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Marcus Johnson (00:00):

Verve's global omnichannel advertising platform redefines what's possible beyond ward gardens. Verve illuminates, connects, and activates high fidelity signals that drive outcomes for brands, agencies, and publishers at scale. Learn more at Verve.com.

(00:19):

Hey gang, it's Monday, April 6th. Ethan, Emmy, and listeners welcome to Behind the Numbers EMARKETER Podcast made possible by Verve. I'm Marcus and joining me for today's conversation. We have two New York based folks. One of them is our principal forecasting writer called Ethan Cramer-Flood.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (00:33):

Marcus, I'm excited to be here today. We got a saucy one.

Marcus Johnson (00:36):

Okay. We're also joined by analyst, Emmy Liederman.

Emmy Liederman (00:41):

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson (00:43):

Hello, Emmy. Glad you're here. Ethan, not so much. Today's fact: California is home to Mount Whitney, which is the highest point in the contiguous US at 14 and a half thousand feet. And California is also home to Death Valley, which is the lowest point in North America at around 300 feet below sea level.

Emmy Liederman (01:10):

Wow. They have it all.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (01:12):

That's the fact.

Marcus Johnson (01:14):

That's all I've got. Yeah. Well, there was this really good graphic visual capitalist showing basically the elevation in the US by state. It was really cool. I mean, I knew the Rockies were high and the rest not so much, but it's so interesting because it really is kind of these blocks of elevation. So, if you draw a line down the middle of America, kind of Minnesota down to Louisiana, the whole right half of the country is basically half the states. It's about a hundred to a thousand feet above sea level, so not very much. All of it. There's no one state which [inaudible 00:01:54]. Then, you've got this strip down the middle kind of North Dakota to Texas, which is about two to two and a half thousand feet, all those states in a row.

(02:03):

Then, you've got the cluster of the Rocky states, the kind of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, a bit of New Mexico, as well.

(02:08):

They're about five and a half to 7,000, so it's like a big jump. And then, the West Coast is like two to 3,000 feet high. I thought it was quite interesting.

Emmy Liederman (02:18):

That is.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:19):

The Death Valley thing is well-known. I did not know the thing about the one big peak in California though.

Marcus Johnson (02:25):

Yeah. In the contiguous, because Alaska Alaska wins when you look at the highest point ever, Denali National Park and Preserve.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:36):

Ah, yeah.

Emmy Liederman (02:36):

[inaudible 00:02:39].

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:38):

Also sounds familiar.

Marcus Johnson (02:41):

Did that feel worth it? You'll never get that time back.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:45):

No, not even close.

Marcus Johnson (02:46):

All right, good. Today's real topic. The ruling that could unravel social media. So, a jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial rights, Bobby Allen of NPR. He explains that in a landmark trial, landmark decision too, the California jury ruled Meta and Google contributed to a woman's childhood social media addiction and resulting depression and anxiety, awarding her $6 million in a rare case, holding tech companies accountable for youth mental health harm. He rightly points out that whilst the financial punishment is minuscule for companies each worth trillions, the decision is still consequential, representing the first time a jury has found social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teens. Meta and Google will both appeal. Meta said teen mental health is quote profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.

(03:52):

And YouTube said, "This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site." The verdict in LA, another case, came a day after a jury in a separate trial in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay nearly $400 million in damages for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook. So, that's the back rounds [inaudible 00:04:14] going on. Emmy, what's your number one takeaway from the rulings?

Emmy Liederman (04:19):

I would say my biggest takeaway is even if the ruling doesn't amount to any major changes in how the platform works immediately or it takes kind of greater pressure for anything with the algorithm to be disrupted, I do think that this is a bit of a morale boost for people who have been saying for all these years that social media is kind of predatory and detrimental to people's mental health, especially kids' and teens' mental health. And I think it also just shifts the conversation away from social media as kind of an individual choice where it's totally up to the user how much time they spend on it and kind of up to their parents to monitor it and shifts it towards social platforms. And I think it'll be interesting to see with potential other trials, people are calling this a bellwether case, meaning that this could be the first of many, how that continues to kind of amp up.

(05:17):

So again, I think it is just kind of a win for people who have made this rally and cry for years that social media is detrimental and kind of deliberately detrimental to people's mental health.

Marcus Johnson (05:32):

Ethan, I mean, do you think this is kind of isolated cases, and it's something that in a few years, we'll have to research to remember what happened? Or do you think that this is... Because it's been talked about as this big tobacco moment that people have been referencing. Mr. Allen of NPR was putting it saying, "The lawyers involved in this case against tech companies view the LA verdict as a promising early sign that the dam is breaking in favor of industry-wide changes."

Ethan Cramer-Flood (05:57):

Yeah. So you asked, what was your first response? And for me, it was definitely my response was, "Wow, this might be for real." And I had to really sort of take a second look at what these conclusions were and then sort of extrapolate into my head the potential severity of what this means. And we'll talk a little bit later about maybe what the future will end up looking like, but just in the short term, I was like, "Wait a minute, this is a significant amount of money considering it's just one person," $6 million, $3 million in damages and $3 million in punitive, 70% for Meta, 30% for YouTube, whatever. It doesn't really matter that much.

(06:37):

The point is that it's one person making a pretty straightforward argument and that there's like 3,000 more cases already underway, basically making exactly the same argument, just in California alone. And if one person has won, obviously we don't know how it's going to go, but if the next person wins and the next person wins, the next person wins, and it's $6 million, we can conservatively assume that the total number of people that are going to be bringing these cases has probably already increased 10X or 20X or 50X or 100X just in California alone.

(07:11):

So, if they lose on the exact same merit, which is basically, "You have produced a faulty product that is harmful," then the liability is going to stretch into the tens of billions pretty quickly.

Marcus Johnson (07:27):

Yeah.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (07:27):

And I was like, "I don't know what they're going to do." If this case is straightforward and other juries agree, they're just going to keep losing. And then, this is why the stock market responded pretty dramatically, and all of a sudden everyone's shares went down. It's like, "Uh-oh, this could be real."

Marcus Johnson (07:45):

Yeah. And it's a large part because the prosecution took a different approach than cases in the past because there's a new strategy of going after how social media's services have been designed, which we've seen has been more successful than going after the content that people see on the platforms because usually social media companies can bat that away with section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which basically says, "Platforms aren't responsible for the content that people post there." They went after, in this case, the design features of the platforms. And so, that's a big reason why they were able to see more success than cases in the past.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (08:29):

YouTube's argument that they're not a social media company really isn't relevant anymore. That argument is out of the old playbook, like "Who cares whether you're social media or what," and this is why people are talking about the AI chatbots possibly becoming, having the same liability. It's just your product. If your product has these faults and causes this damage, it doesn't matter what the label is.

Marcus Johnson (08:49):

Yeah.

Emmy Liederman (08:50):

Yeah. I think one of the most interesting parts of all of this is the ways that Meta and YouTube reacted very differently. Like Meta, as you mentioned before, Marcus, just said, "Teen mental health is profoundly complex and can't be linked to a single app." So, they're kind of redirecting the conversation away from them by saying, "We can't possibly ever talk about teen mental health because it's far too nuanced," which is kind of a great way to just avoid conversation forever. And then, for YouTube, they're just talking about how they're a responsibly-built streaming platform and not a media site, which I found notable because the reason that YouTube has had so much charm and been so effective at keeping people on their platform is because they're actually not just a streaming platform. They're highly capable of recommending you new videos to the point where you feel like you cannot escape the YouTube hole that you fell into.

(09:46):

So, it is not surprising, but notable that they took that route.

Marcus Johnson (09:52):

But it is one of the main arguments that they, and the pushback that they had in this case was that mental health is very complex. And it's hard to judge a case or a situation based on one thing that's happened to a person because things are quite complex. And I think they may be somewhat fairly noted, just to be in their corner for a second, that social media use isn't the whole picture. They're pointing to emotional and physical abuse in this person's, the plaintiff's medical records, indicating that she experienced at home and saying that the plaintiff's therapist never documented that social media use was a factor in her mental health problems. So, I do think we have to be a bit careful to not just say everything that's happened to this person is as a result of this platform.

Emmy Liederman (10:42):

Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think just because it's not totally a direct result of social media doesn't mean that it's an effective counterargument to say mental health is far too complex to associate it with the platform. It's just a bit of a cop out in my opinion.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (11:02):

I mean, I think these arguments are also losing relevance in as much as... That's basically the court of public opinion, the PR battle, right? They're saying that to us as if it matters what we think. It doesn't matter what we think. But then, in the past, so the reason for making these arguments and all of the things that they say when they're called before Congress is because the fear for a long time has been that sea change in society's opinion and then what that might do for political, to the politicians and then the legislation.

(11:32):

So, the big fear is like, "What is Congress going to do? What are state level legislators going to do?" And so, we need to fight this battle, this PR battle in order to sort of head that off at the pass, but that all goes out the window. It just doesn't matter anymore. This is the judicial system, and these are individual lawsuits and individual trial lawyers, and the lawyers don't care about your PR. And if they can win the case based on those merits over and over again, they can talk as much as they want. The PR people can talk as much as they want. It's not going to matter at all because now you're down to just the sort of outcome of the judicial system, and it's just going to happen over and over and over again, if juries continue to find these points invalid, and it seems like that's likely because it seems like this was not that hard of a win as it turns out.

(12:17):

And they'll appeal, but I haven't seen very much analysis that suggested that they're likely... They might get the penalty reduced on appeal, but it doesn't seem very likely that they're going to get this overturned unless they come up with some new information. So yeah, this is no longer about what politicians think or what society thinks. It's about what juries think.

Marcus Johnson (12:38):

The other part which I thought was interesting was the kind of reference and acknowledgement of addiction. So, we've talked about social media use or overuse, but Omri Ben-Shahar, a law professor at University of Chicago is saying, "What is new is the addiction element." And there was one addiction study, I think it was in that NPR piece I was reading, Dr. Jason Nagarta, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, who found teens had habits that mirror symptoms of addiction to substances like withdrawal and impaired functioning. Researchers asking 11 and 12 year olds to respond to statements like, "I've tried to use my social media app less, but I can't." Or, "I've become stressed or upset when I'm not allowed to use my social media apps on a scale of one never, six very often." 16% said they tried but failed to use social media less, and 23% said that they spent a lot of time thinking about their social media app.

(13:29):

So, I thought the addiction element is another reason that the tide does feel like it's turning on social media.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (13:38):

All you got to do is find 10,000 kids in this country that can make that argument, and every one of those families is going to win their cases, and these companies are going to be on the verge of bankruptcy. So, this is why I'm like, "Whoa, this could be very real, and the future could look different."

Marcus Johnson (13:53):

[inaudible 00:13:54]. Please, Emmy.

Emmy Liederman (13:54):

And I think, also, the argument that social media is addictive kind of used to be seen as trivial because addiction is a very strong word. So, people were like, "Oh, I guess I'm addicted to my phone, but it's not really the end of the world. It could never be comparable to other things that we accept are addictive." But now, I think people are kind of moving from that denial to more of an acceptance phase, where if you talk to someone who decided to take a break from social media, the response is, "Oh wow, that's awesome. Good for you," opposed to, "Why would you do that?" So, I think there is this collective acknowledgement that these platforms can be harmful to people's mental health.

(14:42):

One example that I think really highlights this is the popularity of this new product called a Brick. I don't know if you guys have seen it on social media or not, but it is like a physical tile that you can buy and put on.

(14:56):

The way it works is basically it's like a magnet that you put in your house, and then you have to brick your phone, and it locks you out of all these platforms. Then, when you come back home at the end of the day and use the magnet, you can access them again. And I just think this shift away from using an app that may help you manage your social media time to investing in a physical product, it just reminds me a lot of nicotine gum or a nicotine patch or something.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (15:21):

Yeah. I was going to say.

Emmy Liederman (15:22):

It does just feel different that people are spending real money on a physical product to change their behaviors.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (15:28):

Extensive effort to address addiction.

Emmy Liederman (15:31):

Yeah.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (15:32):

It's astounding. And hearing you say that reminded me of something else. If we want to take this even one step further, the tobacco companies didn't just get in trouble for what this was doing to kids. They got in trouble for what it was doing to everyone.

Emmy Liederman (15:46):

Right.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (15:46):

They were hiding the fact that their product was bad for everyone. So far, this social media storyline has focused on lawsuits related to kids because that's probably the path of least resistance to get a legal settlement, but you could very easily transition this into their products hurt everyone. And then, you are talking about a very big [inaudible 00:16:06]. Why is it only against the rules to put out a defensive product that harms mental health of kids? No, also, if you put out a defective product that's hurting all of us, then that actually opens up the world of lawsuits to all of us, which is either good or bad news.

Emmy Liederman (16:19):

It had to get bad enough to impact kids for people to pay attention [inaudible 00:16:24] or kids need to kind of be the headline for the conversation to change.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (16:29):

Yeah. Exactly.

Marcus Johnson (16:31):

Yeah. Speaking of headlines, we don't have to look very far, very hard, to find headlines that indicate that the tide might be turning slightly on social media use. Marisa Jones was noting that Gen Zer's TikTok appetite might be waning. According to a report from the Harris Poll cited by Media Post finding Gen Zers have lost trust in TikTok since its transition to US ownership. 74% think more critically about how they engage with the app. 60% trust TikTok less. The Snapchat, as well. Quantum's financials had showed signs of softening user growth in 2025. And Ethan, you've just put out some research on how much time people are spending with social platforms, over social platforms. When we look at the actual numbers, how much are Americans using social networks and what stands out to you about their usage?

Ethan Cramer-Flood (17:21):

Yeah, it depends how you look at it. So, there's a case being made on both sides here. So, sometimes what you hear is the social media heads, particularly in their trials against antitrust, and when they're arguing back against the government in recent times, they've said, "Hey, look, we're not even that big of a deal. The story has sort of passed. There's lots and lots of other media out there. The total amount of time, how many people and the total amount of time they're spending with social media is actually not that big, and it's plateaued, and in some cases it's going down." And all that's kind of true.

(17:58):

On the other hand, if you look at the total numbers, they still seem outrageous. The average American spends more than an hour and a half per day with social networks. The active users spend more than two hours a day.

(18:10):

These are really, really big numbers. They become less outrageous when you realize that we spend 13 hours a day with some form of media. So, that's true. And then, the other thing that is correct is that a lot of these numbers have started to go down. So, Facebook has been losing share of people's attention for a long time now. TikTok, as you mentioned, had been on a slight downward trend over the last couple years. That's sort of stabilized.

(18:34):

And social media, in general, is not really growing. We as a society have sort of plateaued in terms of the amount of time. It had been going up, up, up, up, up forever. And then recently, it's sort of stopped going up. And by our forecast, at least, users will start to go down even, it's like like a minute or two or whatever, over the next few years, because indeed some things like TikTok are no longer really driving increasing engagement. So, you could make the case that, as they say, why are you picking on us when people spend even more time with Netflix, or actually YouTube really, which we count as an OTT, as they'd be happy to hear. People spend a lot of time doing lots and lots of other things besides just social networks, and we as a society have stopped growing, but it's still pretty big.

Marcus Johnson (19:21):

Yeah. It is fascinating to see that, I mean Nick's, we have hit a bit of a tipping point, especially according to our forecast. Like Ethan said, next year, minutes will... Basically, they're flat. Americans won't be spending more time on social media this year than they will next year. If anything, over the next few years past that is going to be going down a bit, particularly when you look at the share of that digital time and how much goes to social media versus things like streaming, that Ethan mentioned. What stands out to you, Emily, about the social media use of Americans?

Emmy Liederman (19:55):

So, I think the increase in popularity of Reddit is really interesting. I think for a while, Reddit was kind of considered this fringe platform that had sort of odd, not socially-acceptable conversations happening on it. And I think now it's shifted to be a destination where people go if they want to relate to people on a conversation or build community or simply just get an answer to their questions. Whether or not that is a vetted correct answer or not is a different story. But I think it speaks to the fact that even though the advertising kind of arm of Reddit is increasing, there is some fatigue on TikTok,, just because of the sheer amount of ads and products that are being pushed to people all the time and this over consumption. And I think people just miss social media as true social destinations and being able to communicate with peers.

(20:56):

And I think because platforms like TikTok have really deprioritized that, it makes a lot of sense to me that Reddit is coming out on top.

Marcus Johnson (21:06):

Yeah. I mean, for context, Ethan, I mean, it's not just that Reddit has seen a lot of growth recently. It's that people are spending more time on Reddit than LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, a lot of these platforms, which people may assume get more attention.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (21:23):

Yeah. It's more fun for me to talk about all the negative side of the story and all the ones that are going down because Snapchat losing users and losing time spent, X has been shedding users and shedding time spent ever since it's changed over from Twitter. But there's a flip side. So, Reddit is just going like gangbusters. Instagram is also still very much on an upward trajectory, and that's obviously one of the big boys. So, they continue to gain users and gain time every year, and in fact, will probably overtake Facebook. So, it'll be the first time in history, something other than Facebook will be the leading... I mean, if you're Meta, you don't care. With Meta, it's like, "All right. Well, we're still one and two, whatever." TikTok is not actually going to end up catching them. But yeah, to Reddit's credit, they have, in very short order, pulled ahead of a lot of their much older competitors, and they're going to account for about 10% of social time, I think by next year.

Marcus Johnson (22:19):

Mm-hmm. So, we said we've already seen time spent on social plateau. For most, it's going down. For some, very few, it's going up a little bit. And so, we won't be able to link these social media addiction trials directly to, "Oh, okay, this event happened, and that's why social media plateaued." It already did. Maybe we'll see it have some kind of impact later down the line, especially as the kids who might be kind of protected from social media today, what does their behavior look like in a couple of years as they become adults, as they become users of social media in the future? And one of the things that's going to dictate that are the changes that are going to be implemented by the respective interests, one of them is New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who said he'll ask the court to make Meta change its apps to make them safer.

(23:23):

So, Ethan, I'll come to you first for this one. What changes do you expect to see as a result of the social media addiction trial verdict?

Ethan Cramer-Flood (23:29):

Yeah, there's the safety element, and then there's the addiction element. So, the safety stuff is probably a little bit more straightforward. That's probably something that politicians will get involved with. That's when you're looking at this proliferation of age verification or maybe just outright bans. Okay, other countries are doing this. No one under the age of 14 can just be on at all. And then, after that, you have some sort of parental permission. And then, in order to implement this, you force these companies to verify the age of their users, and then you extract penalties if they fail to do so. This is something that probably all of society is rapidly getting behind, and individual states can do it on their own, and they're going to probably start to do it on their own. That's different than the addiction thing though, the faulty product thing and the causing harm. That's a big one.

(24:18):

And that's when we get into some very serious notions of really threatening the business model. Because if these social networks have to abandon everyone under the age of 13, they're still going to keep going. They're still going to be fine. They'll be upset about it, but they'll still be some of the most powerful tech companies in history. But if they are forced to change the fundamental design of their apps to get rid of these addictive elements, in other words, get rid of infinite scroll, for instance, not that the government will force them to get rid of infinite scroll, but that basically that lawyers will force them to get rid of it because they're going to lose so much money again and again and again and again and again, that they're going to be facing bankruptcy unless they voluntarily choose to change their own product.

(25:00):

This is an extreme outcome. I have no idea if it's going to happen, but it's not unreasonable for all of us to start thinking about a future where social media apps do not have infinite scroll. And then, we start to think about, "What does that do to the advertising industry?"

Marcus Johnson (25:13):

Yeah. Yeah. infinite scroll, notifications, the auto-playing videos, algorithmic content recommendations. Beauty filters was something they were talking about, even health warnings on screens. A lot of these things could change people's behavior. And what does that do, to Ethan's point, to the business model? Emmy, what about you? What any kind of changes are you not looking for, but maybe expecting in the future?

Emmy Liederman (25:36):

Yeah. So, I think with infinite scroll, my mind also goes to how popular livestream is and whether that's going to be disrupted. Not that livestream is kind of a central use case of social media. It's still a little bit of a niche use. But if you think about the creators that go live on a platform like TikTok, they're going live for hours and hours on end and kind of building these parasocial relationships with people, and they're completely able to monetize just from their audience and sometimes not even ads or brand deals. So, I think that is sort of tangential to the conversation about infinite scroll because it can just be such a time suck. And the other thing I'm thinking about is just the impact on the creator economy, because even the brands that work with creators that seem to be safe and not aligned with what children are interested in are suddenly lately have had to reconsider that.

(26:35):

I mean, if you think about the whole Sephora kids movement, I guess you could say, of young girls seeing serums and all this advanced skincare, all these advanced skincare products that are definitely not catered to them, finding these products and asking their parents to go to Sephora to get them and all that stuff. I think that just goes to show that creators have a much bigger impact on young people, especially young girls, and that is a significant part of their audience. So, it just does just have me wondering, from the safety perspective, if social media does change and there's a lot more precautions among young users, what would that do for creators and brand deals?

Marcus Johnson (27:25):

Yeah. Yeah. There are so many things to consider the kind of fallout from all of this. One of them I thought was the kind of skepticism over the protection of Section 230, which these companies have really leaned on heavily to keep going and deflect a lot of the criticism that they've got on what's going on in their platforms. And the pressure or the concern over the Communications Decency Act might be growing. Senate Commerce Committee recently held a hearing to discuss that very piece of legislation. So, it'd be very interesting to see if that changes at all.

(28:08):

The other thing I thought was of note was Marisa Jones, who's one of our analysts, she was writing implications for marketers. One of the points she made was, "The decision," she said, "doesn't mean Meta or YouTube are less viable ad channels given their scale, but it does raise questions of how marketers will approach youth-centric media plans in the future.The risk of being associated with platforms causing measurable harm to minors presents reputational and governance concerns. Marketers will likely have to exercise increased caution with that content they promote," sorry, "what content they promote to platforms with large youth audiences."

Emmy Liederman (28:41):

One other angle that could come from this trial and whatever legislation is to follow is this perhaps like a shift in how much social platforms are trying to innovate when it comes to AI. That has definitely been a focus with Meta. We see that they're trying out a bunch of different AI tools and smart glasses, so both inside and outside of the platform, but whatever damage social media is already causing to kids with the introduction of AI, you can only imagine how much more severe that could possibly get.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (29:18):

Great point.

Emmy Liederman (29:18):

I think--

Ethan Cramer-Flood (29:19):

It doesn't sound like they're heading in the right direction at all.

Emmy Liederman (29:22):

Right, right. The idea of having a chatbot that will basically just reaffirm everything that you think about the world as a child and also act as your companion and maybe even replace real-life connection, you can just see how the issues that we already have are only going to snowball, or could potentially snowball, with more AI centric platforms. So, I wonder if this ruling is going to shift that priority a bit.

Marcus Johnson (29:52):

Yeah.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (29:53):

And also, the liability precedent is a major threat to existing chatbots, just ChatGPT and Gemini and all the rest, in as much as we've already seen in the news incredibly terribly horrifying outcomes for kids and adults related to these chatbots. However, the AI companies will have the defense of, "We are fixing it. We are changing it. We're doing something to make this problem not be here anymore." Whereas, for the social media companies, it's the fundamental nature of their product.

Emmy Liederman (30:30):

Right.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (30:30):

They're not doing anything to get rid of the addictive elements because the addictive elements are why they're a successful business. So, it is different. And YouTube is also the third angle. YouTube probably has a whole bunch of different ways to sort of work around this and change how their system works. I could see a backdoor for YouTube, but I don't see a backdoor for Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. I mean, I think there's big trouble coming.

Marcus Johnson (30:54):

Yeah. A lot of this legislation is already kind of half on the book. Dr. Nagarta, pointing to regulations proposed in the Kids Online Safety Act that passed the Senate in 2024, it's been stuck in the house ever since. That includes things he says like design changes for restricting infinite scroll, personalized feeds, notifications for minors, and things like that. But we'll see. That's all we've got time for for today's episode. Thank you so much to my guests. Thank you first to Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (31:19):

Thank you, Marcus. This was a good one. See, I promised sauce, and we brought the sauce.

Emmy Liederman (31:23):

We did.

Marcus Johnson (31:24):

Well, two of us did. Thank you to Emmy.

Emmy Liederman (31:30):

Thank you for having me. This was great.

Marcus Johnson (31:30):

Yes, indeed. Thank you so much to the production crew, as well. Who do we have? We've got John and Luigi hanging out in the background. Thank you guys so much for helping out today, and thank you to everyone for listening to Behind the Numbers EMARKETER Podcast made possible by Verve. Subscribe and follow. Leave a racing review if you can. They really, really do help. Suzie will be here on Wednesday talking about whether or not the world still needs department stores, and I hope to see you on Friday. Oh, now I've got the siren. Maybe it's just in my head. [inaudible 00:32:07].

Emmy Liederman (32:07):

I hope not.

Marcus Johnson (32:07):

I think it's gone. But just so... It was one of the arguments they were making, right, that mental health is a very complex issue. But to... Oh my God, it's back. Sorry, one second.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (32:25):

I think it's you. I don't hear anything.

Emmy Liederman (32:26):

I'm nervous for you, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (32:28):

I need to lie down. All right. All right, cool.