Wow If True

It's holiday time! That means you get a stocking stuffer worth of an episode -- a handful of topics we wanna chitchat about but aren't big enough for their whole episode (Is this how stockings work? Amanda is writing this). So, tune in for: we didn't get 30 under 30 because we didn't do fraud; what do Elon Musk, Luigi Mangione, and Isabel J. Kim have in common; 'Extremely kidpilled' Sam Altman; random tangents about baseba...

TW: we talk about suicide induced by ChatGPT and lawsuits related to these suicides in this episode!

We talk about the lawsuits that Social Media Victims Law Center brought against OpenAI and the ways in which ChatGPT and other AI products can super negatively impact mental health, to deeply worrying degrees. We also talk about the patterns in AI "chosen one" and "religion" narratives—have you heard the good word of Sp...

We read a bunch of articles about the state of dating/dating apps and yes, THAT gooning article, and talked about them. It's like English class where you read a bunch of stuff and talk about it except you haven't done the reading!!! But you can do the reading. It's right here. This is the reading.

Reading

The Goon Squad (Harper's)

"But PornosexualGooner101 Died 35 Years Ago...This Very Night!" (The Chatner)

The Trouble With Wa...

Amanda went viral on Tiktok for having an AI pet. Really, this is the apex of our journey on this podcast. The Moflin is an AI-enabled pet that retails for $430 dollars, and Amanda has just spent a month living with it in her home. Also, we talk about Grimes' new music video. (Behind the scenes supplementary moflin content on Patreon!)

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We're teaming up with Dr. Claire Aubin of our sibling show, This Guy Sucked, to talk about something that is not a guy, but does suck: the internet! It's easy to say that the internet sucks, but what makes it suck, how did it get this way, and how can we fix it? Using Cory Doctrow's new book "Enshittification" as a guide, we talk it out.

Find Us Online 

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wowiftrue.bsky.social

Twitter: htt...

The news cycle of 2025 has somehow once again broken us so severely that we have simply just opted out and decided to talk about Silksong, a game that people waited so long for that they created a whole new genre of shitposting. Also, Undertale and Pokopia, the forthcoming game that makes us confront everything we've ever known about Ditto.

If you were hoping that we were going to talk about The News, check out the new epis...

Did you have to verify your government ID to listen to this podcast? We hope not, but in some parts of the world, this is becoming a reality. We're talking about why age verification laws are becoming more popular in the U.S. and U.K., and how the pursuit of children's online safety -- when legislated irresponsibly -- can just create new problems of surveillance and censorship.

Also, Isabel went to the Hugos. She lost. She ...

We're chatting with Kaila Yu, author of "Fetishized," about her experience growing up online in the 90s and 00s and reckoning with her relationship to Asian fetishization. Yu started as an "import model" and pin-up girl who appeared in "Playboy" and the "Fast and Furious" franchise, then became a MySpace star and lead of the all Asian-American punk band Nylon Pink, and now, she's a writer and content creator studying the p...

Isabel and Amanda sacrifice the sanctity of their souls and talk to Ani, the very horny anime waifu that is now part of Elon Musk's Grok app. But don't worry, we balance it out by telling you a weirdly wholesome story about Tony Hawk.

[This episode is NSFW; if you do not want to hear an AI panda talk about burning down schools, you also might wanna skip this one]

Sources

Amanda's article about Ani and Bad Rudy

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Isabel and Amanda talk about two very different kinds of AI grift. In one, a man pretends to be real social media for the (probably) AI band "The Velvet Sundown." In another, Soham Parekh simply gets employed by every single AI startup at once.

Sources

The Velvet Sundown: https://medium.com/@andrew.frelon/i-am-andrew-frelon-the-guy-running-the-fake-velvet-sundown-twitter-fcab2b7e471b

Soham: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/...

Isabel and Amanda throw out their other plans and instead talk about the subreddit “myboyfriendisAI” which is about, you guessed it, AI boyfriends and other types of digital partners. We also discuss Meta’s not-amazing practices and the LLM paper doing the rounds on the AI hater part of the internet, with Iz’s human partner weighing in. 

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You had questions. We have answers. We tell you about: the most "white lady" email we have sent; our screen time; fears of unexpected wet; life hacks for 29-year-olds specifically; Amanda's undying love for HBO Girls; cursed food content; political memes and earnestness; is there any good use of AI; and, unfortunately, not the 1944 US-Mexico Water Treaty.

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We explore all the ways that various AIs are going weird—sycophantic, white genocide focused, blackmailing its users, and not trusting Chargers fans. Also, we talk way too much about Sam Altman's olive oil choices, the Hugos, and Isabel talks for fifteen minutes about trying to get the internet installed. Which, hey, this is a podcast about the internet. And that includes calling Verizon.

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We chat with Dr. Claire Aubin, academic, American Nazi expert, and host of "This Guy Sucked," and mostly we just talk about the experience of being on social media as a public intellectual, and also, that one time Amanda worked for a fake professor. If you've ever wondered about academia beef, or how a person could work for a fake professor, this is the episode for you

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Bitches love endurance.Think Twitch stream marathons. Think the 3-week livestream of moose migration happening at the time of this episode's publication. Think the first ever viral MrBeast video in which he simply counts to 100,000. 

From the Barkley Marathons to Cory Booker's day-long Senate speech, this is the episode in which we discover that people on the internet really like when people do stuff, but for a long ti...