxing goes. Paul tweeted over the weekend about how he is still processing his role as a disruptor in the sport. It's pretty clear where Netflix goes: It'll be showing two big NFL games on Christmas Day with Beyoncé as the half-time show. Hopefully, this time, they'll be prepared for a steady stream.

Correction: December 3, 2024 — Netflix said 60 million households tuned in live for the Paul-Tyson fight, not 60 million people. An earlier version of this story misstated that figure.

• Reddit's "r/TVtooHigh" is focused on criticizing people who mount their televisions too high.
• The comments are absolutely brutal, roasting any TVs mounted above eye level.
• And don't even get them started on mounting a TV above a fireplace.

The ideal place to mount a television — at least according to most experts — is so it's at eye level while you're sitting on the couch. Samsung suggests mounting it 42 inches from the floor, which would be the target sightline for a 5-foot-6-inch adult who's sitting down.

Not everyone does this, of course. And the people who don't are the target of scorn and derision from one of the most intense corners of the internet: Reddit's r/TVTooHigh.

There are some places on the internet we know are dens of trolling and cruelty: 4chan. Certain Discords. Snark subreddits. Nextdoor comments. The replies on X to anything Elon Musk posts. But this one subreddit dedicated to discussing television mounting is one of the most furious pits of vipers I've encountered. And I absolutely love it.

The subreddit has more than 250,000 members and a mix of posts from people seeking real advice about whether their TV placement is right (it almost never is) — or posting photos of laughably high TVs they found either in real life or online.

A recent post shows a photo someone found of a real-estate listing where a television is mounted so high it touches the ceiling. "It's tv shaped crown moulding," suggests one Redditor. "The mental health epidemic is very tragic," says another.

In another post, a Redditor posted a photo of a television placed high above a fireplace (more on that in a second) with the caption, "We've been roasting my buddy for hours."

More than 500 comments came rolling in:

"At this height, it can be used to display the menu at McDonald's."

"Buddy in the NBA?"

"When is he installing the 2nd story viewing deck?"

"I know a chiropractor ..."

There is something that absolutely delights me about seeing this kind of roasting. Absolutely savage, vicious insults being hurled at people — but about something totally meaningless. No one is going to get their feelings hurt about a TV. In this moment of division and tension in the world, witnessing low-stakes, harmless trolling is a beautiful relief. It soothes my soul to see people hurl insults about TV mounting, in the same way someone might feel relaxed by soothing music or deep breathing.

And besides, they're right — a lot of people do mount their TVs too high.

But there's another topic that frequently comes up that sparks a seething hatred that verges on zealotry: mounting TVs above a fireplace. In many newer-built American homes, fireplaces are placed at the focal point of a living room and can be an obvious place for a TV.

When people come to the subreddit looking for advice about where to mount a TV when they have a fireplace as the focal point in a room, the commenters will go to ridiculous lengths to suggest workarounds: Moving all the furniture so the couch faces an alternate wall. Removing built-in bookshelves on surrounding walls. Some even suggest disabling or removing the fireplace altogether.

"I don't like it, but there are no hard rules," Keren Richter, an interior designer from the New York design firm White Arrow told Business Insider. '"If I had to do it over a fireplace for space constraints, I'd get a Reflectel TV or a projector with a screen. Generally, I try to make media discreet. The fireplace is the focal point and I don't want a big black rectangle to compete with it. Plus, the viewing angle is uncomfortable."

There are other non-aesthetic reasons to avoid a TV over a fireplace: drilling into the wall above a working fireplace could damage the chimney's interior. Excessive heat from fires could also fry the television. There's a product called Mantel Mount that has an extending arm so you can move the TV up and down, but r/TVTooHigh also has strong feelings about this.

When someone posted a photo of their TV mounted with the Mantel Mount, the comments went wild.

"Thank you for your sacrifice and demonstrating why TV above the fireplace is terrible."

"It's dreadful."

"It's an abomination"

"An aesthetic nightmare."

There are some positive things that come out of r/TVTooHigh. Some people genuinely find it helpful.

Jeffrey Episcopo, the creator of the group and its moderator told Business Insider that people participate to have a good time — and to help one another.

"Yeah, it's easy to make fun of someone for having a TV that's too high, but that would get old pretty quick," he said. "It's quite rewarding when someone posts their TV that is too high and asks for recommendations, you give a recommendation, and they post an update saying how great their new setup is and how grateful they are that you helped them."

Joe Wall joined the subreddit as a lurker about six months ago when he and his wife moved into a new apartment. Their TV was mounted high on the wall at an angle, pointed down.

"Every post I came across would make me stare at my TV and think about how hard I would get roasted. So I had to do something about it," he told Business Insider.

Wall changed it up: He removed the TV from the mount and placed the set on a new media stand. When he posted the before-and-after pictures to r/TVTooHigh, the comments were overwhelmingly positive.

"It transformed the space and looks so good!"

"Now we're cooking with gas."

"Love a redemption arc!"

Correction: November 30, 2024 — Jeffrey Episcopo is the creator and moderator of the Reddit group r/TVTooHigh. His name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

• Elon Musk says a lot of us are doing it wrong when it comes to posting links on X.
• He says people should write a description in their main post, followed by the link in a reply.
• Musk says this will stop "lazy linking." If you have any idea what that even means, please let me know!

For anyone who posts links to X, it's been intuitively clear that since Elon Musk took over, posts with links don't get the same reach as they used to.

On old Twitter, a tweet with a link to a news article would often go viral or get a lot of engagement. Now, with the new "For you" algorithm that prioritizes images and videos, posts with links go almost unnoticed.

Finally, we now have some confirmation. Over the weekend, Elon Musk responded to Paul Graham, a Y-Combinator founder, about the topic:

What Musk describes — putting the link in a reply instead of in the main tweet — is what savvy posters have already been doing.

You've probably seen a variety of workarounds on X lately from people who often post links to articles, such as posting a screenshot of the headline or a multi-tweet thread.

As you have probably noticed, all of these options are kind of annoying for readers. I can confirm that they're also very annoying for the person posting the article.

(I should note that one of the features of the paid version of X is a "Top Articles" feature where you can see the articles your friends are posting.)

Initially, it seemed (to me) that the downranking of link posts was partly because of the new emphasis on video on X, and partly about a desire to keep people from leaving X to go anywhere else (in various posts, links to other social platforms have faced some version of a shadowban).

Musk says this is meant to stop "lazy linking" — which … I'm not sure exactly what that is. The term isn't common social media slang like "dirty delete," "subtweeting," or "soft block." (The term is sometimes used in computer programming.) X didn't respond to questions about lazy linking.

Graham's response was to ask Musk what was so lazy about putting a link in the main tweet instead of following it up with a reply that contains a link. Musk, so far, has not responded.

The overall effect here is that X is no longer useful for finding links to interesting articles to read — something that Twitter used to be fantastic at. Bummer!

• AI models are appearing on adult-content sites like OnlyFans and Fanvue — sometimes with stolen images.
• And some people are selling courses for $220 on how to make your own lucrative AI adult creator.
• Does AI harm adult creators? And do subscribers even know they're talking to a computer?

Last winter, there were a few news items about how AI might be replacing humans in a surprising job: online influencer. The articles said a crop of new Instagram influencers had amassed large followings and even secured brand deals. There was one catch: The influencers were AI.

Some of these AI influencers, like Lil Miquela, are a sort of artsy commentary on the nature of influencing or something conceptually interesting. But when I looked a little further into one of the AI-generated influencer accounts on Instagram — one that had reportedly gotten some brand deals — I found a different type of story.

One of the most popular AI influencers had a link in her bio to a profile on Fanvue, an OnlyFans competitor. On her Fanvue account, the influencer posted proactive photos — and for a $7-a-month subscription, I could see her nude photos. (I feel strange saying "she" and "nude" because this person doesn't exist. Remember: She's AI. But this is where we are in 2024, I suppose.)

Ah, so I get it now: The business was always pornography — Instagram and other social media were just at the top of the conversion funnel. These accounts weren't trying to become "Instagram influencers" who made money through promoting shampoo — they were using Instagram to drive traffic to Fanvue, where they could get men to pay to see their nude photos.

Once potential customers get to the paysites, they encounter more AI-generated pictures and videos.

The tech news site 404 Media just published a deep dive into this world, "Inside the Booming 'AI Pimping' Industry." What reporters found was an astounding amount of AI-fueled accounts on both OnlyFans and Fanvue. Disturbingly, 404 Media found a number of these accounts used images that weren't purely dreamed up by AI. Some were deepfakes — fake images of real people — or were face swaps, using someone's face on an AI-generated body.

There is also a whole side economy of people selling guides and courses on how others can set up their own businesses to create AI models. One person is selling a course for $220 on how to make money with AI adult influencers.

A Fanvue spokesperson told Business Insider that using images that steal someone's identity is against its rules. Fanvue also uses a third-party moderation tool and has human moderators. The spokesperson also said that "deepfakes are an industry challenge." OnlyFans' terms of service prohibit models from using AI chatbots. Those terms also say that AI content is allowed only if users can tell it's AI and only if that content features the verified creator — not someone else.

Potentially stolen images aside, the existence of AI adult content is somewhat fraught. On one hand, some of these AI creators claim that this is not unlike cartoon pornography. But real-life adult content creators have concerns about AI affecting their business. Some told Business Insider's Marta Biino recently that they find AI tools useful — like AI chatbots they use to talk to fans. But they said they also worried that using AI could erode fans' trust.

I'm not sure that the fans of the AI accounts are always aware that these "people" are artificial intelligence. Comments on one obviously AI-generated woman's account read like a lot of people think she's human. On her Fanvue, the AI-generated woman sometimes posts pink-haired anime cartoon versions of herself.

On one of these posts, a paying Fanvue customer wrote that he wanted to see the outfit on the real woman — not an anime version. I'm not sure that he knows neither one is real.

• Journaling is now part of a regular wellness routine for many male fitness and "hustle" influencers.
• Instagram influencers who talk about the gym, cold plunges, and the "hustle" also talk about journaling.
• This is probably a good thing.

The best-selling kids' book "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" opens with the titular wimp Greg Heffley emphasizing that he's writing a journal, not a diary. (Even though the notebook his mother bought him says "Diary" right on the front.)

You see, for fictional middle schoolers like Heffley, keeping a diary is considered the realm of teenage girls. (The series has some questionable notions about gender equity.)

But journaling has been going mainstream as part of a daily wellness routine that prioritizes mental health. And one surprising group in particular is taking it very seriously: the hustle bros on Instagram.

I suspect you already recognize the hustle bro genre, but I'll attempt to describe it in case you're not familiar: They're male social media creators who post about workout routines and life hacks, and they're often bodybuilders or extremely fit. They might be focused on financial goals, although the sources of their own flaunted wealth might be obscure (it seems in some cases that they got rich by selling online courses about how to get rich).

They exist somewhere within the broader world of the online manosphere but focus inward on the male self and "mindset" rather than the more explicitly toxic corners that focus outwardly on men's place in society.

Don't call it self-help, call it self-optimization

Journaling has become so mainstream that in 2022, Apple added a Journal app to its default suite of apps baked into the iPhone, prompting people to do a daily reflection as part of its ever-expanding health features.

The mainstream king of all this kind of stuff is Andrew Huberman, the musclebound neuroscientist with an incredibly popular podcast that has popularized all sorts of specific health advice on things like sleep and avoiding alcohol.

Huberman did an hourlong podcast about a "protocol" for journaling, which he said he based on academic research into the benefits of a specific journaling exercise where you write about your most traumatic moment for 15 to 30 minutes a week.

Most of the hustle bros I've seen talking about journaling don't describe a specific journaling method. It's not clear if they want men to reflect on their day, do something more like "The Artist's Way" of "Morning Pages" (a stream-of-consciousness three pages first thing in the morning as a form of creativity), or something more like Huberman's protocol.

Thomas Procopovich is a personal development and sales coach with almost 30,000 followers on Instagram. He's affiliated with Andy Elliott, a sales coach with 2.5 million followers whose content urges men to be physically fit to improve their sales technique.

Procopovich told me that he's been journaling for two years. He's made content about the importance of journaling and mindset. "Men need to be able to write down their thoughts more and see how much they have grown," he told me.

Vinny Brusco, a life coach and host of "The Council of Dudes Podcast," talks often about mental wellness and masculinity. "I think we are seeing a major shift in what mental health looks like in general, especially for men," he told Business Insider.

"It is becoming more and more acceptable for men to be vulnerable and expressive with their feelings. Guys are using different yet old modalities when it comes to mental health. It's almost like we are going back to our roots in some way, with things like cold plunges, saunas, meditating, and even journaling."

This is a group of men who are generally interested in improving themselves in very traditionally masculine ways (getting huge muscles, earning money).

And they're increasingly seeing mental health as part of that improvement. Journaling seems like the perfect vehicle for that.

• The New York Times and other newspapers are in a legal battle with OpenAI over using their content.
• Lawyers for the newspapers are searching OpenAI's training data as part of a discovering process.
• OpenAI accidentally just deleted all the lawyer's work.

An unusual setback has happened in a lawsuit against OpenAI: the company just deleted a bunch of work by the lawyers representing its opposition.

The lawsuit was filed by a group of news organizations including The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune. It accuses OpenAI of using their articles for training and violating their copyrights.

Lawyers for the news organizations have been inspecting OpenAI's training data under a tightly controlled discovery process involving computers without an internet connection.

According to legal filings, there was a snafu last week.

"Since November 1, 2024, the News Plantifs have spent over 150 person-hours searching OpenAI's training data for instances of the News Plaintiff's Asserted Works. The News Plaintiffs stored the results of their searches on two dedicated virtual machines provided by OpenAI," said a filing reviewed by Business Insider.

"On November 14, 2024, the News Plaintiffs learned OpenAI's engineers erased all of the News Plaintiff's programs and search result data that was stored on one of the dedicated virtual machines."

It went on to say that OpenAI had been able to recover some of the data, but not the file structure or file names, which lawyers said made it essentially useless.

It's unclear how the data on the server got erased, but in a second legal filing, a lawyer for the newspapers said that they "have no reason to believe was intentional." (Hey, who among us hasn't accidentally deleted something important?)

Newspaper lawyers are asking the judge to have OpenAI repeat their searches so that they don't have to redo all their (costly) work.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.