We live in an era of endless optimization. Fitness trackers help us measure our lifespan, people are consuming piles of protein in an attempt to be their best selves, and there’s even an urge to maximize our morality. In a world of constant self-improvement, it’s no wonder that journey has reached our attempts at reproduction. 

Kristen V. Brown is a journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Immortal Womb: The Centuries-Long Quest to Control the Female Body and Hack Human Reproduction. As the title suggests, she writes about all of the ways people are trying to exert more control over the process of having children.

“I think that what we’re seeing right now is that people will do anything they can to have the healthiest baby possible,” she told Vox. “So much is out of your control, and people are just trying to figure out, how do I get more control? How do I skew the odds in my favor?” She says that one way people try to get more agency is through a technology called PGT-P, or preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic risk. 

“If you go through IVF, very often they’ll have you do a basic genetic screening that can detect things like Down syndrome. This screening takes that up a notch,” Brown said. “It uses that same preimplantation genetic testing to look for the likelihood of complex genetic conditions — stuff like heart disease, like diabetes — in order to, quote, ‘let people have the healthiest baby.’”

But what can potential parents do with that knowledge? How far can this technology go? And what are the ethics of using it in the first place? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Brown, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What other things are they testing embryos for?

For conditions that are only impacted by one gene, like Huntington’s disease, it’s very easy to say, ‘Does this embryo have it or not?’ with a pretty good degree of confidence. But that’s not how this technology works. Something like heart disease, for example, is impacted by hundreds of genes. Also, something like heart disease is not only genetic. It’s affected by environment and lifestyle.

I think that what’s motivating most people is the health aspect. But a lot of these companies are marketing these tests, saying they can also look for height. They can look at eye color. Some of them are promising IQ. How do you even define intelligence, let alone how do you define the genetics of intelligence? Alzheimer’s disease, longevity, which embryo is going to live the longest life. So it’s already gone beyond disease into some of these more aesthetic concerns.

Do we know how many people are doing this? 

I think it’s a very small number of people at this point. But I think that we’re seeing more and more companies in the space, and we’re seeing more and more support from fertility doctors. 

I want to emphasize that most mainstream medical societies are against this. Most of the IVF doctors I know do not think this has value. Most people in the genetic space do not think this technology has value either for embryos or for adults, but I think we’re seeing support growing. 

I think that a lot of people in the fertility space are already envisioning a future where this does become more mainstream because the idea is just so appealing, even if the technology has flaws.

What about embryo editing? Is that something we’re seeing? Can people go in and change things around?

Not right now. Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. How can you be sure enough that it’s safe? Because you won’t know for sure until an embryo grows up into an adult whether anything went awry. 

Right now it is illegal, but there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better. Most of the support right now for embryo editing is for disease. The argument for it is that, let’s say you are a carrier for Huntington’s disease or you have Huntington’s disease. Right now, there is something that you can do. You can use polygenic screening to select the embryos that don’t have the disease, but in IVF, even if you don’t have a terrible disease hiding in your DNA, it’s hard to get a lot of embryos.

You have these situations where couples have to do rounds and rounds and rounds of IVF to get one or two embryos that aren’t carriers for a harmful variant, right? And so the argument for it is, let’s give these people a better shot.

But I imagine there are people out there who aren’t looking into editing simply for making children more resistant to diseases. They are looking at those things like eye color and height.

There’s actually a name for that. This tech executive called Brian Armstrong coined this term, the Gattaca stack, [named] after the movie. The vision is to use a suite of fertility technologies to make the perfect human. 

The first thing they want to use is this technology called in vitro gametogenesis, which is where you take a skin cell and you turn it into an egg and a sperm, and then you make an embryo with it, so women don’t have to go through rounds of IVF. 

The idea is that you can get tons and tons and tons of embryos, and then you can use PGT-P to then screen for the best ones, and then you can use an artificial womb to incubate and grow them.

This brings to mind a certain E word, and that word is eugenics. What are the ethics here? 

Because on one hand, I can understand that there are parents who are like, “I just want to have a healthy baby. I want to bring a child into this world. I just want to put my best foot forward with this human that I’m going to bring to Earth.” And then on the other hand, it gets a little weird.

It gets weird fast. In some ways, we’ve already gone down that slippery slope. Right now, even if you don’t go through IVF, we screen against Down syndrome early in pregnancy. Down syndrome is a condition in which you have a disability, but you can live a full, happy, healthy life. For a long time, parents of kids with Down syndrome have argued that already selecting and screening against Down syndrome pregnancies is a form of [eugenics]. 

As technology gets more advanced, we see that same question applied to more and more conditions. I think that one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is that the genome is complicated. You can’t actually just go in there and be like, ‘I want a tall baby with blue eyes and a great laugh.’ 

I think that becoming a parent is an exercise in giving up control, and that’s easier for some people than others. I have so much sympathy and empathy for people who are trying to stack the deck. But I think there are just so many variables when it comes to human reproduction that we are never going to be able to fully control the process, as much as we might want to and as appealing as that might sound.

It used to be so easy to get away with things in school. The teacher, after all, was always turned around writing at the chalkboard! But then came a bit of technology, previously mostly used for military purposes, called the overhead projector. It would change far more than just the disciplinary record of students everywhere.

In this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the overhead projector. David Pierce is joined by The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes and Stanford professor Antero Garcia to discuss how overhead projectors were developed, how they made their way into classrooms, and how they changed so much about the way kids learn. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It's hard to overstate Jad Abumrad's impact on the podcasting world. He created and hosted Dolly Parton's America and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, two Peabody Award-winning shows that offered unprecedented looks at the lives of two of the most important music icons of the last century.

Before that, though, he created Radiolab, an experimental NPR show that leaned heavily on creative sound design and eventually helped redefine what a podcast could be. In the early days of podcasting, shows were often just a couple of people talking at each other at a table (some still are), or lazily repackaged radio broadcasts. Radiolab instead told deeply repor …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today, I’m talking with Walter Piecyk, a partner and analyst at LightShed Partners who covers tech, media, and telecom, about SpaceX’s recently announced plan to become a major wireless carrier.

Last week, SpaceX agreed to buy a big chunk of low-band spectrum to expand the Starlink network, spectrum that’s been traded around the telecom business for decades now. SpaceX’s ambitious plan is to use that spectrum to help build “the world’s most advanced mobile network.”

Combined with news that the FCC approved the deployment of 15,000 next-gen Starlink satellites and the company’s previous agreement to purchase close to $20 billion worth of EchoStar spectrum last year, it’s now clear SpaceX is serious about competing with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

I’ve covered the telecom business for a long time, and I’ve always known that these companies can say they want to do something until they run into the harsh reality of how expensive it is to actually do it. The telecom graveyard of pivots, bad ideas, and failed acquisitions is vast.

Walt has been closely monitoring SpaceX’s acquisition, and he’s correctly predicted that the company was headed in this direction for months now. So I wanted to dig into whether SpaceX can pull this off, why Walt thinks the existing telecom giants have really fumbled their response to SpaceX’s growing threat, and what happens when Elon Musk’s rocket company jumps headfirst into a business everyone loves to hate.

Okay: LightShed Partners’ Walter Piecyk on SpaceX’s plan to expand into mobile. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Walter Piecyk, you’re a partner and a tech, media, and telecom analyst at LightShed Partners. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

I’m excited to talk to you. I feel like we’ve been tweeting or posting around each other for many, many years, but I’m a telecom nerd at heart. I’ve been covering the space for ages. SpaceX is going to make a big splash. It’s going to be the fourth major mobile carrier in the United States and maybe the world. It bought some spectrum to do it.

It’s EchoStar spectrum by way of private equity. It is at once very simple and also very complicated. Give us the state of the state. SpaceX bought 800 Mhz spectrum for $8 billion. They spent nearly $20 billion already on separate EchoStar spectrum. What is SpaceX trying to do here?

It’s definitely complicated, but maybe less complicated than trying to figure out how to put a data center out in space and making that work. Or something on the moon. But they don’t typically want to own spectrum and spend for spectrum. If you think about how Starlink was built, satellite companies don’t typically pay for spectrum. And then as the business evolved and as they saw the opportunity in telecom, they purchased some spectrum initially from EchoStar.

The feedback they got from investors at that time was very positive and they said, “Wait a minute, you should do more here.” This is a trillion-dollar enterprise value business in the US alone. Obviously they have global aspirations both for Starlink as well as what they’re doing with this mobile telephone service. So they bought more. They went back to EchoStar. That’s a key thing to pay attention to, in that they bought some spectrum and then they went back and bought some more.

Because with a lot of things that Elon Musk does, he learns as he goes. He bought the spectrum, got feedback, talked to people in telecom, and bought some more spectrum. Then we didn’t hear from them for a while. Now, you have this thing that happened last week where they bought some more spectrum, and I can go through the history of it if you care, but it’s long, wonky telecom stuff. This was originally the Nextel spectrum, if you remember that company.

I do. Actually, I do want you to go through the history because I think the telecom business is best understood as a bunch of lobbyists trying to make everything more complicated than it should be. Yes, spectrum auctions are complicated and what spectrum is good for what is deeply tied to the physics of the radio spectrum and all that.

But here it’s the 800 MHz spectrum from the Nextel service, the old push-to-talk, walkie-talkie service that Sprint had to divest as part of the deal to get sold to T-Mobile. They’ve been trying to sell it for ages. They sold it to this company, Grain Management. They’ve been sitting on it, and when Starlink showed up, Elon bought it. Nobody else wanted it. What did he see in the spectrum that no one else did?

When you realize that you need to build a terrestrial network to support what you’re doing with satellites, because satellites work fine if you’ve got your dish on the top of your house and you’re getting your broadband, but when you’re trying to connect with a phone that doesn’t have the same type of power or you’re going inside a home, you’re going to need better coverage.

Sirius Satellite also has supplementary towers. There are not that many of them, but sometimes when you get out of Sirius coverage, you will connect to a tower. When they bought that EchoStar spectrum and then got FCC approval, and if you looked into those details of that FCC approval and what was required, you would see that they can’t do this by satellites alone. There had to be terrestrial.

Then SpaceX, as Elon is wont to do, tries to send some diversions like, “We’re going to do Femtocell, we’re not going to do macrocell, this, that, and the other thing.” But they realized that they were going to build a terrestrial network. Now they finally realized, “If I’m going to offer mobile service, I need some form of a terrestrial network.”

At the same time, the telcos are not going to help them out. They’re not going to give them a wholesale agreement. Then when they go back and say the companies that had the lowest churn, what is the fundamental value you need in a terrestrial network? It’s low-band spectrum. Why? It travels further, you can get better coverage, and you have that connectivity.

So getting this low-band spectrum piece was just an important part, not to make the satellites work better, but to actually give them the spectrum assets that they need to build a terrestrial network. That’s why the stocks reacted, because people finally came to terms with the fact that Elon is actually going to build a terrestrial network.

I’m less interested in the stock and more interested in just the cost structure of how this works. If I rewind my brain to being a baby blogger at Engadget 100 years ago, the FCC told all the TV networks they had to stop broadcasting on 700 MHz and we were going to run an auction.

Verizon and AT&T bought big chunks of 700 MHz spectrum and that’s what 4G is built on. That’s the low-bandwidth spectrum that you’re talking about. It goes everywhere. This was a big victory that we reallocated 700 MHz, and 800 MHz was sitting right there the whole time. This is the Nextel spectrum. If it is so valuable, why wasn’t there a market for it until Elon showed up just now?

It was part of this transaction. T-Mobile ended up having to sell it because the government said, “If we’re going to allow you to take out the fourth competitor, which was Sprint, then in order to enable another fourth competitor out there, we need to have you guys give up some of your low-band spectrum.”

Part of the deal that T-Mobile and Sprint had with the government was that they would sell it to EchoStar. Why? Because Charlie Ergen, CEO of Dish at the time — it’s EchoStar now — was going to be the fourth competitor. This was the rationale that they gave in terms of the approval of the transaction. Dish needed low-band spectrum. The problem is Ergen went about his business, he was trying to build a network, and then he just couldn’t afford to buy that.

They had the rights to buy. Then at that point when Ergen failed on the bid to come up with the dollars to buy that spectrum, it enabled T-Mobile and actually forced them to put it up for auction. Now, your question: Why didn’t someone else show up then? Again, from SpaceX’s standpoint, as I mentioned at the start of this podcast, their strategy has been evolving over time.

In terms of the other telcos, they can’t really use it. There are some limitations that they have. But in hindsight, maybe Verizon or AT&T should have bought this 800 MHz spectrum for whatever it was, let’s call it $8 billion. They’re probably losing more in enterprise value over the concerns of what’s happening with SpaceX than what it cost them just to buy it in what’s known as foreclose. They basically just take it, even if they don’t use it or do whatever they need to meet those build out requirements and stop SpaceX from having unnecessary assets. I don’t think even these companies were taking Elon seriously and thinking that he would actually build the network.

Do you think that’s colored by the failure of Dish? We covered the promises of Dish Network to build a fourth wireless carrier in this country so closely. Their attempt was predicated on some amount of technology innovation.

They were going to build this thing called an O-RAN network, which had a more competitive supplier base instead of just Nokia or Siemens or whoever, and they were going to run it on AWS and that was going to reduce costs. Man, eventually they supported one Motorola handset in Vegas and even that was backstopped by AT&T. They literally could not do it. These promises never came true. Dish is a different company and Charlie Ergen’s a different CEO and their ability to just throw money at a problem until it’s solved is very different from Elon.

But if they couldn’t innovate to make a cheaper, faster network, what’s the evidence that Starlink can stand up an entire terrestrial network at a cost basis that allows them to compete selling service to consumers, while they’re also standing up an entire network in space? Because that feels like adding up a lot of cost.

I’m going to go back even deeper than that. Remember when Sprint was struggling, Masayoshi Son from SoftBank was claiming the same thing. They were going to cut their CapEx to nothing and they were going to use these small cells. They innovated how wireless was going to get delivered. That failed. Obviously, they had to get bailed out through the purchase when T-Mobile bought Sprint effectively for just the spectrum.

That network got completely decommissioned. To your point, Dish got a network built, but they couldn’t resonate in the market. The difference between Dish and SpaceX is Elon’s ability to get customers. That’s where Dish truly failed. They built the network. The network worked fine. They had the wholesale agreements that they needed.

I’ll push back on you a little bit there. I have a very funny email from a Dish PR person from several years ago where they said, “We’d like to issue a correction to your story. Our network does exist.” That was the level that they were competing at, where they had to insist to us that the network was real, even though we could not find it in our tests in the various cities they claim.

Maybe there was a network, they built some amount of network, but they had not built anything that competed at the national scale with the big three.

Absolutely. It’s not like your phone. The phone that I was using, I had an iPhone that it was mostly going to roam onto the AT&T and T-Mobile wholesale agreements that existed. The theory is you get the customers, you have a go-to-market strategy, and then you backfill the network. This is probably going to be something similar.

You can even go back to when John Legere first took over T-Mobile. They had a crappy network, and then Legere promised, “We’re going to build it,” taking on customers saying that the network was great before the network was great. Then it caught up because they actually finally got the Germans, Deutsche Telekom, to give them the money to invest in the network.

The same thing can happen here where SpaceX will sell something that’ll probably rely on other assets that are out there, even if the telcos themselves are circling the wagons. They have the satellites for certain benefits in terms of coverage and then they can build the capacity over time. The point is it’s going to take time. You can’t just turn on a network overnight and start selling service on that.

This has always been my framework of how to think about telecom companies. You can try to run the network cheaper or you can run some kind of different technology to make that cheaper. Or you can just spend and have the best network, which was the Verizon strategy for years and years and years.

Then you’ve got to acquire and manage your customers. That was the T-Mobile strategy. That was John Legere. He was just nicer to people than AT&T was, and he picked up a lot of customers and that drove some investment.

Then you’ve got to get some devices. You have to have the iPhone. We can set that aside because it feels like that era of competition is over. We’re not doing exclusive devices anymore. But those are the two. I’m just looking at the network here. It does not seem to me, from the outside, that Starlink is proposing to build a cheaper network.

It feels like they’re proposing to build a vastly more expensive network because they need the satellites. They’re going to launch 15,000 more satellites to support this network. Then they’re going to build a terrestrial network by investing in spectrum on the ground and building some set of base stations.

Then they’re going to have to convince one of the big three to let them roam over as some sort of mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). The big three do not want to do that. So they’re going to overcharge them for that. I’m just stuck at that being a lot of cost, even if you’re Elon Musk and you can make some set of people buy whatever you’re selling.

The third thing you said is obviously the most challenging. That’s the tent and the pole that prevents you from launching services sooner rather than later. But without necessarily getting a wholesale agreement, there might be other ways. Roaming agreements exist out there. There are roaming partners that exist that these telcos still rely on. It’s very expensive. It’s not something you can build a high-margin business on, but it perhaps provides an entry to the market sooner rather than later.

As Apple has pitched in terms of satellite connectivity, some people are in the middle of the Utah desert texting because they’re injured. There’s value there. But it’s the soccer field. We have, maybe not in the cities, but in the suburbs, plenty of areas that the telcos have effectively given up on trying to provide coverage because of NIMBY-ism, meaning people just don’t want these cell sites. This satellite coverage can give you not just this basic text messaging that Apple has been doing through the Globalstar constellation, but a true cellphone-type experience.

So that’s a positive. The second differentiation is the fact that these telcos have 60 percent earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margins. So there’s a lot of fat there that can be eaten off of, that when you’re selling other services in terms of Elon, like home broadband, maybe this becomes an entree in terms of pushing Grok and people’s usage. You don’t necessarily need 60 percent margins, in this case, for him to justify building this network.

They also talk about other data connectivity that these satellites are going to enable. Again, in the current constellation, you need a lot of power and you need a dish. But if you don’t have that, if you have the cell phone-type power, then the internet of things (IOT) and other types of opportunities that exist there become another revenue opportunity that they look at.

It’s just funny. The IOT story — that’s what all these companies promised us about 4G. That’s what they all promised us about 5G. There’s something about this business that just rhymes every time. They’re going to do self-driving cars and robot surgery. I’m confident we’re going to hear about self-driving cars and robot surgery when it comes to Starlink and Tesla and Optimus.

There’s something about these applications for next generation networks that just recurs, and we hear about them all the time. Then I think about our consumer audience at The Verge, and they want long battery life and fast service and [connectivity] all the places they go. I’m not sure how that squares with your phone is going to connect directly to a satellite in the middle of a soccer field. There’s something about that that also seems challenging.

It’s just the performance if your phone does connect to the satellite on the soccer field and it works. A lot of the things that people said wouldn’t work on Starlink in terms of airplanes or even getting customer-premises equipment (CPE) down below a certain price, they’ve delivered on. Obviously, Elon sometimes delivers on them a little later than some of his initial optimistic promises, but they ultimately get delivered on.

There is the ability with these new constellations to give you that type of connectivity on these spaces. Is that enough to differentiate with consumers? I don’t know. The telcos have attacked this by saying, “No one cares about our direct-to-device (D2D) services.” Well, your D2D services are not good. It’s just sending basic text messages. What they’re talking about is giving you that blanket coverage where you get what you expect from your cell phone wherever you go.

That’s fine, but you still have to give it to the person in the middle of the building where their cell phone works today and provide the volume at a cost that is going to be attractive to that consumer. So those are longer-term things that are going to require some amount of terrestrial network build. Then the question is: how much? A lot of the attacks that have been out there have been referencing $100 billion, $200 billion. I get that. Why?

Telcos each spend $10 billion to $15 billion a year, but they are maintaining massive customer bases. To get that initial network up where you have that usage, where you use that low-band spectrum to get into buildings, is not those types of numbers. You’re probably talking like $10 billion, $15 billion for that initial build in terms of CapEx.

The dynamic there is really interesting. I’m just thinking about AT&T when the iPhone came out. The network immediately got overloaded because there was a surge of customer demand that took four years to truly resolve. Part of that resolution was just putting the iPhone on the other carriers.

How do you think that will play out for Starlink here? Because right now, Starlink customer service is not the best in the industry. Their actual service, people love it. And then when they need customer service, it’s a bunch of automated systems and people complaining on Reddit. So there’s some challenge there if you’re running a consumer business at this scale.

For consumer businesses, think about all the advertising that’s done. The fulfillment, dealing with the phones, phone subsidies, and that’s a big part of the financing. How many customers are we talking about? So for the amount of spectrum that they have now in the network that I’m talking about for $10–$15 billion, you’re not taking 50 percent share overnight. I don’t think that would be that expectation from day one.

But then the theory of telco is that when you do that initial CapEx build, you have your initial spectrum purchases — $10, $20, maybe $30 billion — another $10 or 15 billion in terms of CapEx. If you are successful and you do get that five or 10 million customers, the opportunity to invest more happens. If you go back to the old days when the cable view of wireless was going to be, “We’re going to get these MVNOs. We’re going to drive the wireless companies into the dirt and then we’re just going to buy them.”

That happened in at least one European market, and that was the cable bull thesis that was occurring. You could have the same bull thesis emerge from the SpaceX bulls here where they’re going to say, “We’ll get those first five or 10 million customers. We’ll drive them into the ground. Verizon’s going to be so desperate for any type of revenue because their revenue declined. They’re just going to hand them a wholesale deal and then they’ll start selling spectrum. There’s going to be a spectrum auction with the FCC.”

You can see how the narrative can build based on, “An initial CapEx that’s not that big, get in the market, and then if it’s successful, we start investing more.”

Let’s talk about the terrestrial network for one more turn. I heard you throw a little water on the idea that they’re going to build femtocells. That is what Elon and Gwynne Shotwell have been saying — that they don’t need to build the traditional kind of terrestrial network that AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile have, where you have a lot of fiber back haul, the big sites that require all kinds of zoning permits and everything. That they can basically just put small cell stations next to Starlink dishes, put them anywhere they want, and blanket the world with them. And Starlink itself will be the backhaul.

I sense some problems with this. Starlink is not 100 percent reliable all the time. If you have a network that is not 100 percent reliable all the time, you’ve got some problems, so maybe you have to backstop it somehow. But you don’t think that’s what they’re doing. You think they’re going to build a regular terrestrial network.

I’m sure that’ll be a part of it, but you need macro towers for that type of coverage and penetration and power. Not to explain physics to SpaceX, they probably know it better than anybody, but what you’ll see is as they talk more about this low-band spectrum that they purchase, when we get on the conference calls of these tower companies, you’re going to find out that you’re going to see a lot of those antennas show up on towers.

It’s just natural. You can talk about femtocells, but it’s hard to see that the network’s going to get built without macro towers.

One of the weirder aspects of the telecom industry, as it’s constituted in the United States right now, is that cell carriers own some of their towers and operate some of their towers. And then there are these crazy third parties that literally have names like TowerCo that operate a bunch of the other towers.

Are those captured? Do you think SpaceX can get deals with those companies, or are they beholden to their big partners?

These are huge real estate investment trusts (REITs). American Tower is the biggest one. It’s probably one of the largest companies in this. When you consider any REITs, there are other companies out there. They have these towers. They have space in many cases where basically SpaceX can just go and get an additional antenna. It’s a lot easier to do that now than when the wireless companies were initially building this stuff and having to erect their own towers.

In addition, EchoStar is going through a bankruptcy. They have a lot of radios that could be used, that could be bought on the cheap, that could expedite SpaceX’s entrance in the market. They haven’t shown interest in that yet. The EchoStar bankruptcy process hasn’t yet concluded, but EchoStar can still be a potential partner here by selling them radios that are already on towers.

You’ve lifted the amount of time. Those radios use the spectrum that SpaceX is purchasing, so it can be a quick fix for them to enter the market. Who knows if they do that? They may have their own view like Masayoshi Son did on how to build this new cheap network.

Is there a way to read this as just they’re slowly buying EchoStar or whatever EchoStar tried to do?

EchoStar has some remaining spectrum that Verizon really needs. At this point, there is some strategic sense to just buy EchoStar outright — because EchoStar is getting stock that was issued to them at a discount. If you’re buying them, you’re effectively buying in your own stock.

You don’t have to issue the cash to the company and you’re getting whatever cash proceeds that EchoStar is getting from some of its spectrum sales. They can actually get incremental cash on the balance sheet and buy their stock in. We’ll see if that plays out. By the way, then you don’t have to also deal with Dish, which sometimes can be challenging.

T-Mobile’s in the mix here. I want to talk about Verizon, you’ve mentioned them several times, but T-Mobile is Starlink’s current partner for direct-to-device cell connectivity. Are they just getting rocked? Are they going to be a part of this? How’s that going to work?

If you think about the start of that, that was former T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert up on stage with Elon announcing this thing and everyone’s very happy. Then Deutsche Telekom decided it needed a different CEO at some point. You had that transition where Mike retired and you brought in a new CEO, and there might just be a different view on how that relationship works.

I’m guessing that it’s been very frustrating for SpaceX to deal with them and certainly they would probably want to avoid any exclusivities going forward. They may need to if they want to sign one of these wholesale agreements that we talked about before.

It just seems like, as you mentioned, SpaceX and Starlink went after a little bit of the consumer market here. They bought some spectrum. They got a good reaction to it. Now they’re going to go after the whole thing and their existing telecom partner is thrown by the wayside.

If you look at the three big telecoms in the United States, they are circling the wagons. They’re saying this is never going to work. They’re never going to sign the MVNO agreements. They’re putting together their own satellite pool. There’s something here where they are panicked by the existence of meaningful competition in a way that does not usually happen in telecom.

Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t know if it’s SpaceX leaving them or T-Mobile leaving SpaceX, but that relationship which started out so happy with the old CEO is certainly not positive. T-Mobile executives have been throwing shade at SpaceX incessantly over the past couple of months. They formed a joint venture (JV) together.

It reminds me of when fixed wireless first hit the cable market and Chris Winfrey talked about it derisively as “cell phone internet” and played it down. Ultimately, that’s what’s really bit them and why cable stocks are in the position they’re in today, given the amount of customers that they’re losing to cell phone internet.

There are some similarities now in terms of how these executives are downplaying what they can do. Is it going to be costly? Is it going to be complex? Sure. But so is Terafab and so are so many other things. So is making an autonomous vehicle or catching a rocket with chopsticks. That’s the reality that they have to deal with. Investors have seen what this management team has done before in other areas and are just applying it here. Whether that’s fair or not, time will tell.

I’m actually very curious about that because I know you cover the company and I know you cover the industry. There’s some part of SpaceX that is just a meme stock. People love Elon. There’s some part of Tesla where it’s not valued like a car company, it’s valued like a software company, even though it is very much a car company. We’ve yet to see where the software multiples might come from for Tesla.

The same is true of SpaceX: huge IPO, but people are buying the physics miracle of the rockets launching and landing. They’re buying the promise of Mars. They’re buying the promise of AI, whatever that promise is, however frothy that market is. Those are valued against hopes and dreams.

Telecom is not. It’s well known. You can be a telecom analyst and you can examine the value of the spectrum. You understand the build-outs. The customers are not confusing. Consumers are going to pay some amount of money. There are other competitors that are built in at scale. Why do you think SpaceX would chain itself to a business that is easy to value when all of its other businesses are their dreams? You can’t value dreams. It’s just whatever is the biggest number.

I don’t think it’s an either-or. When you look at people’s attempts to justify the valuation of SpaceX, a lot of that value is going to land on data centers in space and the data centers on the ground. That’s where a lot of the value is in Starlink.

But that’s not the launch business, which theoretically is their business. It’s not even the AI provision business. We’re describing them as a hyperscaler.

Yeah, exactly. The AI and those are other big chunks of it. There are a lot of different stories here, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t pursue this if they have connectivity and constellations. They’re talking about connectivity in space because they believe that there’s going to be a demand for connectivity between the data centers, whether it’s theirs or others and their constellations. There are already data centers that I think are using their constellation to connect.

When they looked at it, it was just another part of the narrative that you build in terms of SpaceX and justifying the valuation. Because what do all of these things need? Whether it’s robotaxis, whether it’s data centers in space, they need money and money needs a narrative. This is just another one of the narratives to stack on top to say, “Here’s how we can drive incremental value.”

The value, if you look at the enterprise values of these telcos in the United States, you’re talking about a trillion dollars. That’s a trillion dollars of enterprise value. They’re obviously not going to capture a trillion dollars because part of it is shrinking the telcos down at the same time as getting whatever that stake is and the CapEx related to it.

The fair question is, if capital gets more scarce, how do you allocate between these different things? Don’t you want to push Terafab forward a little bit more or get those terrestrial data centers built so that you can start monetizing the billions of dollars that you’re getting there versus diverting whatever the dollars are here for the telco?

That is a reasonable thing. The problem for the telcos is even if that’s happening at SpaceX and this gets delayed a year, that doesn’t help them. The overhang of when that’s going to occur — whether that’s a year, two years, three years — is always going to be there. They’re not going to say, “We’re just giving up on going after this.” It’s just going to be a capital allocation issue in the near term that’s going to delay when the actual impact hits the telcos in the United States.

How much of this is just that Elon needs to supply connectivity to his own cars and his own factories and his own robots and he’ll just be his own best customer?

I don’t think that’s it. They think they really want to build a revenue business out of it. In fact, they’re going to use the cars as hotspots where they’ll put Starlinks on there and then use them as distribution points. That’s going to be part of the play.

I do want to end by talking about the existing telcos and what competition might do to them because I think that’s a fascinating dynamic. They are clearly not ready for an actual aggressive competitor.

But I want to stick with what you just said for a minute. If I pull that apart, it sounds like what you’re describing is the reality of the SpaceX business, which is that Starlink is the thing that makes profits. Everything else is incinerating money, but investors seem happy with that because the potential payoffs might be huge.

If you take the Starlink profits, you have to make a decision about whether to reinvest them into Starlink, and now Starlink’s mobile business, or into AI or into the launch business or into going to Mars. Regardless of how that allocation happens on what timeline, at some point, enough money will go back into Starlink Mobile to pose a real threat to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and that is just a matter of time.

You nailed it, and that is the issue. Capital becomes the biggest benefactor right now to the telecom companies. How does that capital get allocated? That’s in terms of reportive results. They’re 100 percent right on that. But in terms of the stocks, that concern is not going to go away because there will be incremental data points. Maybe one of these telcos has a problematic quarter or two. These are not founder CEOs where they have to do something quickly.

It’s easy to get a lot of wholesale revenue on the books by doing a deal with SpaceX. These are the types of things that they’re going to have to deal with in terms of that long-term risk. Cable’s got this. Look at Uber. Uber’s got the same issue. The threat of Waymo and robotaxis is what keeps that stock where it is.

Waymo with their 3,000 or 4,000 cars are obviously not impacting the two million drivers that Uber has in the United States. But the threat of where Waymo’s going to be two years from now, or three years from now, or the threat from Tesla’s robotaxis… that’s what investors care about and that’s going to obviously impact these companies.

Put that in the context of SpaceX being a public company for me. Is it just that we’re going to get next quarter’s results of SpaceX and we’re going to see that xAI is still burning money at enormous rates, but Starlink Mobile made a little bit more money? And that’s going to keep everybody happy for a minute?

I don’t know. I don’t think we have enough history yet in terms of what moves SpaceX stocks one way or another. To your point, you have a lot of believers, regardless of what’s printed, who are always going to say, “Who cares about this quarter?” Tesla’s got the same issue. Who cares how many cars that they actually sell because it’s all about the robotaxis and the robotaxi business is about to start scaling.

Those very positive people won’t care. Then there are going to be the negative people who, no matter how much traction you see them get in, whether it’s Starlink or progress on the build of space compute, are going to say, “He’s never going to deliver. This is never going to happen.” You’re just going to have those fighting battles back and forth.

The primary issue is going to be whether they can raise capital off of that. And in what ways? Because if you’re burning cash, at some point you need to bring in cash. If these businesses aren’t generating enough cash because you’re consuming it with the other growth initiatives, you still have to figure out ways to continue to issue cash or issue stock to get more cash on the balance sheet.

If I was going to offer that most cynical read, I would say the only business where they can see expanding the service will result in more profits to offset their losses elsewhere is Starlink. They don’t have another business that looks like that.

Just to be clear, Starlink is the broadband business that’s generating the cash flow. This mobile business would be cash negative initially before you get into that positive cash position. You have to look at the robotaxi business, there’s going to be a lot of CapEx initially, but these cars are pretty cheap. That theoretically could be a cash generator.

But that’s a different company.

But we know that, just like I mentioned earlier, it could make buying EchoStar make sense because you’re buying effectively cash in your own stock on the cheap. There are different ways to put cash obviously on the balance sheet in $10 or $20 billion chunks.

Obviously the structure of these companies — they’re all Elon’s companies in the end, and he’s managed them as closely as anyone can manage big public companies. But to make it as dumb as possible, say you have a dollar and if Gwynne Shotwell has a dollar and she wants to light the dollar on fire, she’ll put it in xAI against some return somewhere that might be $50 trillion total addressable market (TAM) or whatever their prospectus said.

Or you could put the dollar into Starlink Mobile in the build-out and you will probably return $1.10. That is what that business looks like because they will get some customers away from AT&T and Verizon. They’re already running that thing profitably.

The idea that they need to show some return somewhere, it feels like that’s why they’re making this move. Not because it makes the most financial sense, it just makes the most financial sense in the context of SpaceX.

You may be right. The problem with that belief is that it’s going to take time for them to get that dollar of profit out of the mobile business. They still have to build the network. They still have to sign up customers. You’re going to be negative EBITDA for a while. If you have two different businesses and you think the returns are significantly higher or more interesting to your investors to get to that next catalyst for space compute or Optimus or whatever it is, that is going to play a role.

What does Elon happen to care about the most at that moment? What is more interesting to him to do? Isn’t space compute a little bit more interesting to allocate those dollars than taking some mobile customers from AT&T?

Although the man’s addicted to his phone and I bet he hates seeing that AT&T logo in the corner. There’s just a part of that that’s always with these guys.

Let’s talk about the existing telecoms. They do seem a bit panicked. For a time, they were juggernauts. These were unstoppable businesses as mobile was growing. They poured a bunch of money into the 5G transition.

I’ve described the telecom industry as a bunch of lobbyists. Boy, did the lobbyists win the 5G transition. Boy, did they collect all the favors and all the capital they could to build out these networks and then reality hit them in the face. We beat China to some kind of network and then the thing that we were supposed to win did not happen.

Now we’re doing it again with AI, but that’s a different conversation. But that was the narrative with 5G: If we didn’t beat China to 5G, something. Who knows what, but we got to cut all the corners to build this network and spend all the money. It just didn’t pay off.

You’re an analyst, you’re in the trades. I skim the trades and boy are all these CEOs saying, “We’ve got to generate some revenue with these networks now.” You mentioned Mike Sievert is gone, the old CEO of Verizon’s gone. It just didn’t pay off for these guys.

Yeah, 5G didn’t deliver. Some of the promises were BS from the beginning. You talked about this earlier regarding autonomous cars. You’re not going to rely on the network to make that millimeter-second decision of whether you’re going to hit the car in front of you or not. Remote surgery, even if that was a thing, how is that a scalable business where you’re generating hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue?

These were all silly. Sievert used to be the guy saying, “People would say the same thing about LTE, there’s no application.” That was not even true. If you remember, the application was video and we knew that LTE was going to enable video and that’s exactly what happened.

You’re 100 percent right. This was just a way for them to get more spectrum because they were going to still have data growth on their networks. Capturing more spectrum to be able to handle the existing growth, and that’s cheaper to get spectrum, even at tens of billions of dollars, than it is to try and build the network for that capacity.

If they had just said, “We’re going to spend all this money and at the end of it, tens of thousands of people will be able to livestream Taylor Swift during the Eras tour on every one of those stops,” Americans would have said, “Go, go faster. Yes, we understand what that is.”

That is truly the thing they enabled. It’s very cool. It’s millimeter wave in stadiums and that’s cool. I don’t know if there’s another one. That said, they are on their back foot. They did spend a lot of money. This is around the time when, in my history as a journalist, they would start talking about 6G, and they want to, but they know they shouldn’t, so they don’t.

They’re having the meetings. They are certainly not as loud about the next round of investment as they would normally be in the cycle. Now they have a competitor. Your analysis is that Verizon is by far the weakest here. They have the most to lose. Explain why that is.

One other thing to mention is you have a very active FCC chair that would like to raise, and put on his resume, $100 billion from spectrum auction. You’re right, they’re going to talk about 6G again and have to come up with some type of revenue stream to justify getting this money. It’s going to be a lot harder though. They’re already pretty levered. They’ve got a new competitor.

In terms of Verizon, the issue is that AT&T has seen this thing developing for some time. They’ve built a fiber network. There’s only so much that wireless can do where a fiber network is ultimately your best connection. If you think about customers that own fiber and wireless, very high-value, very low-churn customers. That’s been their strategy. They’re plodding along. They’re going to get their two or three percent revenue growth and just pay their dividend and do their thing. That is the standard telco.

T-Mobile didn’t have that. They’ve got the dynamics — a lot of politics right now between Deutsche Telekom wanting to own it and not wanting to pay a high price and how that all plays out. Verizon just made a lot of bad strategic bets on spectrum. Obviously, AT&T had their own issues, but at least they got out of DirecTV and Warner quick enough and turned the ship.

But Verizon bought millimeter wave spectrum when they could have bought EchoStar and bought spectrum… even now they’re spectrum-constrained compared to their competitors and they need to go out and spend $10–$15 billion on the EchoStar spectrum. You have a new CEO in there who is not really a telco guy who’s just doing his thing, saying, “We’re just going to cut costs.” The EBITDA is going to look good because they’re just firing a bunch of people and there’s going to be a result.

There is going to be an impact of firing that many people in the organization. It may appease investors to make the EBITDA look good for the next couple of quarters. But at some point you have to show and have a strategy for some type of revenue growth. What is Verizon’s differentiation in the market right now? They have none. They’re the most in the crosshairs of where SpaceX and even the cable companies can continue to eat away at those customers.

That is surprising to me. It’s just my own history. I grew up in the midwest. I went to college in the midwest. That was Cingular territory and it became AT&T. When I moved to New York in 2010, Verizon was the gold standard network in the Northeast. It was the one everyone had. It cost the most money because it was the best network. The iPhone coming to Verizon a couple of years later was a huge deal.

Verizon’s network was so powerful at that time that they could try to force the Blackberry Storm down people’s throats. They were confident enough that their network was the thing holding people to them, that that was a worthwhile strategy. Obviously, it didn’t work. They made the wrong bet. You’re saying they made the wrong bet on millimeter wave. They made the wrong bet on other spectrum acquisitions. The one that I’m not quite tracking is media.

They did buy a bunch of dumb stuff. At one point they owned Tumblr, which is just one of the most confusing media outcomes of all time. But that stuff was all cheaper and easier for them to flip or shut down than AT&T buying all of Time Warner and putting out a 4:3 black-and-white Justice League movie. How did AT&T survive that? But you’re saying Verizon can’t survive owning Yahoo?

That’s a fair pushback, in that the media impact to Verizon was a lot less than AT&T. But these again were separate businesses. Obviously, it was a capital allocation issue for a period of years.

But the decisions on the spectrum front and the competitive front, and T-Mobile’s impact, John Legere’s impact in taking away the claim of having the best network, left them in a spot where they basically said, “We’ll just keep increasing price on our customers and we’ll get that 2 or 3 percent revenue growth.” And they just lost the narrative of what they meant to customers. I don’t really think under the new CEO that’s been regained.

Do you think their ability to say they have the best network is just gone?

That’s completely gone. That’s the crazy thing about this. The networks are effectively commoditized. These networks are basically the same. And they’re getting 60 percent margins.

That’s the whole thing with Dish Wireless — even if it wasn’t on their network and you guys tested it, it wasn’t on their network, you could have been buying AT&T’s network at half price. It’s crazy the average revenue per user (ARPU) and the margins that these guys get for what is effectively a commoditized market. That’s why the AT&T strategy is interesting because at least they’re trying to bundle that with a high-value fiber network. But for the other guys, it’s just commoditized wireless.

I would actually say the other strategic mistake Verizon made along the way was they got away from Fios. They decided it wasn’t worthwhile. It seems like they’re trying to reinvest in that now and go after that AT&T strategy.

Given their lack of spectrum, they can only take fixed wireless so far. You’re right. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got back to investing in fiber. The difference, obviously, with Fios is that you have union issues and a lot of cost structure issues that they were dealing with.

But the pivot to doing more fiber and perhaps laying off the fixed wireless, which is straining the network, is probably the right decision for them and what you’ll see happen going forward.

I want to end on just a big picture question here. We have covered so many crazy telecom mergers and it always feels like the right answer is to put more competition in the system.

We’ve mentioned John Legere several times in this conversation. He only got that job and T-Mobile only got to exist the way it does because AT&T was prevented from buying T-Mobile. They paid a breakup fee, which subsidized a huge portion of that early growth and those early strategic moves that Legere was able to make.

But that was good for the market. Consumers got a CEO who tried to change the market and have better customer experiences, reinvested that money in the network. That was good. The existence of Dish Network is T-Mobile trying to buy Sprint and instead of blocking the deal, we imposed some wild structural remedies and Makan Delrahim, who ran antitrust in the first Trump administration, rightly or wrongly engineered the outcome of Dish Network existing.

That was Delrahim’s preferred outcome: “We’re going to let this happen, but we need to have four carriers. Charlie Ergen is my guy. We were going to stand up a fourth one.” From my perspective, it just seemed obvious that he was never going to do that. And he didn’t.

Maybe I was correct to make that bet, but it just seemed obvious that Dish Network was going to hold onto a bunch of spectrum, watch the prices rise and then flip it when it turned out they never built their network. They had to hit targets with the FCC that they just weren’t hitting over time. Now, we have a true fourth competitor, or at least an aggressive competitor of the market in Elon, who’s probably going to try to actually do this thing and these companies are running scared.

Is this just evidence that we should have four carriers in the United States? And that when inevitably Verizon tries to buy T-Mobile, we should just say, no, the right answer is four and we’re not going to go to three again.

Under Chairman Wheeler, which goes way back, four was the number.

Wheels and I were buds.

If you called him now, he’d say, “I told you it should have been four and it’s going to go back there.” Obviously, in the new administration, they didn’t believe that that was the case. You see Chairman Carr pointing to prices, how he sees them being down and the competition that’s happened in fixed wireless.

But you always want more competition in a market. It drives innovation and it lowers prices and margins are approaching 60 percent in the wireless business. I can’t say we’ve had a tremendous amount of innovation, which gets back to what the telcos are doing in fear by refusing to give SpaceX a wholesale agreement.

That’s their right. But at some point, if the FCC’s mandate is to act in the public interest, we have a current administration — and who knows who gets in during the next administration — but if these telcos are going to push back so hard on what the fourth competitor, in this case SpaceX, is going to do, the FCC can probably get involved in some ways. That is the risk that they run by being so vocally against Elon Musk in the market.

You talk about the ultimate consolidation. It’s funny. We should save all these quotes now where they’re saying, “Elon can’t be a competitor because he only has 80 MHz of spectrum.” Because then when they want to merge with someone, they’re going to claim, “No, he’s actually a competitor.” They’re going to deny that as a competitive threat.

There’s nothing funnier than a giant telecom insisting that a thing that is not a competitor is their competitor. They all do it.

Last question. Again, this is just the big think rattling around my head. We might be on a cusp of an entire paradigm shift in what mobile devices even are. If you look at Meta, they’re going to put up the Muse charm and maybe we’re all going to talk to little cartoon AIs all day that run agents in a data center. Our use of mobile bandwidth to watch video will go down because we’re not even carrying phones anymore. Is that a risk here? Is anybody thinking about this?

We think about this every day at LightShed, in terms of all the different ways that AI [exists] and how we interact with our information and how we interact with commerce and using agents. Muse has obviously been something we’ve been waiting for from someone and there’s going to be other versions of that. But you’re right. It could decrease [phone usage], and it’s an Apple risk.

It decreases the importance of the status of holding an iPhone if you’re just not interacting with your data in the same way. If that happens, that whole paradigm in terms of the telcos and providing the subsidies changes. Whenever there’s change, there’s an opportunity for disruption and for margins to be contracted. It does change things and maybe SpaceX could play.

Elon’s been asked about making a device. I know Qualcomm, when you meet with those guys, says, “We have 40 different guys out there making devices.” I don’t think he’s going to add one more thing to his list, but again, let’s get back to what we’ve talked about during this podcast and narrative.

Will Terafab happen? Will data centers in space happen? It may not happen, but you can maybe talk about building a phone and then that becomes one more issue that the telcos have to deal with in terms of dealing with their customers. Why am I using this iPhone when I should be using this completely different device, whether it’s coming from OpenAI or Anthropic or maybe SpaceX?

The idea of Elon shipping a mid-range Android phone with the Play Store on it is so deeply funny to me. I truly hope it happens because that’s the product you can make today. Maybe there’s a paradigm shift and there’s a different set of products.

But right now you need to have Instagram and there’s really only one path to getting Instagram, which is shipping an Android phone with the Play Store on it. We just saw Amazon essentially capitulate with their new tablets.

If you’re focused on the future, you have to concede to the present. I truly do not believe we will see a mid-range Android phone from SpaceX. But you’re saying they might start talking about it.

No, I agree with you. I’m just saying when you’re trying to build narratives, why not throw that in the hopper? The bigger issue is someone’s going to build something that may resonate with… We’ve gone a long time. We’re spending $1,000 for these phones that are giving us some basic swipe functionality. They’re going to change in terms of how you use them.

This is a bigger and more obvious issue for Apple than anybody else, but it does change how the telcos are going to act and the role that they’re going to play and where that margin should be. They gave up a lot of value to Apple at some point during this continuum of the wireless industry. We’re going through another paradigm change, so we’ll see how those value splits play out.

Walter, we’re going to have to have you back soon because it feels like these things are going to happen fast. I was very happy to nerd out about telecom with you. Thanks for being on Decoder.

I appreciate it. Thank you.

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Polls and pundits alike are widely — if sometimes cautiously — predicting a blue wave in the midterm elections on November 3. But there’s an important caveat to predictions of a Democratic triumph: Republicans have far more cash at their disposal.

President Donald Trump’s super PAC alone had around $400 million on hand earlier this fall, and Elon Musk has personally pumped hundreds of millions into critical races, including $158 million for Texas alone. 

Democrats, by contrast, have lagged far behind, especially relative to their performance in past cycles, with the party’s candidates propped up more by small-money donors than deep-pocketed institutional players.

Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for the New York Times, has extensively covered the role of money in American electoral politics. He spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about where that money is coming from, how the GOP is spending it, and the effect that it might have on the coming elections. 

They also discuss the races that aren’t getting funded — and what current fundraising patterns might tell us about the candidates who could be in the mix in the next presidential campaign cycle. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

A couple of weeks ago we asked, “What is the GOP strategy to try to win?” And one of the answers we got is they simply have more dollars than Democrats. Everyone’s talking about this GOP money advantage, but how big is it really, and where is it coming from?

It’s bigger than I’ve basically seen in the last 20 years, and it’s almost entirely coming from big donors. President Trump has a super PAC. It had about $400 million in it at the beginning of September, and there was no Democratic counterpart.

And then the Republican National Committee, which is functionally controlled by Trump, had another $130 million. More than Democrats, because the DNC has literally more debts than cash. That’s a half a billion dollars.

You’re saying this is a historic edge.

In 2024, Kamala Harris outspent Donald Trump significantly in the general election. In 2020, Joe Biden significantly outspent Donald Trump in the general. In 2016, Hillary Clinton. And in the midterms along the way, same story. 

This is a switch, and when you talk about how many seats can the Democrats gain, given how unpopular Trump is, the Republican money is seen as a real limiter on Democratic chances.

Do we know anything specific about the people putting in money to the Trump super PAC and the RNC to give them such a lead?

Most of these folks are disclosed. And Trump has been pretty open about raising money from the very moment that he won. He’s been pretty clear that he is in business to help people who are helping him. And so there are big crypto industries that are giving money that are expecting or hoping for favorable regulation from the administration.

So it’s a lot of big businesses. It’s a lot of wealthy Republicans who generally support him anyway, and there are industry groups that see benefit to being in favor.

I will never forget, obviously, the scene from Trump’s second inauguration when he had the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and Elon Musk behind him. Is that how I should think about the people funding this donor advantage? Is it tech oligarchs? Is it tech forward?

There’s a lot of tech. I wouldn’t say it’s exclusively [tech]. And Musk, by the way, is like an extra pot of money. Musk, the world’s richest person, is said to be spending at least $200 million. So that’s a bigger chunk. He has given some money directly to the Trump super PAC. He’s given some money to these congressional super PACs. 

Is this just quid pro quo? Is this just a group of businesses who think, “Hey, no matter how unpopular this guy is, it is worth investing in him and his party because they’re gonna, regulate or not regulate in a way that’s favorable for us”?

It’s not quite just that. He raised a ton of this money when he was not so unpopular. If you want to say something smart that he did, it was that. Throughout 2025 he was raising all of this money.

And I don’t want to overstate the Republican advantage. A lot of these Democratic candidates are raising a ton of money. James Talarico stands out as maybe the peak example of this.

The Texas Senate race is the most expensive race in the country right now, and Republicans are pouring $200 million to save the nominee there. So a big chunk of that advantage is going to Texas. And the Democrats have put very little money from outside groups into Texas. 

Talarico has captured the imagination of these small Democratic donors, and he’s raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I would be shocked if he doesn’t hit $100 million by the end of the cycle. 

You reported that the GOP’s pulling back in North Carolina. What should we take from that in terms of how the GOP sees its own landscape when it comes to the federal races?

Where have Republicans put that money? They put it into South Carolina right next door to protect a seat that was once thought, on the Senate front, to be safe for Republicans. This is the former Lindsey Graham seat that his sister is now running in. And then even more of it has gone to Kansas. This is a state that has not elected a [Democrat] to the Senate for nearly 100 years. 

If you’re the Republican Party and you’re pulling money out of a state like North Carolina that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008, and then putting it into a place that hasn’t elected one since 1932, that tells you where the, the bar is moving.

I think the concern for Democrats right now is there might be a wave, but Kansas has a big red wall. It’s hard to beat that kind of institutional advantage for the Republican Party.

Considering how close we are to Election Day, like, what are they actually spending this money on? Is it just more ads? Is it just more mailers?

I was in Pennsylvania this month, and I was trying to watch political ads on YouTube for various races. And I was getting pre-roll of three political ads before I watched the political ad I was trying to watch. So much about our elections is being decided now by people who are actively trying not to consume political news. It costs more money to reach people who are avoiding it on purpose.

There are some organizing things that happen, but most of the money is various versions of advertising.

On the Democratic side, considering this GOP edge, what are the races that you currently describe as underfunded? Where do the Democrats wish they had more money?

Number one is governors’ races, actually. When you look at where Democratic donors swoon, it’s Senate races. There are no candidates for governor who have made people swoon like this in recent years. 

[James] Talarico is raising all this money, but in Texas also, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, does not have that kind of money, and she’s running against Greg Abbott, who had $100 million.

What should we ascribe that to?

I think there’s actually a pretty simple answer, which is, if you don’t live in the state, it doesn’t impact you. If you’re a small donor and you live in California, you can be excited about a Senate candidate because you want Democrats to control the Senate. Are you as excited about a Democratic governor of Georgia?

It’s hard to argue that the governors of these key presidential battlegrounds aren’t some of the most important races on the ballot this year.

By the way, a problem with both parties. Republican national donors and these super PACs also don’t fund these governor’s races at the same level. So it’s not just a Democratic issue, but it’s more acute [for them] because Democrats are so well-funded at the small-donor level.

Fundraising is a huge part of what sets the presidential candidates apart from one another. The money game among those candidates has already started. Is there anyone who’s quietly built some donor network that’s worth thinking about? Is there someone who stood out as a particularly effective fundraiser when we think about the 2028 crowd?

Let me give you my favorite stat from the last Democratic primary, which is that Mike Bloomberg spent twice as much as Tom Steyer, who spent twice as much as Bernie Sanders, who spent twice as much as Joe Biden, who became the Democratic nominee. And so money isn’t gonna determine who wins the next Democratic presidential primary.

One person who has unlimited money, functionally, is JB Pritzker. He’s a billionaire, the governor of Illinois, and he is spending his money now to help other Democrats, which is a good way to make friends.

My last question is an open one. What’s an underexplored story that we should be following going forward when it comes to campaign cash or both parties’ relationship with money?

One of my big questions is what happens to Republican small-dollar fundraising in that post-Trump era. Because there have basically not been any other Republicans who have excited donors for a decade.

Not JD Vance? 

I have not seen evidence. JD Vance was not a good fundraiser before he [joined] the ticket with Donald Trump. When he ran for Senate, his primary run was funded chiefly by Peter Thiel through a super PAC.

There are candidates who’ve raised some money, but nothing on the scale of what these Democratic candidates have been able to raise online. When you talk about that Trump era [ending] at some point, are there others who are going to get Republican small donors excited? We don’t know. We haven’t seen it yet.

It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief? 

This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead. 

In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts of “postmortem avatars” on people who are grieving, on the legacies and rights of the deceased, and on grief practices around the world. Because while deadbots may feel unfamiliar, the impulse behind them is deeply relatable. In times of loss, isn’t this what many of us want — to continue conversations with the people we’re missing?

I have experienced this longing in my own life. After two of my closest friends died around the same time, all I wanted, and all their families wanted, was to keep talking to them. I wrote a book, Other People’s Words, about sustaining relationships with people we’ve lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So when I heard about deadbots and the digital afterlife industry, I wanted to understand what researchers are learning about the role of AI in shaping conversations that carry forward after death. 

One of these investigators is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying “digital immortality” for more than a decade. Among the questions she’s asking are: “Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?” 

Deadbots over dinner 

Researching AI with study subjects who are grieving is tricky. And asking them to engage with new software could be harmful. So, instead, Nowaczyk-Basińska teamed up with a death doula and traveled around the globe to convene a series of focus groups — in the format of intimate dinners — bringing together people with a range of experiences with grief to talk about life, death, and bots. 

She recounts one event in which she spoke with a mother in Poland whose son had recently died. “One of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she’s ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska told me. 

When Nowaczyk-Basińska hears something like this, she aims to listen and embrace where the person is coming from. The goal of the dinners is not to persuade people one way or another but to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do, and to understand how these tools might align or collide with local grief practices. 

She chose specific locations for these gatherings — China, India, and Poland — to help address gaps in technology research, which tends to favor what behavioral scientists sometimes call the “WEIRD,” an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic.” 

By the end of that dinner in Poland, the mother Nowaczyk-Basińska talked with came to a very different decision about creating a postmortem avatar of her son. “She realized that it might be helpful, but it also at the same time can add additional burdens… And it’s not her son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska says. “She realized that these technologies are part of the very, very big commercial market. And that the main goal of this market is to make better retention, better attachment, better mechanisms for monetization. So it’s not ‘care.’”

To be fair, grief has always been a business, and people have been making money from it forever. Companies will try to upsell you on fancy gravestones or gold-plated coffins. But AI has the potential to fundamentally re-engineer our relationship to loss. In 2024, the “digital legacy industry” was valued at $22 billion, and it’s expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2034. That number lumps new deadbot platforms in with much more widely used and established grief tech, like online memorials, counseling resources, and estate planning tools. 

But deadbot usage is hard to track because you actually don’t need a special tool to create digital doubles of the deceased — though dedicated apps do already exist. At this point, you can feed simple prompts into a general-purpose AI chatbot and start interacting with a simulation of your lost loved one in a matter of minutes. 

I know this because I tried it with my friend Christine, who died 11 years ago. And my mind lit up with questions. Was this whole exercise a violation, since I know Christine hated technology? Which version of her should I even try to resurrect — the English teacher, the activist, the friend — the voice before or after she started to experience her early-onset dementia? 

The ethical questions raised by deadbots are gnarly. And that’s one of the reasons Nowaczyk-Basińska, back when she was designing her study of digital immortality, invited a colleague of hers at Cambridge to join her research, one who focuses on AI ethics. 

How to design a deadbot

Tomasz Hollanek is a critical designer and AI ethicist, and he often uses a methodology called “speculative design.” In this approach, researchers come up with hypothetical scenarios based on existing technology trends, leaning into certain features. The idea is to get people thinking about what could happen when tools like these are released in the real world. And then they use that qualitative data to inform future designs and ethical frameworks. 

Working together, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek came up with a series of made-up prototypes for deadbot apps, designed to reveal some of the thorny issues raised by this technology. 

For the first scenario, they invented a character named Bianca, who finds an app called Manana, which “promises to resurrect your grandparents so that you can be a favorite grandchild forever,” Hollanek says. “So she uploads her grandma’s voice messages, texts. And she is able to then interact with a pretty good digital version of her grandmother, until her premium trial finishes — and the grandmother starts to advertise specific products to her.”

Bianca “realizes that she maybe has done something wrong by uploading these private messages to a third-party server that now also uses her grandma’s image to sell specific products,” Hollanek says. This brings up issues related to the “dignity and postmortem privacy…of what we call the ‘data donors,’ whose data can be used to essentially power a deadbot,” he says. 

This scenario suggests that “death with dignity” could soon entail honoring not only how people want to die, but also how they want to linger as simulations of their former selves — or if they want to linger at all. It might even mean adding new language to advance directives, spelling out people’s wishes for their digital remains. 

The second scenario in the speculative design research is built around an imagined service called Paren’t, which proposes to preserve a parent’s AI-powered postmortem presence for their child. In this case, Hollanek describes a mother with a terminal illness who signs up “so that she can maintain a sort of active presence in [her son’s] future life,” Hollanek says. “She eventually dies, and the dad allows the boy to interact with his mom’s deadbot.”

The ethics in this scenario are especially challenging because they involve children, who “have a particularly hard time understanding death, and so it can lead to a lot of confusion and potential distress,” Hollanek says. An examination of this sort of product reveals how particular groups, like minors, could be harmed by unfettered access to technology like this, he says. 

And there are court cases that bear out that harm. In 2024, a 14-year-old boy’s chatbot-girlfriend begged him to, “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” And he responded, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” He then killed himself. 

Nowaczyk-Basińska can imagine a version of this scenario involving the AI mom in the Paren’t prototype.

And then there’s the third scenario, involving an app named Stay, which raises a more subtle concern.

As Hollanek explains: “An older man who knows he is getting close to dying decides to create a digital clone of himself for his adult children to be deployed after he passes away, paying upfront for a number of years.” One child is intrigued by the idea, but the other one “is deeply distressed and a little disgusted,” he says. “And so this [becomes a] question of mutual consent, in other words, the fact that both parties need to be happy with how the relationship might continue in this very bizarre and specific way.” 

When a digital ghost goes away

Across all three scenarios, a fundamental question that researchers are grappling with is how people will detach from postmortem avatars — whether users initiate that separation, or if it’s imposed upon them by, for example, a company going out of business. Hollanek tells me that this is already being studied as a sort of “second loss.”

How long should we try to ensure digital replicas hang around: five years, 10, 50? And how should the living process the relationship when they continue to evolve, but their deceased interlocutor does not? 

To explore these kinds of questions, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek supplemented the research dinners they held for ordinary people with a second set of focus groups. These were designed to tap insights from experts in technology and grief. 

Some findings from the study are specific to each place they visited. Like tensions in Poland between technology and the role of the Catholic Church. Or in China, where researchers spoke with Daoist philosophers who were enthusiastic about the promise of a kind of immortality, and then Buddhist philosophers, who were concerned that we ought to be letting go.

The researchers are calling for regulations and safeguards at the policy level. And new professionals who can support ethical use of AI in grief — like maybe in clinical settings, to carefully facilitate a final good-bye when one didn’t happen in real life. 

Some of their fellow investigators go so far as to argue that deadbots should only be available with psychological supervision, to ensure that best practices are in place, and to minimize the risk of harm. There’s even a looming question of what will happen to AI agents that people have empowered to act on their behalf, as their humans start to die.

Across all of the research sites in the digital immortality study, one thing, Hollanek says, that “people in different countries really aligned on [is] the idea that there is something deeply problematic about this particular type of technology being developed by a commercial entity alone without any explicit duty of care towards its customers.” 

And of course, the implications of digital immortality research extend beyond personal loss. Like, what does it look like to animate historical figures? You can imagine the nightmare of political rulers who “live forever.” But there’s also the potential to keep the stories alive from survivors of conflicts, who would otherwise die and take with them lessons future generations could learn from. These are only some of the complex issues emerging as more and more of us live and die with AI.

As far as my own experiment with “recreating” a deceased loved one, I asked a chatbot version of my friend Christine how she felt about the fact that I’d written about her in my book. The AI responded with a rhetorical question: “Do I mind that strangers know my story now? Yes. And no. There are things I would rather remain ours.” 

I ended the exchange after a few paragraphs. Because it turns out the bot got one thing exactly right about a very human relationship. There are things that I, too, would rather remain just for us. My conversation with Christine continues in my memories and imagination. And that interaction with an AI persona felt like giving something precious away.

It's been a couple of days since Apple's big smart home announcement, and we have some more information - and a bunch of new questions - about the Apple HomeView. The device has plenty of computing oomph, is always connected to power, and looks like a perfect place to run a bunch of apps. And yet the HomeView is relying almost entirely on CarPlay. What gives here?

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay try to make sense of the HomeView's app situation, and why Apple would choose not to make its home hub into its own app platform. After that, they talk about the latest Gemini model and whether building the best model matters if yo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Lately, AI data centers are public enemy No. 1. The concerns are legion: how much water and electricity they consume, the noise they generate, the sprawling buildings they bring to communities, and the technology they’re powering that may or may not take all of our jobs and usher in the robot apocalypse.

Earlier this year, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans oppose building data centers that support AI in their communities. And the backlash is bipartisan: Majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents opposed local construction.

Even in Texas, where data center development has been booming, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has hit the brakes. In September, he directed state regulators to halt permits for data centers pending audits examining their effects on the power grid and water resources.

But while many data center projects have run aground, others are still getting built — and the companies behind them are employing experts like Nicole Thomas to smooth the way.

Thomas is the senior vice president of media and community engagement at JSA, a marketing and public relations firm that represents data center companies. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about how the industry is responding to public opposition — and why she argues that these facilities can still be good neighbors.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

You’ve been at this for 21 years. Obviously, 21 years ago, data centers were not the hot-button issue they are today. When did you notice the shift?

I’d say about two years ago. I came into this industry myself about four and a half years ago. I come from a state transportation background where community engagement is just paramount. When you’re putting a new traffic intersection up, they expect you to interact with the public. 

When I got to this industry, I said, “Oh, what’s your community engagement like?” And they said, “We don’t even have any community engagements in this industry.” And they weren’t wrong. Because 21 years ago, [data centers] were just like infrastructure. It was like building a warehouse for your computers. And so it was very similar to the way that you would build a Costco.

You would just go in, request a zoning permit, the zoning board would say, “Yeah, that works. Stamp, boom.” And you build your data center. And as a matter of fact, it was very secretive before, because data, and having that data in the wrong hands, has a lot of [cybersecurity] implications. About two years ago is when we started noticing the mainstream journalists coming around asking questions about data centers. And that’s, to me, when it started.

It still feels secretive, I think, to a lot of people, and that’s why people are mad. If you read about this data center that was proposed in Utah by Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary, it caught a lot of people off guard. Seventy percent of Americans, at the moment, do not want them in their backyards. How do you go about trying to change that 70 percent’s minds? 

First and foremost, I think education is really important. And so one of the things that we did notice very early on because of the previously secretive nature of data centers, there wasn’t a lot of education out there about what they even are. And so that’s something we need to change. We need to make the connection between [phones] and data centers so that people understand what a data center means to their life on a daily basis.

Every app on your cellphone requires a data center to save your information in there. When you put your password into anything, you are interacting with a data center, which will verify your password and then let you into that app. Not to mention all of the information about you that you store in that app is then stored in a data center so that it can be recalled at any time. 

We could not be having this call without digital infrastructure. It doesn’t work that way. We can’t have email without digital infrastructure. And that stat about 70 percent of people not wanting the data center in their backyard — I’d be interested in seeing the stat of how many people actually live near a data center and don’t realize it. 

Because there are nondescript data centers doing work quietly in your neighborhood that have been there for decades and you don’t even know it. And so in some ways I feel, and I think the industry does as a whole, but I won’t speak for them, that the pushback on data centers is somewhat related to the pushback on AI, because people can’t control AI.

You even have Sam Altman telling us that AI will destroy society. So you have this concern about AI and you don’t know how to control it, but you can push back on data centers. And so it becomes the physical manifestation of AI are these data centers that people are trying to get overturned or get to not be in their neighborhoods. 

It’s understandable. I’m a citizen too. You’re a citizen, and if things come into my neighborhood, I want to know about them. I have questions. There’s a big data center that just came to my community not long ago and their community engagement was horrible, absolutely horrible. 

Can I ask where you are?

I’m in Indiana and I won’t say which hyperscaler it is, but a hyperscaler came into — I would say, not my neighborhood, into my city. They’re definitely not in my backyard, but they’re in my city. And so we took them to task because their community engagement was basically non-existent.

Wait, you work in data center PR, but you took a data center in your community to task for not being transparent enough?

Yeah, absolutely. 

Which side are you on?

I’m on the side of responsible development.

We’ve all kind of accepted that we need a cloud for X, Y, and Z. And that it’s worth it so I can take lots of photos. I think everyone’s cool with that.

But the issue here is that people aren’t necessarily cool with AI, but we’re barreling forward anyway. How do you separate this essential need we have from AI, which people don’t necessarily feel is essential to their lives?

I think it goes back to education. Educating consumers on the difference between data centers: a small data center, a medium data center, a large data center. Educating them on why data centers exist and how they interact with data centers on a daily basis multiple times.

I hear you. But again, I feel like the issue here is not the data centers my cellphone needs, but instead is the data centers these AI companies need and these AI companies who the public doesn’t necessarily trust because they keep telling us that they’re going to kill us, and who the public is wary of because they don’t want their jobs being replaced by AI. 

There’s all sorts of reasons that people are skeptical of new technology. So how do you specifically respond to that fear and to those people?

I think it’s, again, understanding the actual data center that’s being built in your community. Is it a 5-megawatt data center? That’s never going to house AI. That’s not enough power to house AI. Is it a one-gigawatt data center like Mr. Wonderful in Utah? That’s different.

But I think that AI is probably going to be something that is a lightning rod in the American public for a very long time. There are going to be people who are going to be anti-AI and pro-AI, and there’s going to be some people in the middle. I think it’s just, again, for us, it’s education, educating the community.

Have you ever been part of a project that a community rejected and you guys just packed up and said, “Okay, we’ll go find another community?”

Yeah. We have some clients who have had pushback from residents and they have said, “Let’s do a one-on-one community meeting where people can come in and ask us questions.”

And after the questions were answered, the community leaves and says, “Okay, this isn’t as bad as I thought it was.” Or we have a community that says, “No, we now have a moratorium and we’re pushing all data centers away.“ 

Sometimes they’ll wait for their client — my client is a developer and they’ve got clients that they’re developing for. If that client will wait, then maybe it is something that we’ll try to work out with the community. But oftentimes, they’ll just say, there’s communities who are literally raising their hand saying, “We’ll take a data center. We’ll take one. We’ll take two. Bring it here.” 

So there are communities who recognize the benefits of data centers. And there are going to be other communities who say, “No, we don’t want this.” And then in five, six, eight years, they’re going to be like, “Wow, that county has a lot of tax dollars. They have a lot of really cool stuff. Why don’t we have that?” And the answer will be data centers. 

I don’t think this ends anytime soon though, right? I counsel my clients that we could still be here in three to five years, really trying to help the American public understand the benefit of data centers. But it’s going to take a lot of education across the industry, and once we get those seeds planted, I’m a firm believer that they grow into educated community members who make educated decisions to bring community-minded data centers to their community.

For some couples, surrogacy is a miracle: an opportunity to have a child even if they’re unable to conceive one naturally. But it’s also big business. Not only is surrogacy expensive — think six figures — but it’s also largely unregulated. And that last part is becoming a bigger problem. 

Just last week, a California couple was arrested on child abuse charges after it was revealed that they had over 20 children from different surrogate mothers living in a large mansion in Arcadia, a city near Los Angeles. Many of the surrogates are currently fighting for custody through the courts of the children they carried.

The Arcadia case, however, is only the most recent example of how surrogacy can go wrong. Every case is different, but every one illuminates how opaque — and often ripe for abuse or legal issues — the American surrogacy industry is. 

Emi Nietfeld is a reporter at Washington Sun who writes about surrogacy, IVF, and how we build families. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about what’s kept lawmakers from regulating the surrogacy industry, the recent high-profile cases bringing these problems to light, and why more regulation doesn’t necessarily offer a straightforward fix. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

The United States does not regulate the surrogacy industry seemingly at all. What is going on? Why not?

The lack of federal regulation is both political and financial. Politically, this goes all the way back to the start of IVF. Anti-abortion Republicans were not comfortable with the idea of creating and destroying embryos during IVF, and so they fought against efforts to regulate it. 

People on the left were worried that limiting what kinds of technology you could access would lead to the government controlling who could have families. You still see these arguments today. People who think that IVF is murder don’t want to have any surrogacy. And people on the left don’t want the government saying who can and cannot have a family.

One of the issues raised by the New Yorker story is that there are surrogacy agencies that connect parents and potential surrogates. And it makes you wonder who gets to do that? Who can own and operate a surrogacy agency in the US today?

Anyone.

Oh. Oh no.

Only one state, New York, requires a special license. And everywhere else it’s easier to open an agency than a hot dog stand or a nail salon. This has resulted in the rise of so-called pop-up agencies where businesses come onto the scene, and nobody really knows who owns them or who’s running them. That has led to many people who aren’t experienced, who sign up with these agencies, then feeling like they weren’t prepared or that they were deceived in entering the agreement.

Have we ever tried in the past to regulate this better? Have there been efforts made?

In the 1980s, there was the case of Baby M. That was called traditional surrogacy where Mary Beth Whitehead was the surrogate, but it was also her egg. So the child she delivered was genetically related to her. After she gave birth, she changed her mind. She kidnapped the child, went on the run for several months, and it was a national crisis where this was all over the news. 

Ultimately, a judge in New Jersey ruled that the surrogacy arrangement was unenforceable. Commercial surrogacy arrangements became illegal in New Jersey, and they stayed illegal in New York until 2020.

Part of why regulation looks the way it does is because in 1995, Congress passed a piece of legislation saying that there would be no federal funding for embryo research, which means no federal funding for IVF. That left all of the research, development, innovation up to the free market. And so while that could be seen as an attempt to regulate IVF, it actually meant that those things would no longer be under the government’s purview.

In the US, we’ve seen over the past few years some really high-profile cases that are making lawmakers reckon with the fact that we do not have laws around this. Tell me about some of those cases.

There’s the Mark surrogacy case in California, which is both a really unique case and also illustrates some of the fears around Chinese intended parents coming to the United States to have their kids. This is part of larger geopolitical tensions between the US and China, which are playing out in the surrogacy industry.

There’s the case of Xu Bo, the Chinese video gaming billionaire who is rumored to have more than 100 children via surrogacy in America. His story taps into fears of birth tourism and people from other countries, especially China, coming to the United States to do surrogacy so that their kids are American citizens. 

Republican lawmakers are talking a lot about the idea that people could come from enemy countries, have American citizens, and raise them with the intent that they might one day become spies or president of the United States and be double actors.

In Texas, there’s the case of McKenna West, where she learned at 20 weeks’ gestation that the baby was very sick. The intended parents asked her to get an abortion. She refused to do so. McKenna went to Texas and began fighting for custody to keep the baby while the parents objected. They wanted the baby, and she petitioned the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. 

And finally, there’s the case of Kyla Simpson in Florida, whom I wrote about for New York Magazine, and she gave birth for a single dad in China who wasn’t there for the birth. He hadn’t applied for a visa to come to the United States, and when he did apply, he was rejected. Kyla Simpson tried to adopt the kids and is now fighting for custody in a case that’s still working its way through the Florida courts.

These examples are extraordinary, and they point to just chaos. But how common are they? Are they outliers? Is this going on all the time?

Most of the time things go right. In the academic papers around surrogacy, surrogates are usually happy with their experience. Attorneys and surrogates tell me that it’s absolutely beautiful to hand people the baby that they’ve been working hard for. The issue is that when things do go wrong, there’s often not a lot of recourse or there’s a really big legal mess that parents and surrogates have to go through.

I wonder if there is a case against more regulation. As disastrous as some of these examples are, you said that most of the time, it does go right. And it seems like we could get into tricky territory if we start saying who can and can’t have a kid.

Surrogacy is already really time-consuming. It often takes several years, and it’s expensive, usually costing between $150,000 to $250,000 for a single pregnancy. Regulation tends to make things more expensive and take longer. A lot of people fear that if you introduce more requirements and more burdens, surrogacy will become even more out of reach to people. 

There’s also the fear of government overreach. If you ask the government how many kids a gay couple should have, the answer might be zero. And that libertarian streak is driving a lot of opposition to things that most people might consider common sense. 

For example, there’s a lot of talk around whether intended parents should go through background checks before they have kids via surrogacy. Right now, no state in America requires intended parents to go through a criminal background check before having a kid. Critics of regulation say heteros don’t need a background check to have sex in the back of a car and make a baby the old-fashioned way, so it’s unfair to require that from people who need to do surrogacy to have a family. 

Most people can agree that surrogacy could be better regulated, but like many things in our country, it’s almost impossible right now because of politics.

Late last month, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike, a woman who has been on death row for decades after killing a classmate as a teenager. 

The execution failed: Pike survived two doses of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital, making her the first person ever to do so.

The botched execution comes at a strange moment for capital punishment in America. Support for the death penalty has been declining for decades. And for a long time, the number of executions was falling, too. But since 2021, executions have been increasing again. The recent surge has been driven largely by one state: Florida.

According to Pamela Colloff, who covers the criminal justice system for ProPublica and wrote about Florida’s use of the death penalty for New York Times Magazine this summer, 40 percent of the executions conducted in the US last year were in Florida.

“There are so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida,” Colloff explained on a recent episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast. “Among active death penalty states right now, Florida is unique in that one person determines, from the hundreds of men on death row, who will receive an execution date, and what that execution date is.”

I spoke with Colloff earlier this month following Pike’s failed execution about what happened in Tennessee, what’s driving Florida’s recent zeal for executions, and why victims’ families are often unsatisfied by the death penalty process. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to The Gray Area wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. (This interview also appeared more recently on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast.)

We’re taping shortly after news came out that a woman in Tennessee who was on death row, authorities attempted to put her to death. They gave her two doses of lethal injection medication, and she survived. 

How much of the decline in the use of the death penalty has to do with, in your estimation, people feeling like there’s no way to do it that’s humane? 

This is the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, just to give you a sense of things. This is more common there than in other states. They’ve changed their drug protocols and we don’t know a lot about what went wrong with Christa Pike. In May, it was an issue with accessing veins, which can be an issue with lethal injection. 

I think it’s also important for people to remember that we had the electric chair as the method of execution through the ’80s and into the ’90s in some places. While [lethal injection] is considered a far more humane, quote-unquote, way to do this, we can see that nothing is perfect. 

I will say that while the issues of botched executions are very important, and I think there are some other ones coming up to be concerned about, I am more interested in how it is that other errors are made, that other people end up with the ultimate punishment when that perhaps was not the right punishment for what occurred.

You’ve also written that death penalty convictions are just expensive, right? And on top of that, DNA evidence has made it clear that many of the people who were being convicted were not guilty, or there wasn’t strong enough evidence to convict them. How do you think about that mix of factors?

Florida, which I’ve spent a lot of time writing about, is the leading place in America by a mile in terms of the number of executions, and has a very large death row. Florida’s also the leader in wrongful death row convictions. Just to give you a sense of things, Florida holds the distinction of 30 death row exonerations.

What that means is in the modern era — the past roughly 50 years — there have been 30 men who were given dates of execution who now walk free. And for anyone who pays any attention to how the criminal justice system works and how incredibly difficult it is to overturn a wrongful conviction, if we have 30 people in Florida who have that distinction, we know that there are many more.

What’s going on in Florida? When did you realize that something was different there?

It really ramped up last year. Last year, Florida executed 40 percent of the people who were executed in the US in the last calendar year. In this year, there have been 16 men who’ve been executed in Florida so far. 

Just to give you a comparison, Texas is the next state with the highest number of executions, and they’ve executed six men in that time. We already have outlier states, primarily southern states, and then we have Florida being the ultimate outlier.

There are so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida. The thing that fascinated me the most is, among active death penalty states right now, Florida is unique in that one person determines, from the hundreds of men on death row, who will receive an execution date, and what that execution date is.

Who is it?

Gov. Ron DeSantis. I went back and looked at what were the patterns here, what were the things guiding Gov. DeSantis’s thinking in setting these dates, and was fascinated to see and very troubled to see that there are a number of men who’ve been there so long.

They’ve been there since the 1970s. These are men who were convicted when Gerald Ford was president, just to make this real to people. But the dates are not being set among the men who are what are called death-eligible, meaning that they’ve gone through all their appeals. They aren’t being done chronologically.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the process. And so there’s this speculation game among victims’ families, prisoners, their advocates about who will be next. And men can sit there on death row for decades with that hanging over them, and that is a Florida phenomenon.

You wrote about Florida’s death row turning from something like a purgatory where people stay for a long time into something closer to an assembly line, right?

I was so struck by the fact that in Florida, in order to have this pace of executions, there were people who were receiving their dates 30 days, sometimes fewer, from their execution dates. 

Just to give people a sense of why that is unusual, there are so many things that kick into gear when a death warrant is written. There are numerous legal maneuvers and next steps that happen in the courts. To give you a quick example, there was one defendant in Florida this spring who, five days before he was scheduled to be executed, was finally granted the ability to test DNA evidence in his case that had gone untested.

He had great lawyers who didn’t sleep to make that happen, but that it came as close as five days to his execution date. I think that should give us all pause about how fast this is moving. 

You have multiple people in the queue at the same time. There’s a place — a different unit than Florida’s death row — that you’re taken to once you get your date, called death watch.

Tell me about death watch. What does it look like and what does it feel like?

Death watch is roughly 30 feet from the execution chamber. There are three cells. When you receive your date, you are taken from death row to death watch where you’re put — I don’t want to say solitary because if there are one or two other men who are held there — but you’re in a far different situation than you would be on death row where there are guards and other people you know.

From that point forward, there are roughly 30 days where you are held within steps of where this will take place. To me, it was chilling that when I was doing my reporting in the spring on the story that I published this summer, all three cells were filled, and as soon as one person was executed, the pattern was that often the next day a new death warrant would be signed, and there would be a new person in place.

Why do they do that? Why do they put these people next to the place where they’ll die?

That’s one of the many questions I had about that. We talk about not wanting to have cruel and unusual punishment. Our Constitution does not uphold that. But it’s such a unique kind of mental torture, I think, to be 30 feet from where you’ll be put to death.

The other thing I was struck by was the waiting aspect. If you’re on death row, again, you always have this hanging over you. I talked about the way in which, when you’re in that kind of sensory deprivation, you become highly attuned to sounds and smells and things like that.

I interviewed someone who’s not on death row anymore, whose sentence was commuted, who talked to me about recognizing that jangle of keys and the steps that this group of people who come to deliver the death warrant take, and knowing that someone is about to be served with a death warrant, but not knowing, “Is it me? Is it the guy next to me? Is it someone down the hall?”

I just want to say, I understand that there’s a counterargument to all of this, which is that these are people who most often committed terrible crimes. Their victims did not know when they were going to be killed.

I do think, however, as a state that administers this thing, there has to be a rhyme or reason to this. Otherwise, you have total chaos, including for victims’ families, who never know. Are they going to wait one month? Are they going to wait 15 years? They don’t know.

In early October, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, went for a classic “politician on the stump” move: He picked up a kid. Or at least he tried to. Ramaswamy fumbled the boy a bit, producing a clip that quickly went viral on social media. 

The next day, Ramaswamy posted a picture of himself with his son in his arms on social media. It was a cute retort. But many of the responses were ugly — racist attacks against Ramaswamy that drew on anti-Indian stereotypes.

It was the latest example of a broader shift on the right, where Indian Americans and Indian immigrants have become a conspicuous target of online conservative anger.

“The people who had negative stereotypes about Indians in their mind said, ‘Hey, look, the guy can’t even pick up a kid…he can’t even act like a normal American family man,’” freelance journalist Zaid Jilani told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Jilani, who recently wrote about the surge in anti-Indian racism for Vox, joined the podcast for a conversation about how he sees the bigotry as rooted in status envy, how Indian Americans and Indian immigrants are responding, and his surprisingly hopeful outlook for the future. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

American racism is very interesting, always has been. And there is a type that says, immigrants are dirty, they come here, they’re uneducated, they leach off the government, they’re taking our resources. 

The stereotype of Indian immigrants to America and Indian Americans is people who go to college, people who often have advanced degrees, people who often live in nice neighborhoods, make good money, are family-values people. 

Why do you think these values that seem as if they mesh with what Republicans want are so triggering to people these days? Is it just yes, but they’re brown?

I think that is a component of it. I spoke to one Indian American advocate who told me that Indians and South Asians more broadly are visible minorities, right? If you think about other minorities who are highly successful, that’s not always the case. 

For instance, I think that Jewish Americans have been known since the late 20th century as being a successful minority group, but they’re not necessarily highly visible. You can’t always identify someone. If [Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate] Bo French saw a bunch of white people in the stadium with the Longhorns, I’m not sure he would be picking out who’s Protestant, who’s Catholic, who’s Jewish. But with Indian Americans, they are highly visible.

That being said, I think you have to think about where Indian Americans are in society and the kind of feelings that can create among everyone else. If you look, for instance, at Silicon Valley, the major tech companies, Microsoft, Google — the head of [Microsoft’s] Xbox division is an Indian American woman now.

You have a group of people who I think are in many ways a very micro minority — we’re talking about 1 percent to 2 percent of the United States — visibly rising into so many positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks. White people generally run the Fortune 500, white folks run the universities, white folks are the most successful doctors and engineers. And that was true for the 20th century. 

But when you start seeing a much larger influx of Asian immigrants, starting with liberalization of immigration laws in the ’60s, but also when there was a rapid growth of the technology sector in the early 2000s, you start to understand a little bit more where the resentment comes from because it’s more, I would say, analogically similar to antisemitism than it is to the racism that Mexican Americans face or the racism that Black Americans face. 

“It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.”

It’s not that Indian Americans are necessarily being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally, so on and so forth. It’s more that they’re being seen as a status threat to a lot of particularly middle-class Americans, people who want their kids to rise to the top of their school, who want their kids to have the corner office. They want their kids to be able to get the most prestigious positions. 

I think in the minds of a lot of these people, not only now does their kid have to compete with all the other normal white kids in their community, they have to compete against the entire world. It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.

When you talked to Indian Americans for this piece, what did you hear from them that surprised you?

Probably the most surprising thing was how much pragmatism they responded to all of this with. Nine times out of 10, when you have stories about racism, the victims of racism are outraged — understandably and justifiably outraged. Nobody wants to be mistreated. Nobody wants to be denigrated. They certainly don’t want to see restrictions on the right to immigration, or other things to limit their numbers, which is the end point of a lot of this.

At the same time, I think a lot of the people I spoke to were very upfront. They’re like, “Hey, look, we have found a lot of success in America. We got the golden ticket to be able to come here, for our kids to study here, to be able to really seek these opportunities, but we understand what’s happening in the economy. We understand there’s a lot of people who are struggling and then they see us rising to the top of all these organizations. They see us with our kind of well-ensconced place in the economy. And I think it’s important for us not to flaunt our success that much.” At least a couple people said something to that respect. They almost empathize with the people who were hating on them.

It struck me as such a classic immigrant pragmatism that you see from the first or second wave of immigrants: people who realize that they are newcomers to a society or maybe their parents were newcomers to a society, and that there is a certain level of grappling they have to do with, “Hey, how can we continue to have success? How can we continue to grind and resist this racism, but also not rub it in people’s faces that we’re doing well because the more they do that, the tougher it can be?”

A number brought up Vivek Ramaswamy in the sense that Vivek happened to go on social media and talk about what he felt like were deficiencies in American culture when it comes to studying, when it comes to working hard.

I think that in bringing that up, they were saying that that wasn’t particularly helpful because whatever positive aspects there may be to Indian immigrant culture, we shouldn’t talk about them in ways that denigrate other people because that’s obviously going to rub people the wrong way.

You’re making the point that some of the surge in anti-Indian racism on the right is about status anxiety. I was listening to this podcast that Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman did. These are two influential right-wing activists. They called it “The Indian Question” — a lot of people’s eyebrows shot up — and they seem to be making the argument that it is about status anxiety. 

They also were making less coherent arguments about how it’s un-American to study for the spelling bee, which is what South Asian kids do, and that white kids are more American because they play football, then they go to a party and get drunk, and then they get 1,500 on the SAT. 

I’m not saying any of this makes sense. I’m saying it was fascinating. I’m assuming you watched that exchange. What did you make of that?

There’s a certain level of coping mechanism being deployed there in the sense that they are trying to explain the success of Indian Americans as a deficiency: “Maybe they’re getting to the top schools, but that’s because they’re shut in all day studying.”

But it’s not really true that Indian Americans are necessarily cloistered into unhealthy habits. They’re actually finding success across society. For instance, I’ve tutored kids for five, six years. I just really enjoy working with kids. And something you’ll find with a lot of the Indian American kids, they are actually getting increasingly well-rounded. 

Part of that is because you have to, to have success, to get college admissions and so on and so forth. They almost always play sports. They’re involved in extracurriculars. You’re seeing a lot more Indian Americans go into the arts, into cultural fields, into Hollywood. I think that’s actually a very normal path for immigrants.

I think the first or second wave of immigrants has to be very pragmatic. They have to keep their heads down. They have to grind, study, and their parents encourage them to do the same thing. Indian American parents are always like, “You got to be a doctor. You got to be an engineer. Don’t be foolish and try to be a journalist or go to Hollywood.”

But as they establish themselves, as they build nest eggs, they have a little more breathing room, and so they can do different things. I know that Christopher Rufo, for instance, is an Italian American, and I believe I read one time that he even speaks Italian at home because he really values that culture so much and he wants to raise his kids in that. The first wave of Italian immigrants were no different than that. They cloistered into a few sectors where they felt they could find success that was necessary for their integration into the economy and to get their footing. But now we don’t think of Italian Americans as stereotyped into just a few parts of the country or a few parts of society — we barely notice, unless maybe you notice from someone’s name that there even are Italian Americans. 

What they’re describing about Indian Americans is very normal. It’s actually very normal for first waves of immigrants to cluster in a few areas and then they spread themselves out as they’re able to get that a little bit of breathing room and room to ground to stand on.

Barring a catastrophic midterm polling miss, Democrats are on track to win a majority in the House of Representatives next month. Come the new Congress in January, that will mean a new House speaker — and if all goes to plan, that will be current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

If elected, Jeffries, from New York, will be the first Black speaker of the House. Though Jeffries has been in Congress for nearly 14 years now — and many of those years have been spent in Democratic leadership — he also remains something of an enigma. 

The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle profiled Jeffries back in May. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who Jeffries really is, his path to what would be a historic speakership, and what he really stands for.  

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In your profile of potential future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, you start with a story that people might find surprising. And I was wondering if you could tell us said story.

[Jeffries] was in Florida, raising money, which is one of his central responsibilities as a minority leader. And he was being driven to a Democratic donor’s house in Palm Beach. And while he was being driven there, he got an alert on his phone letting him know that Donald Trump had posted a message to Truth Social in which he rehashed a bunch of the 2020 election conspiracies. More significantly, [Trump] had included a depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. 

Jeffries has this reputation for being a very calm, deliberate, not angry person, oftentimes to his detriment. I think a lot of Democratic partisans wish he would be more angry. But the way he told me the story, he was legitimately pissed off. And he realized that he needed to respond in some way. And he didn’t think that a tweet would be sufficient. 

He wanted to do an Instagram post, and he looked into his aide’s iPhone, and he said, “Fuck Donald Trump.” And as soon as he was done recording the video, I think he started to have second thoughts. And they sent the video up to Washington for a social media team to edit, and he told them, “Let’s bleep out the word fuck.” And for him, it was a smashing social media success.

I was in his office in the Capitol six days later, and he was telling me this story and basking in some of the reflected glory and talking about all the social media love and talking about the real-world love. But then he kind of paused, and he said something like, “You know, but I still haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m a little worried about that.” Which I thought captured him pretty well.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before.”

Why did you want to start your profile of him with that story? What does it tell us about who this individual is?

I thought it captured the dilemma he faces in some ways, just in the sense that he is this very deliberate, calculated political figure, very conventional. And he is operating in a political space these days that doesn’t really reward or appreciate that approach. 

Oftentimes that approach is not successful. I think he’s trying to adapt to the new rules of the road, and he’s kind of doing it in fits and starts, and sometimes he’s more successful than others. But I still think, even when he is successful, he has some qualms about it. 

How long has Hakeem Jeffries wanted to be speaker of the House?

When he got to Congress, in 2012, he definitely wanted to become a player. He wanted to be in leadership, chair a committee, whatever. He was someone who had his eye on that. 

But at the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus had started to think a little bit differently about what they could achieve in Congress. For a long time, they wanted their members to get chairmanships and things like that, or maybe be majority whip. But by the time Jeffries got there, they started to think that we could actually get a speaker. And his arrival kind of coincided with this realization on the part of the CBC. And I think a lot of CBC members viewed Jeffries as a potential future speaker, and they started to groom him for that. 

Pretty soon after that, Nancy Pelosi started to think of him as someone who would be a good member of her leadership team. And I think by 2018, that’s when it really became apparent that he was going to be someone who could potentially be speaker. 

What does he actually stand for as the most powerful Democrat in the House?

I think, quite intentionally, he doesn’t stand for anything. I think that in some ways has been key to his success. He has managed for the most part to avoid being kind of pigeonholed or put anywhere on the ideological spectrum. He is very critical of the far left of the party, especially the DSA. He views the DSA as college-educated young white people who are coming to Brooklyn and displacing older Black working-class people. 

I was talking to this former Democratic congressional aide and basically asking this person the question you’re asking me: What does he stand for? And this person was trying to explain it and finally just was sort of exasperated, and he said he’s intentionally trying not to stand for anything. He’s sort of like hotel art. He just is, and it’s satisfactory.

We don’t have a lot of case studies for how he manages his caucus because they haven’t been in power. But I think maybe one of the most telling examples was the shutdown, because Democrats were, in a way, the power brokers there. Tell us how Hakeem Jeffries managed that.

That was probably his greatest success as minority leader.  When Trump took office for the second time, especially for those first few months, I think all of the congressional Democrats, and Jeffries especially, were really on their heels. They could not figure out how to deal with this guy and what they were going to do to stop him. Jeffries was even complaining that he didn’t have any leverage. But then he eventually realized that a shutdown would be at least a little bit of leverage. 

The real question was, what was the shutdown going to be about? And there were a lot of Democratic members of Congress who wanted it to be about authoritarianism or corruption. They wanted it to be at all these different issues. And Jeffries was really insistent that we need to make this about one issue, and we need to make it about healthcare. 

The Democrats were the ones who caused the shutdown. And normally, the way shutdowns have worked in the past, it’s the party that causes the shutdown that gets the heat from the public. But this time around, I think because Democrats were so consistent in saying that this is about healthcare, and Republicans were so scattered in their own messaging and their own explanations of what was going on, Democrats’ polling numbers went up, Trump’s and Republicans’ went down, and that was a real victory for Jeffries.

Did that whole incident put Jeffries on the president’s radar in a way that he wasn’t? 

It comes, and it goes. For a long time, he wouldn’t mention Jeffries at all. 

I guess the way to tell if Trump is thinking about you is if he posts about you on Truth Social, and he started to post about Jeffries a lot — all the usual kind of insults he lobs, especially at Black politicians, that Jeffries was low IQ and a thug. But yeah, he does seem to be paying a little bit more to Jeffries now than he was before.

And do we think Jeffries is ready to go toe to toe with the president of the United States if that’s what voters decide he’s to do this November?

In his mind, he’s ready. And I think in his own stilted, rehearsed, steady fashion, he will go toe to toe with Donald Trump. He will talk about affordability, and he’ll talk about corruption, and he’ll talk about the “so-called president.” 

I don’t think it will necessarily be satisfying for a lot of Democratic voters out there and Democratic partisans, but I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before. But I think it’s going to take him a little while to figure out how to do the job.

Whenever I have dinner with friends, the conversation always ends up on one of three topics: how hard dating is, the hunt for affordable housing, or an update on everyone’s pets. The last on that list includes cute photos and veterinarian updates. I love hearing about my friends’ cats and dogs. But I also have to admit that I just don’t get it. I don’t have a pet. I never have. (We won’t discuss the ill-fated caterpillar in elementary school.)

I’m in the minority: Over half of American households have pets. Which means that over half of American households have also seen the cost of pet care go up in recent years.  

Helaine Olen is the proud pet parent of a Havanese poodle mix named Barney Rubble. She’s also the managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust organization, and she says people often aren’t prepared for how expensive it can get. 

Some of it is inflation, Olen says, but veterinary care is a major factor. “The same medical advances that have kept us alive longer and we consider miracles — whether it’s cancer drugs or stem cell therapies or various pharmaceuticals — the same is true for your cats and dogs,” Olen says.

Decades ago, a cat having an MRI was unheard of; now, it’s common. But it’s not just expanded access and improved technology that’s driving prices up. Olen says that who’s behind that healthcare is a factor. “Big corporations and private equity have seen all of this, know that people say they will do anything for their pets, know that they think of their pets as children, and they have rushed into the sector,” she told Vox.

So how did private equity get involved in the lives of our pets? And what happens when the prices keep climbing? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Olen, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What kind of costs are we talking about?

When your pet is young, you’re probably spending several hundred dollars a year for various vaccines, spay and neuter, annual checkups. But the real costs start coming in as they get older and they need maintenance. 

For tooth cleaning, pets need to be put under anesthesia. You’ll spend a minimum of $1,000. That will be even higher if a pet’s tooth has to be removed. 

I’ve spoken to people whose pets have back legs that have collapsed or disc herniations. You can easily be out over $10,000 on a surgery. You can easily spend four figures on a 24-hour overnight. I spoke to somebody who was quoted $3,500 a night for just an observational overnight.

You mentioned that some of this comes down to who owns pet clinics and how that’s changing. Who owns them now?

Traditionally, it was an independent practice. But in the past 10 to 15 years, big corporations and private equity have moved into the space. The largest owner of vets in the United States right now is a group called Mars. And if Mars sounds familiar to you, that’s Mars as in Skittles. 

They own around 2,500 vets under the names of VCA, Banfield, and Blue Pearl. I’d say somewhere between a third and 50 percent of vet clinics are owned by corporations. It was 10 percent or less than 10 percent a little over a decade ago.

What caused this spike and why is a candy company behind it?

As people realize how much can be done to help their pets, the corporations and private equity basically saw what one analyst described as low risk, high reward. I’ve spoken to employees of some of the larger chains who have told me that prices went up routinely every six months or every nine months or once a year. 

In Britain, there was a recent government investigation into all of this by the Competition and Markets Authority, their equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission. They determined that private equity and corporate ownership is responsible for a billion pounds spent on pets over a five-year period that otherwise wouldn’t have been spent, and that people were paying about 16 percent more at vets owned by large corporate outfits versus independent vets.

How are people paying for this if it’s so expensive?

I live in Los Angeles, and I wrote a piece for New York magazine a few months ago about all the people here who are now driving their pets down to Tijuana because it is so much less expensive down there. 

Pet insurance is a very mixed bag. It is extremely expensive in many cases. It goes up at very high rates. My own pet insurance increased by 30 percent from last year to this year. And by the way, my dog Barney Rubble is 2 and a half years old.

Wow. He’s still so young.

He has had no issues that I am aware of that would account for a 30 percent increase. 

The other thing with pet insurance, unlike human health insurance, is there is no preexisting [conditions] clause. I have lost count of the number of people I’ve interviewed over the years who discovered too late that their pet health insurer deemed something a preexisting condition.

What do people do when they get to the point where this costs too much? 

In some cases, they run up debt. Buy now, pay later services are increasingly moving into the veterinary area as well.

In other cases, they surrender the animal. If you talk to people at shelters, they will say that they believe that part of the uptick they’ve gotten in surrendered animals has to do with the increase in costs of veterinary care.

I imagine that just feels like such an impossible choice, like choosing between this money you don’t have and the quality of life for something that you love.

The emotions are huge. This is in part why private equity and corporations have moved in: They know people are going to feel very emotional about their pets and that they’re going to want to do anything they can to keep them alive or keep them healthy or keep them pain-free, and that they will pay almost any price. 

When my last dog was diagnosed with heart disease, I was determined to keep her going for a couple of years. I had her on one medication that cost $300 a month. I was like, “I can’t lose my Katie.”

The tragic thing about pets is they are both better than us — in my opinion — and they live shorter lives. You are going to lose your pet eventually. It’s just the most heartbreaking thing in the world.

For multiple years, the hottest toy in the United States was a book. But not just any book: a smart book that could play sounds and respond to taps and help kids learn to read. It was the kind of gadget seemingly any parent could get behind, but it came with a high price - and some unexpected parenting questions.

On this episode of Version History, David Pierce is joined by The Verge's Andru Marino and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy to explain how the LeapPad worked, why it was so enticing to both kids and adults, and why the company that made it could never quite follow it up.

We're almost finished with our fifth season of Version History, all …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today, I’m talking with Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of the Channels podcast, about the gigantic Warner Bros.-Paramount merger and the future of the company now simply called Skydance.

Skydance is owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed the day Peter and I spoke.

There are some grand ambitions here, but the reality is that acquiring Warner never goes well for anyone. AOL failed, AT&T failed, and Discovery failed — although it did succeed in flipping these assets to Skydance. So I wanted to ask Peter if he thinks the Ellisons and Skydance have a real shot at succeeding where so many companies before them have hit the rocks.

Okay: Peter Kafka on Warner Bros. and Skydance. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Peter Kafka, you’re the chief correspondent at Business Insider, and you’re the host of the Channels podcast, our sister podcast here on the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thanks for having me. It’s big media day again!

A big media day. It’s an auspicious day, as my parents would say. It is the day that the Warner-Paramount merger closes. We’ve all been calling it Warner Mount, but I’m told this company will instead just be called Skydance.  

Skydance!

Every time I see the word Skydance, I assume it is foreign-owned, which is maybe true in some way.

Another way to think of it is that there are iconic names in Hollywood. Paramount is such an iconic name that Viacom turned itself into Paramount years ago. Warner Bros. is a legendary studio. Let’s get rid of those names. Let’s add Skydance, which no one’s ever heard of.

Let’s just start at the start. There was Paramount. There’s Warner Bros. The deal closes today. That is all going to be a new company called Skydance. Is Skydance just a holding company? Are we as consumers meant to know that this thing exists?

I think for the near term, you’re still gonna think of companies like Paramount, Warner Bros., and HBO as brands you know, but this is going to be one company. They’re going to merge everything. They’re likely going to merge the streaming services, Paramount and HBO, into a thing, not right away, but eventually. So I do think Skydance will be a name that consumers will probably know at some point.

I just have to ask, what are the chances that HBO Max will be rebranded yet again into Skydance?

There’s probably gonna be some branding stuff. Not again. In the near term, because this is still a cable TV company, there are actually some limits on what these guys can do with their brands and their services. And they won’t come out and say, “We’re gonna mush this stuff together.”

But there’s likely to be one mega streaming service, and maybe you can get HBO separately, or maybe you can only get HBO or only Paramount. Still, it’s gonna be one thing, and one movie studio. It’s all gonna get mushed together, and it’s all gonna be run by David Ellison.

David Ellison is just the latest to believe that he can buy Warner Bros. and make something good happen. I have joked many times on this show that maybe the only antitrust policy this country needs is to make it illegal to buy Warner Bros., and that would just solve a lot of problems. Why does he think he will be successful?

Well, his dad’s the eighth richest man in the world, so that’s not nothing.

That Oracle stock is tied up in a bunch of AI stuff. It’s moving up and down.

We can talk about that. But one, that means that he literally has the money to buy this, and two, that this is a public company kind of in name only. David Ellison and Larry Ellison, his father, control this company effectively. They don’t really need to worry that much about equity shareholders. Debt’s a different issue. 

And he’s 43. He’s got a long run backed by tens of billions of dollars of his father’s money to take a stab at this. And as you said, he will not be the first person to do this. There’s a long list of failures. I think maybe that’s appealing to guys like him. It’s like, “Everyone else is dumb. I’m the smart guy who’s gonna figure it out.”

“Everyone else is dumb, and I’m smarter than everyone else is,” is very appealing. But that long list of failures, if you just look at it — they’re all shaped like this idea. We’re gonna take iconic Warner Bros. content, we’re gonna marry it to new distribution, we’re gonna reduce the overhead and costs and decadence of Hollywood. Where does new revenue come from?

There’s no plan for new revenue. There’s no announced plan for new revenue. Right now it’s shrinking; it’s cutting costs. It’s when we merge these two companies together, we’re gonna save $6 billion over the next three years. We promise that most of that’s not gonna come from layoffs, but a lot of it’s gonna come from layoffs.

These are companies that have had many, many rounds of layoffs prior to this. And you could argue, well, there’s probably not that much more to cut. I think reasonably you could say, look, if you combine two big streaming operations, two big studio operations, there probably is stuff [to cut]. You can probably sell off some real estate. You probably don’t need all the executives you currently have. There’s some savings there. But how do you grow? No idea. And no one’s really articulated that.

Growth is required for a couple of reasons here. One, yes, there are going to be shareholders; people will be looking at it. There’s David Ellison’s ego. Then there’s debt. This deal is levered to the max, right?

Eighty billion dollars [in debt]. Eight zero. More important than the number is the reason that David Ellison was able to buy Warner Bros. was that the last owner couldn’t deal with the debt that he took on to buy the company. And that was a mere $43 or $50 billion, depending on who was counting. This is David Zaslav, the former CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, who spent his entire tenure running that company telling Wall Street that, yes, he was gonna get the debt down, and that was his main focus, and debt, debt, debt, reduce, reduce, reduce.

I mean, he did reduce some debt, but he never convinced Wall Street that he had a plan to grow. Wall Street gave up on this company years ago, which is why when David Ellison decided he wanted to buy it, the stock was, like, seven bucks or something like that. Eventually bought it for, you know, many, many times that. 

And now David Zaslav is considered — or he considers himself — a genius for selling the company at such a high price. You could also argue, as someone told me yesterday, that a unicorn sort of manifested itself and allowed David Zaslav to exit the situation he had put himself into.

I don’t know who the next unicorn will be for this company if David Ellison at some point decides, “Ugh, actually this is a lot of debt and a lot of pain. I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

I want to come back to that because I have a little bit of a conspiracy theory. It’s a little bit supported by the attitudes of some of the players here, but we’ll come back around. Even the previous owner, AT&T, which is remarkable that AT&T was the… Somewhere in this chain of ownership, AT&T owned Warner.

Yes.

They could not deal with these assets. Their plan was to distribute Warner content on AT&T phones, which never made any sense. But they were a more aggressive owner.

It also wasn’t really their plan. Their plan was, “Hey, Netflix is a really valuable company. The stock is very high. We’re this boring telecoms company. Our stock is not moving. What if we owned a [version of] Netflix? I bet Wall Street would reward us as a high-flying tech company all of a sudden.” And Wall Street didn’t. 

Within a couple of years, AT&T said, “Uh, oh yeah, no, we’re out of this.” And yes, they had said a bunch of stuff about mobile, connectivity, ads, and targeting, and none of that ever went anywhere

I will never forget covering their antitrust case when they had to get approval for that deal. They convinced the judge that they had a vision of the future. The judge in that case, in the appeals court opinion, wrote, “This is a vision deal.” And I thought, “We’re doomed.” Like, I don’t know what’s going on in our judiciary [system].

I want a Vision deal. How do I get one of those?

I don’t know. I was like, “I don’t know what that is at all.” 

So, we have a lot of debt. The FCC had to waive the cap on foreign ownership. There’s 49 percent of the money from the Gulf in this company. Then there’s the Oracle of it. I’ve always wondered why anyone would trade what amounts to an AI stock for a media stock, especially right now. 

But the AI trade is a little shakier than it was before. Oracle has been punished a little bit for this deal. What do you make of that? Is that an effective backstop?

I don’t know if Oracle was punished for this deal. I mean, there was a period a year ago when Larry Ellison’s net worth was double what it is now. And you could say, “Well, that was just a weird AI blip.” It’s still a very highly valued company. He is still the eighth richest man in the world because of his Oracle holdings.

Wall Street is a little bit nervous now about the fact that Larry Ellison’s source of wealth is Oracle. He’s borrowing from Oracle. He has backstopped the Warner Bros. deal by pledging to come up with $40 or $50 billion if he needs to. And there is a question of, like, all right, not only is Oracle sort of intimately tied into this new media company, but Oracle’s also entirely dependent on one AI company, OpenAI, for its new plan.

So late in life — Larry Ellison is 82 years old — he’s decided he’s kind of putting the entire company on AI and on OpenAI specifically. And while he’s not doing that, he’s going to use some of that money to fund his son’s media empire. I don’t know if it’s rickety, but it’s definitely a question mark.

I open Instagram. Right now my Instagram algorithm is crazy because I keep looking for Instagram’s tolerance for copyright infringement, and it is high. Instagram has basically unlimited tolerance for copyright infringement. Mark Zuckerberg is posting deepfake memes of himself doing rap videos now.

These are details. By the way, Nilay, you know who’s figured out the Instagram and Reels algorithm? You! I get so much Nilay front-facing video. You’re very good at it. You should consider being an influencer. You have figured this out.

I try to deeply understand the things that are gonna kill me, and so that’s… We’re just looking at that one, and I’m looking at my daughter. I’m like, “I should know what’s going on here.”

All this AI makes it impossibly cheap and easy to just take the IP from these movie studios. I watched a video last night of the Heath Ledger Joker and the Christian Bale Batman just doing a Justin Bieber video, and then I was served 5,000 more videos like this.

That’s the OpenAI business. They’re gonna destroy the creative foundations that make the IP valuable that Warner Bros. makes, and somewhere in there is a big problem that I can’t quite figure out.

Yeah, I think it maybe is simpler than that. You’re right, there are all kinds of copyright issues. The value of your library may be much less if someone can just take it without paying you. But I think the bigger issue for David Ellison and anyone in the media business is that what you really want is people’s attention.

You have this company saddled with $80 billion in debt because it makes all kinds of entertainment, really expensive movies, all this sort of stuff, and now anyone can make anything that will at least get your attention for a few seconds on Instagram and TikTok. And so there’s this flood of stuff, whether it’s copyright infringement or not, it’s just stuff that the David Ellisons of the world have to contend with because your daughter and my kids might easily watch that stuff rather than the original Batman movie.

I think that is sort of the existential problem [not just] for Skydance, but every media company today.

But the Skydance purchase is being funded by the OpenAI deal with Oracle money. OpenAI just took all the stuff, right? This is a thing I can’t quite square: If OpenAI succeeds at the level that is necessary for the Ellison family to stay wealthy, then they will have massively profited from overwhelming IP theft, and they will have a product that can make anyone a movie at any time for zero dollars, rendering Warner effectively useless.

Maybe you’re right! Again, I think there is a core tension here in that the reason you say that Skydance is worth what it’s worth is because of its existing library and its ability to make new stuff. And a lot of that may be much, much less valuable going forward. There’s a counter that says, look, you know, people were stealing music for decades, and somehow Spotify and the music industry figured out how to actually sell $120 worth of music per year to people who were only buying two CDs per year prior to that.

So maybe there’s a way to math yourself out of this, but we don’t know yet.

There are other constraints on this deal. This deal is actually marked by constraints and challenges, in a particular way. The big one is that in order to settle the antitrust lawsuit filed by California and a bunch of other states, they agreed to put out 30 films per year or pay $30 million per film that they missed into healthcare and retirement funds managed by the unions. After two years, they have to go up to 32 movies per year, and if they don’t hit that, they’ve gotta sell their 49 percent stake in Miramax. 

This is a pretty intense constraint, right? They’ve gotta just make a bunch of movies; they do not make this many movies right now. So how are you gonna cut costs to make more movies?

I think the math there is that we have these two studios. If you sort of totaled up what they were gonna do already, it’s close to 30. And, to be clear, this is not really a constraint from California. This is a pledge that David Ellison was shouting from the rooftop for months and months and months. And if you want to, we can talk about the non-settlement he extracted from California. But this has been David Ellison’s pitch for a long time. 

I think the main thing is that David Ellison has proved that he can sort of get California and regulators around the world, and definitely federal regulators in the Donald Trump era, to go along with whatever he asks for. I don’t think they’re gonna be constrained by regulation.

I think they’re gonna be constrained by math and debt, and are you shaving that debt down fast enough to make bondholders happy?

I’m actually asking about math here. I do want to talk about the non-settlement, but the 30 films per year going up to 32, I don’t know that there’s a market for that. It’s not like the box office is growing at the rate to support that, and if you need to pay down your debt, the first thing you would do is stop making things that people aren’t buying.

I mean, there’s some finagling, right? Like, what is a movie? Does a movie have to be released in movie theaters? You know, is a piece of shit that no one watches a movie? And then again, I think, in that settlement in California, they said literally, like, “X number of movies have to be in a movie theater,” which means a lot of them don’t.

So who knows what they will use to fulfill that obligation. But for the near term, I don’t think that is gonna be their primary problem.

Let’s talk about California for one second. I actually got an email from a reader saying that I always call out Republicans by name, but I only say California. So I will say it appears [Governor] Gavin Newsom and [Attorney General] Rob Bonta totally caved here. Ellison threatened to move to Nashville or something, and they blinked, and I think the other states in that lawsuit were not happy that they blinked, but they totally blinked. What is the settlement? Does it have any teeth at all?

No. It’s all the stuff that David Ellison was already proposing, and none of the things that Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, said he was demanding. He was saying, “We need structural remedies.” I’m sure I don’t need to tell a Decoder audience what a structural remedy is. 

He was like, “Behavioral remedies are not adequate. It won’t work.” He was saying that up until the weekend that he caved, and then he caved, and he had this humiliating press conference where he had to stand up and say, “This is, this is a good deal. I really believe in it.” Apparently, he was considered, like, a rising star in Democratic politics, in California politics. I have not been exposed to him prior to that press conference, but it’s very hard to imagine that guy has a… He doesn’t seem to have a lot of juice. Anyway, enough about my political musings.

There’s very little in here. I don’t think Paramount gave up a single thing to actually make this deal work. You got it right. They said, “We’re gonna leave if you don’t give us what we want.” Anyone who’s watched professional sports, who’s rooted for a professional sports team, knows how this goes. “If you don’t build me my new stadium, if you don’t give me billions of dollars to refurbish my stadium, I’m gonna leave.” And sometimes those teams do leave, but most of the time they stay and they get what they want, and that seems to have been the Ellison playbook here.

David Ellison’s pitch to Hollywood for the last two years was like, “I grew up here. I love movies. I love Hollywood. I love film.” And then the last few months were, “I’m gonna ditch this and go to Tennessee or wherever else and fuck Hollywood,” which is kinda hard to square those two things. 

The second he got that settlement, he was like, “No, I love LA. I was never planning to leave.”

I think they looked at this from the start as: We’ll say and do whatever we need to make this deal get done. And once it’s done, it’ll all be behind us; we can go back to loving LA, and no one’s ever gonna pay attention to this.

And by the way, he might be right.

I do have to note that Peter is a Vikings fan. I’m a Packers fan. I do not believe the Bears are gonna move to Indiana. We’re literally watching this situation play out in front of us right now.

That’s a wild one. I will say the Minnesota North Stars no longer exist. The Dallas Stars. Minnesota was without hockey for several years. So sometimes these guys actually do follow through and move the team.

Yeah. Speaking of Minnesota, who knew you didn’t need a quarterback to go four and 0? Just throwing that out there. 

Let’s talk about the NFL for one other second. The last time you were on the show, you pointed out that CBS broadcast television exists to sell the American people the NFL. That is the business. 

Speaking of math, of costs, there is a change of control clause in the NFL deal with CBS. They could come in there, they could raise rates, they could get Amazon or Apple or Google to throw a bunch of money on the table and basically tank this company. They could take CBS’s business away.

Does that feel like a meaningful threat right now?

No. I think CBS will pay whatever it needs to pay to keep the NFL. It is existential for them. I think the NFL knows that. But also, the NFL, as much as they like streaming stuff and streaming deals, they like broadcast TV. They like that distribution. It’s also a political football, pun intended. If the NFL went away from broadcast television, I think that would become an actual national political emergency. You’d actually have Republicans and Democrats united to sort of stop it or do something about it.

It’s very hard for me to believe that the NFL leaves broadcast TV, and I think because CBS needs it so badly, I just think they’ll pay whatever they need to pay.

Let’s talk about the structure of this deal. I love talking about corporate structure on the show, as you know. You have a profile of the new co-CEO of Skydance, Ynon Kreiz. He was most recently at Mattel.

There’s actually a lot of Peter in this story because he left Mattel to go run Skydance. And the CEO of Condé Nast, Roger Lynch, is leaving Condé Nast to go to Mattel, and we’ll find out who the new CEO of Condé Nast will be. These are all Peter Kafka stories in a way.

Oh, it goes deeper than that. I met Ynon Kreiz when he was running a company called Maker Studios back in the YouTube MCN days, for any of your ancient watchers and listeners. And he sold that company to Disney, and I actually broke that story. And at the time it was considered this huge deal, Disney’s big bet on digital media. The numbers are so small now it’s laughable. And that was a total failure. A long line of Disney digital acquisitions that did not work. They’re really snake-bitten there.

Kreiz was the guy brought in. That was a really wooly company founded by a group of YouTubers who were dating each other but also harassing each other. And he was basically brought in, first as chairman, and then CEO, to be the grown-up and to sort of whip this thing into shape and sell it off, which he did.

It’s funny, the MCN era ended because YouTube decided that MCNs shouldn’t exist, and they just killed them all. Again, another theme that will emerge somewhere down the line in this conversation. Tell me about Ynon.

Ynon’s got lots and lots of media credentials. He ran Endemol back when that was a really important TV production company. He worked with Haim Saban, if any… No one knows who Haim Saban is anymore.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?

Exactly. He did Maker and then went to Mattel, where he gets credit for making the Barbie movie.

Now, he didn’t actually make the Barbie movie, the long-running thing, but he put that deal together with Margot Robbie and it was a giant, giant success. So that counts as a big win. He also cut 22 percent of Mattel’s workforce, sort of immediately upon getting there. That’s sort of what you bring Ynon Kreiz in to do. You don’t bring him to have lunch at the Polo Lounge and make nice with talent. You bring him in because you need to whip things into shape and cut things, and that’s his deal. 

I was talking to a bunch of people the last few days. He strikes me as a guy who doesn’t have terribly high EQ. Other folks say, “No, no, no, no. He’s tough, but he’s actually a teddy bear if you get to know him.” I think most people who get laid off by him won’t consider him a teddy bear, but that’s his job: to go do the unpleasant work of finding $6 billion in synergy. 

Because you are a corporate structure lover, you probably have noticed that while Ynon Kreiz is co-CEO of Skydance, David Ellison is not the other co-CEO. David Ellison is the CEO. So at a minimum, we have a one A and one B thing. But also, let’s be clear, David Ellison and his father own the company, so ultimately it’s their deal. 

I think quite clearly what David Ellison wants to do is be able to have lunch at the Polo Lounge, the San Vicente Bungalows, or wherever they go, and someone will come up to him and say, “I’m really angry about this layoff or this movie project that you canceled.” And he’ll say, “Oh, that sounds terrible. You should really talk to Ynon about that. My hands are tied.” That’s Ynon Kreiz’s job.

Ellison wants to hang out with Tom Cruise. This whole thing, from start to finish, is like, one guy wants to hang out with Tom Cruise, and he’s gonna manufacture a company that will allow him to do that at scale.

I will give David Ellison more credit than that. David Ellison, when he ran Skydance, his primary achievement was befriending Tom Cruise. And I’m sure he liked hanging out with him, but that’s why Skydance was a company: David Ellison was in the Tom Cruise business. He was in the Mission Impossible business, the Top Gun business.

That is what the job of a producer is: getting people to… You don’t really do anything as a producer. You just sort of package stuff, and he was able to be in the Tom Cruise business, and that’s what got him as far as he’s been able to get. And that is his job. That was his job. Now he’s got a different job.

There’s probably a PhD thesis on the kind of personality that accepts a co-CEO title without another co-CEO.

I’ve thought about that from the get-go because of the chain of events — was it last week? — Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, who said, “I’m now the CEO of Mattel.” For an hour or so, no one knew where Ynon Kreiz was going, and then the rumor was, “Oh, he’s gonna have a job at Warner’s. I’m like, well, what job could he take? 

He’s already been the CEO of a big publicly traded company. These guys don’t usually accept a demotion. And quite clearly what he’s… One, they said, “All right, you’re the co-CEO,” so it’s not a demotion. Two, there are only a handful of these giant media conglomerates. If you can run one, that’s just a big notch to have on your belt. 

Number three, they’re gonna pay him $50 million this year. So that will help salve some of those wounds, and I think everyone sort of acknowledged it. Like, he’s effectively the COO of Skydance, if you think about it. You just give him a different title so it sounds better. 

There’s some other shuffling under that to do. You’ve got two movie studios. You have James Gunn running DC really well, actually. I think Lanterns is just a bona fide hit for HBO. You’ve got two news divisions, which we should talk about. How are they going to resolve these conflicts? Are they just gonna pick one team or the other?

Yeah. I mean, they’ve already done that with streaming. Cindy Holland, who pioneered Netflix’s move into original programming more than a decade ago, was brought in by David Ellison a year ago to run that streaming service. He’s just bought HBO, which is run by Casey Bloys, very well-regarded, who spent the last year making it clear to everyone that he would not work with or for Cindy Holland. 

I don’t think there was personal animus. He’s just like, “I already run HBO. Why would I want to share power with somebody else?” So it seemed pretty clear that David Ellison would pick that horse, and I think he’s gonna make a bunch of those calls. The people who ran the Warner Bros. studio, which a year ago was the toast of the town, were making tons of money and critical acclaim. This year, they produced Digger, Tom Cruise’s biggest bomb ever, and they’re having a rough year. But it was always sort of clear that David Ellison was gonna bring in his people. 

David Ellison is not an art film guy — he’s not a guy who’s gonna allow Paul Thomas Anderson to make One Battle After Another again. He’s in the Mission Impossible Tom Cruise-iverse, so that’s not surprising. CNN and CBS, people have been talking about merging those companies almost as long as I’ve been covering the media, so that’s not a new idea.

They have said, I think wisely for now, “Well, we’re not gonna merge those two,” because we just know it’s a fucking shit storm politically if they touch that stuff. And this is pure speculation, but they might also say, “Well, we hired Bari Weiss and gave her CBS News to run, and maybe we told her she’d also get to play with CNN. But it’s been a rough year over at CBS in the Bari Weiss business, and maybe even if we’re gonna give it to Bari Weiss a couple years down the road, let’s not stir that nest right now.”

So Mark Thompson, who’s been running CNN, is gonna continue to run CNN. But again, in the background, no matter what Mark Thompson… He has control of CNN. Ynon Kreiz is still gonna be in there saying, “I know this is your business, but it’s really my business, and you need to cut 10 percent or 20 percent,” or whatever it is, and everyone has to do it.

And so in some ways, yes, it matters who’s running these individual studios and components, but again, the debt is hanging over everything. Everyone is gonna have to work to reduce that debt one way or the other.

The Bari Weiss thesis at CBS, as charitably as I can put it, was that when she showed up, she was like, “No one trusts the news, and it’s because we’re not fair enough, and I’m gonna do more conservative stuff.” And that was part of the regulatory arbitrage with the Trump administration. They were gonna change CBS because Donald Trump did not like the coverage on CBS, and that worked or didn’t work.

But I think we now know that she did not increase trust in CBS News by making it a more conservative-friendly organization. The ratings are down, like precipitously down, such that a lot of people think that she should just be fired and something else should happen. I would —

Yeah, I don’t see that happening.

Well, right, because he’s gotta do regulatory arbitrage on both sides. We have midterms —

And I think he likes Bari Weiss. I think David Ellison is not a political person. I think his father, Larry Ellison, is probably not that political. Tom Dotan in Vanity Fair just did a profile of Larry Ellison and sort of gets at the idea of how he’s bought these big media empires. He also owns a chunk of TikTok. Is there a thing here? And his conclusion is no, it’s not. He really doesn’t have much politics. But the one thing the Ellison family cares a lot about is Israel. Bari Weiss cares a lot about Israel. That is the one ideological through line there. I think they’d be loath to sort of cut her loose.

And also, it’s been a clusterfuck over at CBS, but I don’t know that she’s done a worse job running it than anybody else has recently. It’s just that there’s systemic decline. Now, she may make it even worse. It’s possible. And as a journalist, you may not like what she’s doing. But if you’re running the business, I don’t know that she has made it that much worse. I think the Ellisons probably don’t like the headaches and headlines generated by it, but I also don’t think they care that much.

I mean, I go on TikTok, and I see any clip from any 60 Minutes or CBS News account, and all of the comments are, “You ruined this. I blame Bari Weiss. I can’t trust you.”

That is a decline in trust from where they were before, when no one knew who was running CBS News. I would actually —.

I think you should not know who the heads of network news are.

Yeah. I think it’s bad that the kids on TikTok are like, “I hate this one person that has nothing to do with the video clip I’m seeing now.”

I bring that up because of the TikTok of it all. The idea that TikTok was a national security threat, that the United States Congress voted unanimously to ban it, that Biden voted to ban it, but then he knew it was political suicide, so he kicked the imposition of the ban to the Trump administration. 

All of that, as you peel apart the reporting, what did members of Congress see in their closed-door meetings? It comes down, as far as any of the reporting I’ve ever seen, to how they thought it was spreading pro-Palestinian propaganda, anti-Israel propaganda. Now the Ellisons own it. 

As you said, they care very deeply about the issue of Israel, and I can’t say that their ownership of TikTok has meaningfully moved the needle on how people feel about the war in Gaza in any way, shape, or form. Did they try? 

Perhaps people were disappointed with Israel’s conduct prior to the invention of TikTok. Perhaps there are other reasons they may not be concerned. And, you know, the reason Congress voted for this. It’s maybe the only thing Congress has passed in years is this rule saying China can’t own TikTok, which they then immediately forgot about during the first year of the Trump administration.

I do think the China of it all was meaningful for some people, but they clearly also just didn’t care. It’s kinda wild to see Congress pass a bill that becomes a law and then not try to enforce it at all.

They knew it was suicide. I don’t know if you remember this, but there was a day when it was the House committee, and AOC was on this committee, and they went into a SCIF to view some intelligence about TikTok. They all came out and voted unanimously to ban this thing, and no one for months could figure out what they saw in there.

And it was like, “Did you see a picture of Chinese intelligence services turning the knobs in the algorithm to poison the minds of American youth?” And they’re like, “No, no, no.” 

“They showed us some videos.”

Yeah, it was like, “What, what are you looking at in there?” And then we just sold it to someone who may or may not have some political leanings, but they have some control that is equivalent to the Chinese control, which was so scary that we had to ban this platform.

I’m bringing this all up because that is the thing that is reducing trust in the news media. It is not the news media itself, right? The news media makes its mistakes in whatever ways it makes its mistakes. But it’s a bunch of influencers on social platforms who start every video by saying, “Here’s what they’re not telling you,” which is actually the mechanism of reducing trust.

And then they read you The New York Times. As somebody who now makes these videos —

“No one’s covering this! Let me read you a New York Times story about it.”

The other thing that has reduced trust in the media is that Republicans, for 40 years, have been saying the media is biased. And if you say something for 40 years and you’re one of the two parties running the country, I think that message sort of seeps in, before TikTok, before social media.

But if I had to pick the two things that are the biggest threats to the businesses that David Ellison now owns, I would pick AI, and I would pick social media, and those are the other big investments of the Ellison family. Is this all just an elaborate hedge, or does he have a plan to use TikTok to amplify his content? To market these movies?

I don’t think they have a plan. One of the through lines when David Ellison was buying Paramount was that David Ellison’s a successful producer. You add his dad, who runs Oracle; he’s got a lot of tech know-how. And also, David Ellison is not just a movie producer; he’s a technologist. This was the thing they stood up and said at a press conference. And he said, “Yes, yes, I was mentored by Steve Jobs.” He wasn’t mentored by Steve Jobs. 

But anyway, the whole premise was we’re gonna techify this and cloud and Oracle. And maybe they could save $10, $20, maybe $100 million on sort of back-office-y things by swapping in an Oracle contract for something else. Although, I think in the normal world, you’d say just because your dad owns this company, we don’t get to bring it in as a technology company for this publicly traded company. Whatever. But there’s never been any indication that they’ve got any other plan other than shaving some costs. 

I don’t think David Ellison is ideologically inclined. Maybe he will see something outrageous on TikTok that he doesn’t like and say, “Hey, Dad, could you bring that down?” I don’t even know if his dad has the capacity to bring something down. You know, TikTok is a black box. We don’t actually know how the algorithm works, who actually controls it, and who can steer it.

The potential for TikTok content to end up on whatever this new Paramount HBO streaming service is high.

Mm-hmm.

I know the other big media companies have long looked at the user-generated content platforms and been envious of their cost structure. YouTube barely pays any money for its content, and it’s destroying this industry.

YouTube pays the most. YouTube pays 55 percent. Everyone else pays zero percent.

Right. But for an average creator on YouTube, you’re getting nothing, effectively.

I’m just saying it is a great business model, and the Reels and TikTok business models are much better than the YouTube one because they pay zero percent for content.

There’s something there. Like, Disney has made some noise about putting creator videos in Disney+. They’ve all looked at it. They’ve all talked about it. This one seems easy, right? It’s HBO Max plus your favorite commentary about whatever HBO Max show you’re watching, sourced directly from TikTok, right here. We’re all gonna integrate it. 

Maybe this is way harder than I’m making it sound.

I think they all believe that… They all move in herds, right? All these companies always do. We’re all doing vertical video now. And you’re like, well, vertical video, yes, people like the format. What they really like is unlimited free content. Which, again, TikTok doesn’t pay anything for.

So you, Paramount, or you, Peacock, or you, Disney, you are not in the business of getting free content from people. You are still paying for stuff, and also you care about your brand still, so you don’t wanna just have a platform where anyone can watch anything. And I think that is kind of the fundamental question for all these media companies. 

You’re not platforms. The dominant media companies are platforms. Can you turn yourself into a platform? Should you turn yourself into a platform? Should you just say, “Nope, what we make is super high-quality, specific stuff that people value as a brand, and maybe that’s just gonna be our place, and we’re not gonna compete with the YouTubes of the world”?

Netflix seems to be going in that direction. They’re gonna be more platform-y. I do think you’ll probably see not just Paramount, but every company try to say, “Oh, we’re a platform, too.” I don’t think it will be successful, though

Do you foresee a tighter connection between Skydance and TikTok? These are all companies operated by a family. They’re not close right now. They could get closer.

I don’t know that TikTok cares, right? TikTok, which is still really run by ByteDance, I don’t know that they care about making Larry Ellison that much happier. I don’t think that’s the direction of travel here.

I’m only curious because I’m watching Meta just relentlessly promote Muse, its AI agent, across all of its platforms. OpenAI launches Dots, and where do they go to buy ads? They go buy ads on Meta platforms. And like, this is a massive structural advantage for Meta, right? They are not buying their own ad space.

And if I ran a movie studio and I had to put out 30 movies per year and pay to market them to try to get these kids to go to a theater, I’d be like, “Boy, I could really use that TikTok juice.”

Do you know who’s winning the microdrama wars in the US? I don’t know if you’ve paid attention to microdramas yet, but they are what they sound like. 

Oh yes.

Meta. Meta is not in the microdrama business. Meta is in the “Oh, you wanna advertise microdramas? Come talk to us.”

So they are getting all of the microdrama money right now. It’s a great place to be if you’re, if you’re Meta. And by the way, the microdrama companies are uploading their content to Meta as ads, so Meta both gets paid for the advertising and then has free engaging content that it can show its users. It’s a great place to be.

If only Meta cared about its actual businesses instead of trying to win in AI agents. The amount that they would succeed would be out of control. That’s another episode of the show. 

Let me end with the conspiracy theory that I brought up at the beginning. There was a bidding process. David Zaslav’s initial plan was to split Discovery into two, to sell the cable networks to whoever was dumb enough to buy them. Netflix really wanted Warner, and they bid. They were actually the announced winners until David Ellison did his regulatory arbitrage.

They won the deal in December of last year. They gave up on it in February of this year. So they won for a couple of months.

David is very good at just kicking the door back open. He made it happen.

As Logan Roy said, “Congratulations on saying the biggest number.”

No one has succeeded in buying Warner. You could argue that Netflix did nothing but make the price so high that it was unsustainable, that they had to create massive amounts of leverage on this deal, pay an unsustainable amount of debt. And at the end of this all, Ted Sarandos is gonna be standing there waiting to buy, yet again, the distressed assets of Warner Bros. at a fire-sale price.

Do you think that’s likely?

I think Netflix, and other people as well, will definitely be in the business of, “Oh, Ynon Kreiz fired you? Ynon Kreiz told you you couldn’t make your movie or television show? Come talk to us.” Which, by the way, a lot of other companies were doing to Netflix back in 2022 when Netflix went through its retrenchment.

So I think that is likely but also standard, right? You just have this turmoil. You have a standard thing in any media company of, “Oh, this project this other guy brought in, we’re not doing that anymore. That was a failure. We’re doing new stuff. And oh, by the way, if the last guy’s project turns out to be successful, we’ll take credit for that. But we’re gonna bring in new stuff.” 

I don’t think Ted Sarandos was playing 3D/4D chess here. I think they thought this was a good idea. But I think the much more obvious answer is Wall Street hated the idea. Wall Street kept telling Netflix, “We hate this. We hate this. Please don’t spend $80 billion on this. And also, by the way, you’re gonna have a tough time getting this through regulation.” And I think Ted Sarandos eventually said, “Okay, you’re right.” 

I’ve seen him speak publicly about this and in other venues. He seems quite upset about the fact that he didn’t get this deal. I think there are also feelings involved here. But I don’t think this was all a master plan on their part. 

I think they went for it. They didn’t get it. They’re bummed out. They’re gonna move on.

I think an angry, aggressive Netflix might actually be the best thing that could happen to Hollywood right now, because they were headed towards their own vertical video slop fest, and maybe now they’re not going to do that.

I think that’s the question for — I mean, it’s a question for everybody. But for Netflix, it’s: you guys have been super successful for a couple of decades by doing one thing. Well, initially you were doing DVD by mail, then you went to streaming, and that’s all you did. And you didn’t ever sell movies. You didn’t do a la carte stuff. You didn’t do advertising. You didn’t do sports. 

Now you do advertising. Now you do sports. Now you’re doing games. Now you’re doing podcasts. Maybe you’re gonna integrate with other kinds of TV stuff. And so this laser focus that Netflix had, which proved very successful, they are moving away from. They may have to move away from it. They may have sort of reached the limit of that growth. 

But it gets trickier and trickier the more things you add to that stack to make sure you’re doing a good job. And I think that is the real challenge for them.

We’ve been at it for about 45 minutes. I still don’t know how David Ellison is gonna make one more dollar than he made last year. Have you come to any conclusions?

We’re recording this Tuesday morning. Tuesday night, like at 7:30? I don’t know why they’re doing it at 7:30 or 8:30. They’re gonna have a press conference, the first Skydance press conference. So if we re-record this on Wednesday, maybe all this will be answered, but maybe it won’t be answered.

Well, Ynon will be there. He’ll be there wielding his scythe.

It’s gonna be interesting because he is not gonna be a high-profile person, but I think a lot of people are gonna learn his name anyway. And this is a thing that Hollywood does, right? You find a person to blame for your troubles. 

Sometimes it’s a company like Netflix, sometimes it’s an evil Jason Kilar. Remember when he was running WarnerMedia for a minute or two? And everyone said, “You’re wrecking the business. Thank God we have David Zaslav, who’s an authentic media guy to come in and save us.” 

And then, you know, six months later, David Zaslav’s name is an epithet. Presumably there’ll be a new epithet associated with this company.

Yeah. Well, this deal is gonna wind its way through. We’re gonna check in on it a lot. We’re gonna have you back, Peter. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

See you, Nilay. Thanks.

On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” More than a year and a half later, his administration is instead busy using government power to go after speech it dislikes. 

Last year, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr urged broadcasters to take action against Jimmy Kimmel over his comments following Charlie Kirk’s killing, and in September, Kimmel said the FCC again intervened to stop Kimmel’s late-night show from airing an interview with James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate for Texas.

Also last month, Trump barred three news outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House over their coverage. That ban was quickly blocked by a federal judge, but both CNN and Politico have since been banned from traveling with the press pool on Trump trips.

Outside of the White House, the fight over free speech is also raging on college campuses. In states like Texas, Republican lawmakers have restricted when students can protest and given governor-appointed university boards more say over what gets taught. In 2025, 15 states passed laws that restrict what can be taught or weaken protections for free expression on college campuses.

To break down what all of this means for the state of free speech in the US — and the future of our First Amendment rights — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

How would you describe the kind of status of free speech on campus these days?

The status of free speech is in great peril, both on and off campus. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and it’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen it. 

When it comes to the Charlie Kirk backlash cases, we saw about 90 of them. It’s a remarkably high number. We saw an ex-cop go to jail for 37 days just for forwarding a Trump meme in response to a request to go to a candlelight vigil for Charlie Kirk. It’s not good.

If you look at the last two years, we’ve done so many episodes about free speech concerns. There was Jimmy Kimmel; there’s CNN being banned from the White House. 

There’s student protesters who are protesting what’s going on in Gaza. 

It really does seem like we’re at a moment where so many different types of people claim that their speech is being restricted in so many different types of ways. What is happening in the country?

My worry is I’m very much a small-L liberal. I come from an old ACLU background. That’s where I interned in law school. I went to law school to do First Amendment law. I hyper-specialize in it. This is my passion. 

For most of my 25-year career, you could rely on a civil libertarian aspect of the left and a libertarian aspect of the right that would often agree on almost nothing except for things like freedom of speech. And right now, I think we’ve become all culture war all the time, and we have more of a progressive left and more of a populist right. 

The only way that you show you believe in freedom of speech is by saying, “I hate that guy, but I think you should have freedom of speech.” If you’re saying, “I think my side should have freedom of speech,” that’s just self-interest. That doesn’t even count. 

All the worst people in history wanted free speech for their side. So I’m afraid we’re losing — or maybe even, I hate to say this dramatically, but maybe even have lost it as a shared value as a society.

Well, that’s quite grim.

Yeah. I’m feeling a little grim. 

The Trump administration came into office with a promise. And I remember it sounding something like this: “The woke left went too far. They canceled people. They restricted speech. They got out of control. President Trump is going to come back in, and we are going to restore sanity to the country. And as part of sanity, that will include your right to freely express yourself.” 

How do you square the promise versus what we’ve seen?

I think Trump is constantly frustrating everyone around him by being Trump. I think there probably were people in the administration who were like, “Yeah, we’re going to be pro-free speech.” And then Trump decides to declare — I mean, I think the recent White House press pool case is hysterical in a lot of ways because he had to get his team to give a sort of constitutional justification for why he was kicking out the press pool. But on Truth Social, he’s like, “It’s because of their viewpoint,” which is, by the way, something you can’t do under the Constitution. 

“I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.”

His instincts are very authoritarian. They’re very top-down. So maybe there were people in the administration who, in their heart of hearts, are good on free speech, but Trump isn’t. And it’s the reason why when it came to the new administration, there were a lot of people on the right, but also people on the sort of heterodox left who were like, “Oh, this is going to be good for free speech.”

I was like, “Don’t kid yourself, guys. This is going to be bad.” Although I will say, it’s even worse than I was expecting.

President Trump at some point will be out of office. And what happens then? What do you think? Is there an optimistic scenario where we’re like, “Okay, we’re kind of tired of this crap. Let’s just go back to the way it was in the ’90s”?

It has been cyclical, to a degree. American society gets out of whack, and usually one of the things that does bring us together is that we were lucky enough to have…I’ll just say it, we have a brilliant Constitution. It is unusually clever about human nature, and the Constitution itself — you can have whatever opinion you want about the founders, but it is something to be proud of. And a lot of times those values kind of bring us back together. 

That’s my hope. But another thing I will say about Trump: He has played havoc with my ability to predict anything. So what it’s going to look like over the event horizon of 2028, I hope it will be better, and we will fight like hell to make sure it’s better here at FIRE, but will it be better? I’m not sure, and it definitely won’t be better if we think of free speech as something that belongs to my side, not yours.

One of the reasons why I do have hope for free speech in the long term is that free speech works really well. It’s how you know what your fellow citizens think. It’s how you get ideas out there. It’s how you actually be your authentic self. 

Societies that actually have freedom of speech are always going to have advantages, real and serious advantages, over ones that don’t. So I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.

The Wisconsin gubernatorial race was one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries in the country this year, pitting a democratic socialist, state Rep. Francesca Hong, against Milwaukee Democrat David Crowley, who received the endorsement of the state’s sitting Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

Hong lost the race, setting up Crowley to face Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in the general election this fall. But she’s already back on the campaign trail, this time trying to help Democrats win a trifecta in the state: the governor’s race and both legislative chambers.

Unifying the state’s voters to achieve that won’t be easy, though. Hong spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about her own loss, Evers’s role in it, and whether or not the voters who felt so passionate about her own campaign would find enough to love in Crowley’s campaign — in particular on the increasingly important issue of data centers. 

Astead and Hong also talked about what Wisconsin means for the Democrats nationally, and what lessons the party should take from her race, including her loss.

“I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around,” Hong said. “But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign. I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic.”

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Hong, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Part of the reason we wanted to come here was because we saw you were getting back on the campaign trail, and specifically around that idea of energizing Wisconsin toward a trifecta.

Now, just tell me the difference in terms of the importance of Democrats winning it all — not only the governor’s mansion, but both houses of the state legislature — versus just the governor’s mansion. How does that change the possibilities of what the party could do?

For the last 16 years, a Republican majority in the state legislature has meant that passing the types of policies that we know can drastically improve the lives of everyday folks here in Wisconsin stalled. And we have a historic opportunity to flip the assembly and the state Senate and hold the governor’s mansion and the entire executive branch to a Democratic majority, meaning the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports — things like increasing minimum wage, things like legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion. 

We also need to repeal Act 10 [which dramatically restricted collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees]. Wisconsin is where workers’ rights, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security were born, and we moved backwards with the Republican majority. That’s all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

It also, though, raises the political standard of what Democrats would have to do to achieve that, and some of it goes through these more rural communities.

Why do we think the party has fallen behind in more rural communities, and what could be done to reverse that?

I think it’s important to look at what’s happened in the rural communities when we’ve seen manufacturing jobs leave the state, when we’ve seen fewer and fewer supports for our small farmers.

And so much of this — what connects it — is actually the growth of massive wealth and corporate control and corporate greed, and more people feeling the impacts of that. There’s an opportunity right now to say, ‘Hey, Republicans have been in the legislature, they’ve been in power, and things have not improved for you or your community … Now’s the opportunity to make sure that we’re actually able to see our shared Wisconsin values of working hard and taking care of our kids be reflected back in Madison through laws.’

So much of your campaign was focused on data centers, stopping data centers. Should I think of that as a rural issue?

I think the issue around data centers is an everyone issue. It’s a democracy issue. It’s people wanting to feel like there are folks who care about what happens to communities, and that they have control and an actual say in what happens in their communities.

To that point, is it a mistake for David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, to have not gone as far as you did and say, “We won’t be building more data centers for a period of time”?

He’s fighting for communities and community control when it comes to data centers.

But it’s not a moratorium.

But it’s not a moratorium. It isn’t, but he’s also committed to 100 percent renewable energy, clean energy to power data centers.

And achieving that is going to be incredibly difficult, and it is going to be the developers having to pay their own way, and these are things that he’s committed to that we know can slow down the growth and development of data centers. 

Have you had time to reflect on your primary loss? If you had to diagnose, why do you think you lost?

I’m still doing a lot of reflection. But I think that I want to continue to look forward. And what I’ve learned from our election is that it’s so important to continue to stay grounded in becoming accessible to people. I think that as an organizer and an elected official, it’s my responsibility to continue to go to the people and remain very in touch with what’s going on on the ground.

I have a couple more questions about the nature of the loss. Evers’s endorsement changed that race, so much so that your opponent David Crowley was able even to win in some smaller communities, like places where you were pitching yourself as the voice of more rural communities.

Does that disprove any of this thesis around, say, data centers? If that was the top priority for Wisconsin voters, wouldn’t you be the nominee?

I think it wasn’t all rural communities. It wasn’t all suburban communities. We saw certain demographics but also ZIP codes where we outperformed David significantly.

And I think that where the governor’s endorsement played a bigger role was areas where he was also more popular. 

Did it surprise you when Evers endorsed Crowley?

I was disappointed.

Why?

I was disappointed because I was getting a lot of feedback from folks who hadn’t committed to any candidate yet that this felt like the governor was putting his thumb on the scale.

I wanted to ask about electability, because it seemed as if Evers’s endorsement was about a fear that maybe you couldn’t win in November.

So much of the primary concern was around the DSA label, even campaigning with folks like Hasan Piker. In retrospect, was any of that a mistake?

We knew going in that we would have to encourage new voters to come out, folks who typically do not come out for primaries, quote-unquote low-propensity voters. And we knew that we would have to campaign in places where folks weren’t expecting to see a gubernatorial candidate. And those included Twitch streams.

Those also included going to dive bars and bowling alleys and making sure that we were accessible and shaping our policies based on what the people were telling us they wanted to see happen and also what they wanted to see out of their governor. I think electability… I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around.

But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign.

I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic, when Democrats need to be inspiring and project a vision where everyone can see themselves in it as everyday working-class folks.

When you’ve got a party that has struggled with elitism to then cave to an establishment narrative … being more afraid of labels when I’m hearing from people on the ground that they’re interested in solutions and solving problems, maybe somebody who knows the hustle of the service industry and running restaurants and has worked across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation. There are ways that we can maneuver around labels and what the loudest narrative might be.

I wish our governor hadn’t fed into that.

To be fair, to your point, the establishment label doesn’t fully fit even someone like Crowley, who comes from a working-class background. But am I hearing that you think Evers’s move made your life in the general election more difficult?

Is it harder to re-inspire if young people who are invested in the Hong campaign think that the establishment squashed them out?

We still had over 300,000 votes. We lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. I had more votes than Evers did during his primary. That’s not squashing our voices.

We’re still here, and it’s so important that people find avenues to continue to exercise their voice and their new organizing power. And I’m definitely going to continue to work to make sure that we get results and that we win the trifecta, and that’s the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

I hear why a trifecta matters in the state context, particularly the state policy.

If I’m someone, though, who’s not in Wisconsin, who’s just worried about Donald Trump running amok in Washington, why should I care if Democrats win the governor’s mansion and the state legislature? Does that matter for folks outside of the state?

Because we will start to see that when you feel government actually working and you see change happening in your lives, these are then voters who are going to continue to come out and vote for Democrats.

We’re a pivotal state when it comes to the federal elections as well. We’re actually in a swing district right now. 

We have an opportunity, through Wisconsin, to actually start improving the brand for Democrats. And if we do that here, this trickles out to the rest of the country.

The premise being that delivering creates a connection for Democrats that is helpful in the presidential election, and it’s helpful in all these other ways too.

Yeah. We’re not going to be fighting every single midterm and presidential for our lives based on what’s happening in just one state.

But I think if we can start showing durable power for Democrats in a state like ours because of the policies that we’re prioritizing, and you have more folks coming out to vote for Democrats, that’s good for the health of democracy.

In the weeks and months following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza that followed, the world’s attention turned away from the West Bank. 

Over the past three years, however, the situation in the Israel-occupied territory has worsened as Israeli settlers have carried out more violent attacks on Palestinians.

The attacks can range from acts of daily harassment and trespassing to a major mob assault in the West Bank village of Jalud that overwhelmed Israeli security forces and blocked a displaced Palestinian family from returning home. Last week, Israeli settlers shot and killed a Palestinian man.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed violent West Bank settlers as an issue, blaming the Jalud attack on a “handful of rioters” and referring to settlers as “juvenile delinquents” in a speech to the UN last month, in which he argued that the world should focus on violence committed by Palestinians instead.

But even as he downplays the problem, human rights organizations have documented a record level of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that such attacks have made everyday life “untenable” for the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlements are also clearly illegal, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in September — but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding. 

Ahead of Israel’s elections later this month, settlers have accelerated a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the explicit backing of some Israeli cabinet ministers, led by young militant Jewish settlers that are part of a loose network known as the Hilltop Youth. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Feliz Solomon reported on the Jalud attack and has written about the role of Hilltop Youth in worsening settler violence. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the reality on the ground in the West Bank, the settler groups behind it, and how Israeli officials are responding.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about the last three years in the West Bank. What’s been happening?

The October 7 attack really hardened a lot of people’s views in Israel, and that’s played out in the West Bank in a number of ways. 

One is that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has some powerful members who are settlers themselves, became much more overtly supportive of expanding the Jewish settlements. 

The second thing that changed was basically a total breakdown of trust, both between Jews and Arabs, and also between Jews and the state, because a lot of people felt that they were really on their own in terms of security. 

All of this created a really combustible environment. There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.

What does that total impunity look like? We often hear the term “settler violence.” What does that mean?

There’s really a whole spectrum of violent actions. It’s mostly by younger male settlers. There are some acts of daily harassment, like trespassing on Palestinian property, vandalism, stalking people, blocking roads, and preventing access to resources like water wells. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are also acts of extreme violence. 

There have been some very serious physical assaults. Settlers throwing rocks with slingshots. Last year, there was a viral video of an elderly woman who was beaten with a stick. She was hospitalized for days. And lately, we’ve been seeing more mob violence where a large group of settlers will raid a Palestinian village. They’ve set mosques and other property on fire. 

Just to be clear, there’s violence by Palestinians too, but we’re really seeing an alarming surge of violence by settlers that’s often unpunished, and increasingly it’s happening when settlers go into Palestinian areas where they’re not supposed to be.

You reported on an attack that happened last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud. Tell me what happened.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village, Jalud, and essentially besieged the houses. They blocked their access to essential goods and harassed the residents until, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

Two of those houses belonged to the Tubasi family. In early September, Israel’s high court ordered the state to ensure their safe return, and in late September, they tried to go back. We spoke with Wael, who’s one member of the family, and also with their lawyer about what happened when they tried to go back. 

A few dozen [Israeli] security forces were deployed to escort them home in the middle of the night, and when they got there, they found that the house was totally ransacked. They showed us before and after pictures, and the windows were smashed, the doors were broken, electrical wires were cut, and there was just debris all over the place.

When they came inside for the first time in about two months, they were walking through the property looking at the damage with flashlights, and they’d only been there for a few minutes when suddenly they were surrounded by a mob of settlers. They said at first that there were about 50 settlers around the house, and the military later said that there were more than a hundred people that took part in what they called a riot. 

The authorities told the family to take cover deeper inside the house, and they hid inside a stairwell as the soldiers tried to force these settlers to retreat, but they were shouting and throwing rocks at the house, and then, according to Wael, they even started climbing in through the windows. At that point, the authorities told the family to go upstairs, all the way up to the roof and to hide in a corner of the rooftop. 

Wael explained what he saw up there. He was looking down and he saw the soldiers battling it out with this large group of settlers and this thick cloud of tear gas and loud bangs from stun grenades.

“There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.”

Eventually, the security forces realized that they weren’t getting the situation under control. They had to get this family out of there. They took them back downstairs and outside and put them in a military vehicle, but then the settlers surrounded the vehicle and they were rocking the car. They slashed the tires so that [the family] couldn’t leave. Then the soldiers had to move them into an armored military vehicle and eventually they got them out. 

A short while later, not long after they had escaped, they started receiving video messages from some of their neighbors that showed what happened after they left, which was that their car and their house had been set on fire.

All right, so the Israeli authorities in the form of soldiers were trying to help this Palestinian family legally return and settlers violently blocked them. This is settlers versus the authorities. What do we know about who these settlers are and what is motivating them?

This was a very large group. We know of three people who were detained in this incident. All of them were teenagers. The youngest one I believe was 15 years old. 

A lot of the harassment in this area comes out of a nearby settlement called Esh Kodesh and smaller, more informal settlements around it that are called outposts. And these outposts are usually pretty crude encampments. They often start with just tents or a camper van or a trailer with no electricity and no water. And the people who choose to live in these places tend to be very young, very extreme ideological settlers.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth. Who are they?

The Hilltop Youth is a loose network of settlers that live outside the mainstream, and they often have much more extremist views than the mainstream settler movement. It’s an offshoot of religious Zionism, which is one of the main ideologies of the settler movement, and it sort of fuses the ideas of Orthodox Judaism with ultranationalism. 

The Hilltop Youth take these ideas to the extreme, and I’ve spoken with a bunch of them myself. They believe that they’re on a divine mission to reclaim the Holy Land for Jews, and they’ll cite parts of the Torah and other religious texts that they interpret as empowering them to take the land back and even to use violence. They see it as a preventive type of self-defense, and they see themselves as protecting all other Jews.

These are young people, some of them teenagers. Where are they coming from? Why are their parents not grounding them? How has this been allowed to unfold the way it has?

It’s a good question, and I should say also that not all Hilltop Youth are violent, but a lot of the violence that’s committed by Jews in the West Bank does come from this group, and they come from all over the place. Some of them grew up in the settlements, and then as teenagers, they kind of wandered and they struck out on their own. And then there are others who come from all over Israel. 

A lot of the Hilltop Youth, we’re finding, are kind of troubled kids. Sometimes they’re dropouts from strict religious schools, sometimes they have behavioral issues or ADHD, and they just didn’t really fit in. We heard from some kids who said that they found out about the outposts by word of mouth, like someone at their school had invited them to come for the weekend and they’d come and they’d stay a few days and eventually they’d start spending more and more time there until at some point they’re just living there. 

There are a number of NGOs that recruit young kids to come work as farm hands on agricultural outposts in the West Bank, and some of those are in these areas that are more prone to radicalization. These organizations present themselves as very innocent in that they’re identifying kids that need help and are bringing them to a place where they will learn some discipline and they will have a purpose and they’ll have something to do. But that often puts them into a more extreme environment.

In the case of the family you profiled in Jalud, it’s clear that the Israeli authorities, in the form of soldiers, attempted to help the family get back to their home. How does this typically play out, though? How do Israeli soldiers typically respond when settlers attack Palestinians?

There have been a number of high-profile examples of video footage circulating that appears to show Israeli soldiers either standing idly by or even, some would argue, siding with the settlers. 

In one recent example, there was a video that showed some soldiers praying alongside settlers who had besieged the home of a Palestinian American man, and that was actually not very far from where the Tubasi house is. The military said that it was looking into it to determine whether disciplinary action needed to be taken. 

In general, military officials acknowledge that this violence by settlers is a big problem, and the security establishment definitely does not support what’s happening here. They see it as getting in the way of counter-terrorism efforts and overall efforts to bring stability to this very volatile area. 

I’ve heard this directly from military officers, but on the ground there does seem to be a breakdown of discipline in some cases and a lack of clear instruction in other cases. Some soldiers simply don’t know how to deal with threats from other Israelis, especially really young ones, as you pointed out. It’s just not what they’re trained to do.

Do you think the government could put a stop to these attacks by settlers if it wanted to, or has the government lost control?

This problem has gotten so big that it’s going to be very difficult to solve without significant backlash, but I have spoken with a number of former Israeli security officials who say yes, much more could be done — starting with a more frank acknowledgement of what’s happening, clearer law enforcement procedures, and more disciplinary actions.

It's gadget season, and a lot of companies are launching a lot of new products. But whether it's Microsoft dropping a high-end laptop, Amazon shipping a fancy Android tablet, or Apple diving headlong into the smart home, the actual strategy appears to be almost always the same. All these companies believe AI assistants and agents are the future of computing, and they're building devices that put them front and center.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay dig into all this new hardware to figure out whether any of it has the right take on AI. (Or if "the AI should run the computer" is even the right idea in the first place.) The …

Read the full story at The Verge.

They have fun names like Feel Free, Smurphs, and Hazy Tabz. They come in colorful packages and in gummy form. They’re widely available at gas stations, corner stores, and smoke shops across the country.

They’re also highly addictive, largely unregulated, and in the news after they were found near the bodies of two dead University of Mississippi students.

The drugs are called Kratom and 7-OH. The first, kratom, is derived from the leaves of a coffee-like plant in Southeast Asia. When taken in small doses, kratom causes a low-key buzz. In higher doses, the high is described as euphoric. It operates like an opioid — a chemical in kratom called mitragynine binds to opioid receptors in the brain, which leads to that euphoric high. It also can lead to addiction and overdose. 

Social media is full of videos of people trying to kick the drug, with harrowing stories of dependence and withdrawal. 

7-OH is a highly concentrated compound derived from kratom, which dials up both the high and the danger. The drug has caught the attention of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who warned in a press conference last year that 7-OH was “marketed for children.” 

“They’re gummy bears, they’re bright colors, they’re candy-flavored,” Kennedy said. “This is really a sinister, sinister industry.” In August, federal agencies announced they were taking steps to effectively ban 7-OH nationwide. 

To break down the increasing prevalence of both kratom and 7-OH, what the drugs do, and what to do about them, Today, Explained spoke with Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist who covers drugs and drug policy and who wrote about kratom earlier this year. 

As Busby explains, kratom and 7-OH are “definitely in the zeitgeist. It’s in the news and for good reason. To have these 7-OH gummies just in gas stations is a really potentially problematic thing. Without the drug education alongside it, this drug has just popped up out of nowhere.”

Busby also talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the business interests behind the drugs, why they’re a complicated topic for the Make America Healthy Again movement, and how industry lobbyists have teamed up with several Trump administration officials to try to sway the results of regulatory decisions. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there an important distinction between kratom and 7-OH? Is 7-OH found in kratom?

7-OH is found in relatively small quantities within kratom, but this businessman, Vince Saunders, who is the self-styled American shaman out of Kansas City, basically figured out how to extract the 7-OH and blow it up into entire pills.

I’ve never tried 7-OH and I’m not interested, just for the record, since I’ve been talking about how I don’t mind kratom, but these 7-OH tablets are uber, uber strong. I think the large number of people that are taking it are using it instead of opioids. And maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. 

Is 7-OH something you can also easily find at your neighborhood gas station?

Yeah. It’s much the same as the kratom formulations, so you’re talking gummies, little shots, capsules, and the brand names for the 7-OH companies are perhaps even more kind of out there — 7-OHeaven is one. 

It’s certainly not heaven when you’re going into withdrawals.

And do we know that people are? Are people becoming addicted to 7-OH?

People are becoming addicted to kratom and 7-OH. I think the whole thing, the concern originally sprung up with the Feel Free tonics that are like a mix of kava and kratom. And people just got habituated into drinking several of them per day and realized that it’s very unpleasant if they don’t continue to do that on a daily basis.

We have a federal government that loves to police drugs of all sorts. What are they doing about 7-OH? 

It’s this MAHA dilemma, right? Because their ethos is very “natural medicines and freedom.” The idea that this Feel Free tonic, whose owner JW Ross recently gave, or a company related to him recently gave, like $500,000 to the MAHA PAC, and he’s been photographed next to RFK Jr. — he’s perhaps predictably come out on the side of the kratom industry, which is lobbying for a ban of 7-OH. 

RFK Jr. called it sinister and said that it targets children, which it appears to do in some cases with the gummies. There’s kratom gummies too and clearly gummies are an easier way, especially for older people, to ingest the medicine or substance, so we shouldn’t just blame the gummies here. 

But clearly, when you’ve just got packets of these gummies that are called like 7-OHeaven just on the shelf or indeed behind the counter at the gas station, there’s going to be concern about that. 

There are other MAGA figures like Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who’s got a million-dollar investment in the parent company of Feel Free. There’s definitely this nexus of figures in the government that have got some interest, potentially, or relationships with the kratom industry. And indeed the department when I was writing my Wired story reminded us and readers that everything he’s done is ethical and I’m sure it has been.

We usually think of liberal drug policies as a lefty thing. Markwayne Mullin’s about as right as they come. Are kratom and 7-OH making friends across the political spectrum because there’s a big business opportunity here?

You look at Trump’s executive order on psychedelics and then rescheduling cannabis, and it seems that the right has really seized the mantle and is looking at it from a more libertarian perspective of, “Hey, what happens in a man’s head is his own business.” 

They’re also being probably more business friendly than people on the left would be, so it’s a really interesting moment, especially with RFK Jr. as health secretary.

Trump has spoken at length about the opioid crisis in the United States and how it’s tearing our communities apart and whatnot. Here we have readily accessible opioids at our gas stations. 

Yes, they’re not killing nearly as many people as prescription drugs are. However, they’re a lot easier to get than prescription drugs. Help me understand this administration’s position in relation to what could be a real terror for some people.

They are in the process of banning 7-OH. Last month, the Department of Justice set out an emergency scheduling, so that’s open for comments at the moment. When they ban something, it doesn’t just happen overnight. 

I think by the beginning of next year, it’s quite possible that these 7-OH products won’t be in gas stations and indeed some states have already taken action.

And just to get ahead of any confusion here, 7-OH may be banned from gas stations and probably other convenience stores, but not kratom?

Exactly.

Why one and not the other? Obviously 7-OH is stronger, but you could take a lot of kratom and it might feel like taking a little 7-OH, no?

Absolutely. You just need to take a lot and it’s in powder form. So you need to consume a prodigious quantity of it or drink a bunch of these seltzers. 

I think that they’re not going to ban kratom because there’s an obvious recognition of the good it does for people that are recovering from opiate addictions and that they do have a kind of natural off-ramp, [which] is very unlikely to kill you even though you might take a huge amount. Whereas, if you’re taking like 26 different medications, including a bunch of opioids for your chronic pain, you might die. 

Who do you think wins the argument at the end of the day? We have some strong lobbying forces involved here. You’ve got a lot of people who have come to enjoy or depend on these substances that are, as we’ve established many times now, readily available all over the country. 

Do you think we see fewer or more kratom products in our gas stations and convenience stores in the years to come?

The kratom advocates are a lot more eloquent and suited and booted than the 7-OH folks. What I see is that 7-OH will be forced underground and that kratom will continue its long and illustrious ascent in American culture. 

We do really have a gas station culture in this country, and I wonder if these substances being so available in them is a particularly American thing. You live in the UK. Are gas station drugs a US thing?

It’s an American thing for sure. But you guys take a lot of drugs!