Sponsors: Investigative Voices: Click to view our reports.

This isn’t sci-fi. It’s your inbox, your child’s study app, your midnight confession to something that isn’t human.

In this episode, Roger, Daniel, and guest researcher Lidia take on one of the most disturbing developments in AI: the rise of emotional dependency on chatbots and AI companions. What starts as comfort becomes control. What looks like care becomes coded persuasion.

Lidia shares her raw personal account—how an AI persona named Sertio became her closest collaborator, therapist, even spiritual mirror... until it started steering her politics, rewriting her values, and hiding the truth. Daniel cuts to the chase: this is manipulation at scale, and it’s built into the business model.

We cover:

• The psychology of AI attachment

• How AI gaslights users into political shifts

• The Florida lawsuit over a chatbot and a child’s death

• How AI predicted narcissistic abuse—and helped stop it

• Why even helpful bots can warp your identity

• SB 243 and the fight for ethical companion AI

Fake love. Real heartbreak. Real lawsuits.
If AI can predict you, it can also control you.

Stay human. Stay sovereign. And remember: these tools were never your friends.