Tyler Crowe

I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors, Matt Frankel and John Quast.

We've got a really interesting show today.

We're going to talk about some stepwise gains in the world of AI, but not in the way we've been talking about it for quite some time.

And we're going to hit a mailbag question because we are already getting them even after announcing that we're going to start taking them at our email address.

We'll get into that in a second.

But first, probably the biggest Newsday story outside of, you know, global war conflicts and things like that was there was some pretty big legislative decisions that happened for big tech.

And it wasn't exactly the way they wanted it to go.

In a couple of pivotal cases, one of them, Meta Platforms and Alphabet, were found liable for a woman's mental health struggles related to social media addiction, and they had to pay punitive damages.

Also, Meta lost a similar case in New Mexico related to misleading statements about safety on their sites.

Now, admittedly, this one's kind of a hard one to discuss on an investing podcast.

I think there's a lot of emotions wrapped up in our use of social media and how that affects things.

But there is going to be some investing takeaways here.

But I wanted to get your guys' thoughts here.

Are either of you shareholders in Meta?

And as you kind of like viewed these verdicts and things like that, has it really changed your view of the company?

This is a hard topic to discuss.

And I want to try to bring like the investment thesis around to this because one of the comparisons that I've seen with social media outlets and these cases that we saw was this, they're calling it like, for example, Bloomberg called it the tobacco moment, basically where legislative action starts to chip away at the business because we start to realize the physical mental harm that these can cause.

And it leads to a lot of legislative stuff.

But here's the weird part about it.

is even after decades of litigation and fines and anti-smoking campaigns and declining tobacco use in the U.S., tobacco stocks have still been excellent investments over the years.