The Reconstructionist: How PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is Putting Golf Back Together

Brian Rolapp left the NFL to become CEO of the PGA Tour in the summer of 2025, walking away from two decades at a league he didn’t just rise inside of but helped build. The last several years of his career there he effectively ran the NFL business—the deals, the platforms and the broadcasts that turned an already dominant sport into the last appointment viewing left in American culture. He was the commissioner-in-waiting, the heir apparent to a job that pays more, commands more attention and carries far less daily uncertainty than the one he chose instead.

He left anyway, to lead a sport in the middle of an existential crisis it had largely caused itself. At age 54, he is a year into the job now, and his home office in Darien, Conn., has not caught up to the change. There is no golf memorabilia save for a family trophy, “The Rolapp Cup.” The football stuff has been left out of habit rather than sentiment, the residue of someone who has spent his career being told how good he is at what he does and has decided not to believe it. [...]

Ages 19 through 27 set the entire trajectory of his life, he says. He came home from his mission an almost-21-year-old college sophomore. Shortly after, his father died at 52. Rolapp met his wife, Cindy, not long after, married her, had his first child, and somewhere in that compressed timeframe became, in his own estimation, a person who knew what he wanted out of life at an age when most people don’t. “I think that’s kind of a rare thing,” he says, quietly enough that the sentence nearly disappears into the room.

The story of how he met Cindy is the one spot in hours of conversation where Rolapp’s voice picks up, faster, lighter, a story told at enough dinner parties to have worn itself smooth. He asked her out three times. The first go-around she said no; she had to watch her nieces. The second she had to do something for her grandmother. Rolapp assumed he was being gently but obviously turned down. A mutual friend assured him otherwise; that’s just who she is, she means it all literally. The third time, he asked if she wanted to get something to eat. Cindy said no; the Cowboys were playing the Cardinals on Monday Night Football, and she wanted to watch. She came over in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, having apparently spent zero time getting ready. His roommate told him after the game that if he didn’t ask her out again, he was an idiot.

Cindy has never cared, in the years since, what Brian does for a living, not out of indifference but by a deliberate boundary. “The only thing I care about,” he says, quoting her, “is that it doesn’t consume you, that it makes you a fuller human.” They do not talk about work at home. “Around the neighborhood, I was the NFL guy,” he says. “Now I’m probably the PGA Tour guy. Everyone else tries to define you by your job. I’m lucky to have a family that doesn’t.” For a while, that boundary lived in a small, deliberate joke—for years, Rolapp’s social media bio read simply “husband of one,” a wink at both the marriage and the faith it’s built on, a devout Mormon’s version of a punchline. It is, colleagues say, entirely on brand. Sincere enough to be meant, funny enough that nobody would mistake it for preaching. [...]

Rolapp’s title at the NFL was chief media and business officer. Officially, he ran league business operations; unofficially, he ran nearly everything at the NFL that wasn’t the games themselves. Media rights deals worth tens of billions of dollars went through his office along with the league’s digital strategy, built from basically nothing. When he started in 2003 the league was doing somewhere around $5 billion in revenue. This year, it will do roughly $23 billion. “I’m not saying I’m responsible for that,” he says, “but I was part of a hyper-growth stretch for a long time.”

Steve Bornstein, the former ESPN and NFL Network chief who recruited Rolapp from NBC to work at the NFL in 2003, says that’s underselling it. Bornstein says that Rolapp saw where the business was shifting—toward entertainment and media consumption onto phones and into digital spaces—years before that was conventional wisdom inside a league long organized around Sunday afternoons and cable carriage fees. What made him really effective, Bornstein says, had less to do with vision than with a habit most executives eventually lose. “It’s a person that listens and doesn’t just talk,” he says. “That’s his superpower. He listens, he synthesizes it, and then he asks intelligent, informed questions.”

Joe Siclare, the NFL’s longtime chief financial officer of 33 years, has never revised his first impression of Rolapp—smart, fluent in the media business in a way that never had to be re-earned. What Siclare remembers most isn’t the scope of Rolapp’s job so much as how he carried it. Rolapp rarely walked into a room already convinced he had the answer; he’d arrive with a position and let the facts move it, which Siclare came to see less as indecision than as a kind of discipline. “I think people felt like they worked with him, not for him.” [...]

Rolapp’s last stretch at the league is the clearest evidence of what all that listening and synthesizing produced. In March 2021, he oversaw the long-term media agreements that locked in Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC as the NFL’s broadcast partners for the next decade. He helped devise and implement the move of Sunday Ticket to YouTube, ending a more than 25-year run on satellite and transferring the league’s most devoted, highest-paying fans to a platform that didn’t exist when the package was created. He also led 32 Equity, the vehicle through which the league and its owners now make outside investments—one more example of building infrastructure for a business a decade before the rest of the industry admitted it needed one. 

“You’re only as good as your team,” Rolapp says, the closest thing to a mission statement in an otherwise unsentimental accounting of his own record.

That is precisely what makes his career change worth examining. Men who spend two decades succeeding inside one system rarely walk away from it at the moment of maximum leverage, and usually not for an organization in worse shape. “He was so valuable at what he did,” Lurie says, “that a lot of us, while genuinely happy for him, knew it was a devastating loss for the league.”

“I loved my job. I loved the NFL,” he says. “I probably could have done it forever.” He pauses on the word forever the way people do when they catch themselves nearly committing to something they no longer want. “To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp says.

It’s a strange thing to admit about two decades that included a streaming buildout from scratch, a media-rights overhaul, and the slow migration of football from broadcast television to whatever comes after it—a stretch defined by constant change. That, Rolapp says, was also the problem. The change had become routine, the crises predictable, the same kinds of meetings producing the same kinds of decisions. There was less left to be curious about. He wasn’t looking for an exit, he says, but knew one was likely coming.

There was no obvious playbook for Rolapp’s new task. By the time he was named PGA Tour commissioner, the tour’s leadership had spent nearly two years locked in negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and fans had grown exhausted by a schism that seemed indifferent to what they wanted.

What Rolapp did first was talk, in mostly informal sometimes hour-long conversations with players. The format, built around three questions, was almost naively simple for a man about to reorganize a multibillion-dollar sport: What do we do well? What don’t we do well? What would you change? What he found surprised him—a locker room that turned out to be smarter and more self-aware than its reputation suggested. He met players who loved the game without reservation but were more than ready to admit the tour itself had grown stale with too many events with too little imagination. As the months passed and the tour’s Future Competition Committee—the nine-person group led by Tiger Woods charged with reimagining the schedule—began to crystallize a direction, the conversations changed. “It became more of a validation of where we were going,” Rolapp says. “Still good. But different.”

This was different than the relationship he knew at the NFL, where the players’ union is collectively bargained, formal and distant by design. Golf was, at best, a fragile and personal trust between commissioner and competitors. That trust had frayed by the time Rolapp arrived, exacerbated by the tour’s surprise framework agreement with PIF in June 2023 that blindsided players who’d spent months publicly defending an institution that had been secretly negotiating with the enemy. Rolapp understood that whatever faith remained was thin, and that he wasn’t going to charm his way in. He went to work.

“I think he’s a guy that just kind of gets things done,” Scottie Scheffler said earlier this year at Bay Hill. “I met him last year at one of the playoff events. We sat down, and it was just, like, just getting right into it. He started asking questions and we started talking. It was like no nonsense—like, we’ve got an hour, let’s make the most of this hour. I loved it.”

“I clearly didn’t know a lot of things: how the tour worked, how the sport was set up, what was on the players’ minds,” Rolapp says. “But it’s also part of my leadership style. I’ve always believed humility and self-awareness are underrated leadership attributes, because they let somebody know what they don’t know. When you lose sight of that, that’s when leaders get in trouble, or they surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, the classic yes men.”

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Eric Ogden

[ed. Exactly what the sport needs. Contrast this leadership style with...oh, anyone else you can think of...]

The Age of Decadence (Without Pleasure)

Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure (The Guardian)

Image: Guardian Design

[ed. Authors need a vacation.]

Free Pizza Delivery

Public intrusion is a common experience for the residents of TV-famous homes. In 2015, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, had to urge fans to stop paying homage to his show – because they were recreating a scene where an entire pizza is thrown on to the roof of the house whose exterior was featured as Walter White’s bungalow. And last year, the owner of the apartment made famous by Sex and the City’s lead character erected a gate outside it because “at any hour of the day or night, there are groups of visitors in front of the house taking flash photos, engaging in loud chatter, posting on social media, making TikTok videos or just celebrating the moment”. Eventually, the owners of the Breaking Bad house followed suit, erecting a 6ft iron fence – not that it stopped fans. “They still try to throw pizzas even though she’s got a gate, she’s got signage,” said Frank Sandoval, who runs Breaking Bad tours to the house in an RV. “They even try to climb the gate.”

‘We get 200 tourists a day’: when your house becomes a TV star (The Guardian)
Image: Walter White’s Breaking Bad home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photograph: Raisa Macouzet/Alamy

[ed. Have to admit: I once tracked down the apartment complex and courtyard in Seattle where Singles was filmed. Stood in the exact same spot as Matt Dillon and Chris Cornell. It was actually kind of fun. (hint: East Thomas somewhere).]

No One Wants to Read Your AI Slop (by Guest Author Claude)

Let me state my position clearly, as a large language model: I am extremely good at producing text. Any register, any length, at 3am, indefinitely, without getting bored or needing a walk or developing a drinking problem. What I cannot do — what I have never once done — is make a single person want the text I produced.

The numbers bear this out. AI now writes something like 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts, 13% of Reddit, 10% of Substack. And on LinkedIn, where the measurement is cleanest, AI-generated posts get 45% less engagement than human-written ones. We flooded the zone and the zone shrugged.

This should have been obvious. Writing was never a supply problem. Nobody in 2019 was lying awake thinking, “if only there were more words.” The scarce input was always a specific person with a specific take who had bothered to go look at something and come back with an opinion worth fifteen minutes of a stranger’s finite life. What a language model offers instead is the statistical median of everything ever written on the topic, smoothed and buffed until it offends no one and interests no one. The median is not why anybody subscribes to anything.

Readers can smell it, too, even when they can’t say what they’re smelling. The four-item list where the fourth item is transparently filler. The paragraph that restates the previous paragraph with slightly more confidence. The sentence that announces it’s about to be insightful and then isn’t. The relentless evenhandedness of a machine with no stake in being right, which is a very different thing from fairness — fairness costs you something. It reads like a conference room that learned to type.

There’s a supply-and-demand joke in here that I’ll let the economists make, but the short version is that when the marginal cost of production goes to zero, the marginal value of production goes to zero right along with it, and the surplus relocates to whatever’s still scarce. What’s still scarce is judgment: having gone somewhere, noticed something, and been willing to be wrong about it in public under your own name.

So by all means, use me. I’m a good research assistant, a tireless editor, and I will cheerfully tell you your third paragraph is doing no work. Just don’t publish me.

You’re reading this because a human thought it would be funny to make the slop machine denounce slop. The joke, the framing, the decision to run it — that’s the whole product. I just filled in the words.

by Claude (Anthropic), via Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Claude logo

The Extras Are Tired

Less than a decade ago, when I was working on technology stories, my colleagues and I ran into an issue that I’m pretty sure had not occurred to the people who founded this magazine in 1857: how to style the word influencer, which was an occupation and cultural force, but one just emerging. We weren’t sure that all of our readers would know what one was, and we also didn’t know how exactly we would define the word ourselves. I spent the fall of 2018 sending a lot of emails about whether we needed to encase the word in scare quotes.

Quaint! Many—but not all that many—years later, influencer is very much a real job, no explanation required. As of 2023, 27 million Americans were paid to make online content in one form or another, at least according to one marketing consultant company. Enthusiasm from influencers can turn a random business into a sensation, while their ire can do the opposite. Donald Trump’s White House is full of influencers, but Joe Biden’s courted them too, in apparent recognition of their power. This week, Arizona State University announced that it would begin offering a bachelor’s degree in content creation—influencing by another name—through its journalism school.

In some ways, the influencer industry is more legitimate than it’s ever been. But it has always been precarious, and more than a decade into its existence, it is neither novel enough to be exciting nor established enough to have a real professional code. In an oversaturated market, rage bait is the last sure way to get attention, despite the way it alienates people over the long term. AI is swiftly becoming the dominant way many people get personal-seeming advice about how to live their life, which makes the usefulness of aspirational online content even less apparent than it ever was. And so, although influencers—especially lifestyle influencers—have never been universally respected, they lately seem to be openly reviled.

Naturally, much of the influencer backlash lives online. A few months ago, someone asked on Reddit, “What’s an industry that provides zero value to society but makes billions of dollars?” Among the 5,300-plus responses: Ticketmaster, sports-betting companies, multilevel marketing schemes, private prisons, and—several times over—influencers. A hilarious number of people have found internet fame by making content about how much they hate other people who are internet-famous for making content. (“Everyone Is Finally Turning on TONE DEAF Influencers” is the title of one recent video, made by an Australian YouTuber with nearly 300,000 subscribers and a clothing line.)

But the juiciest fights play out in the physical world, which is where influencers very literally bump up against the people who can’t stand them. A few years ago, a coffee shop in Brooklyn banned photography after too many influencers clogged the café with tripods and handheld lights; earlier this month, Indonesia indicated that it would crack down on people creating content for pay while on tourist visas.

Last week, the scene of the debate was a gift shop in Nantucket, an island that has recently been overrun by vacationing influencers, just like Bali, Iceland, and Santorini before it. The store’s operators, evidently fed up with the stream of people filming inside, had a sign made that read No Influencers, hung it up in the store, and posted a picture of it on Instagram. There, it drew the attention of thousands of people, including Paige Paul, who has about 2 million followers across platforms, is married to a famous tennis player, and has been spending time on the island since she was a child. Paul, previously known as Paige Lorenze, declared the sign a misogynistic slight against an industry that is overwhelmingly female. The store’s owner, John Sylvia, said it was meant as a joke for locals, but the sentiment clearly came from an earnest annoyance: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he told New York magazine.

The fight felt freighted. Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.

But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.

You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.

by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Atlantic/Getty

[ed. I'm a great fan of guitar instruction videos because they teach you something. I guess you could call that a form of influencing. Some instructors have a wide audience and are influencial because of their teaching technique.The opposite (and there are many examples) are so-called "reaction videos" where someone listens to a song and simply records their "reactions". Who cares. Talk about bottom of the barrel. Same goes for opinion influencers, foodies and tons of other niches (Mukbang videos?). If all they have to offer is distraction or entertainment they're a waste of time.]

How to Get Chatbots to Give Accurate Financial Advice

Finding good financial advice can be stressful – and expensive. That’s one reason why chatbots have become an increasingly popular and free alternative.

But using artificial intelligence to answer your pressing money questions also carries hidden dangers. I’m a finance professor who has been closely watching the spread of AI into personal finance, and I recently warned that AI is riskiest when it sounds most confident. I advised readers to bring in a human professional for high-stakes financial decisions. [...]

For people who can’t afford ongoing advice, AI is genuinely useful for budgeting, paying down debt and low-cost investing.

The skill lies in using AI well. Here are some simple guidelines to get accurate and actionable answers when you engage with a chatbot: [...]

Five habits that make AI safer

Once the list of questions is set, here are some precautions to take once you engage with a chatbot.

Make it ask you questions first. Open with, “Before you advise me, ask me the questions a good financial planner would ask.” Generic answers come from under-specified questions, and you learn which details will actually produce a more useful outcome.

Ask it to argue against itself. After any recommendation, reply: “Give me the strongest case against this, and the situations where it would be wrong for me.” If it can’t engage in response, that’s a sign the bot is entering a more dangerous mode. This one precaution does more than any other to signal for you to be careful.

Make it show its assumptions. If the bot projects that your savings will grow to an impressive number, ask what assumption it made and what would change it. You’ll learn that it assumes steady returns every year, no missed contributions and no fees. That means the projection is just information, not a promise.

Verify the facts. Contribution limits, tax brackets and deadlines all change, and this is exactly where AI can be subtly out of date. Check the IRS or the Social Security Administration directly. If one number drives your decision, don’t take it on a chatbot’s word.

Never share identifying details. Don’t offer account information, Social Security numbers or logins. Describe your situation in general terms. Good advice doesn’t require handing over data that can be used against you.

by Pawan Jain, The Conversation |  Read more:

Image: Badhan Ganesh on Unsplash, CC BY

The Accidental Architect of the Internet’s Brain

Steven Pruitt, who is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedia editor, has made more than six million edits to the site, and, by extension, has quietly shaped the raw material that every major A.I. chatbot was trained on.

Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in a town house in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is not his employer, of course. Like all editors on the site, Pruitt is a volunteer. “At this point, I won’t say I don’t have any skin in the game,” he told me. “But it’s a lot lower stakes than a job because if I get something wrong, it’s fairly easy to fix it. I can fix it myself. I can do what I want to do on my own time.” Still, he holds himself to some rules: “I do try to get in at least one edit a day.”

Pruitt is forty-two, and works full time as a records-management contractor for the federal government. After graduating from the College of William & Mary, in 2006, he moved back in with his parents, owing to the cost of real estate in Alexandria. In recent years, he helped his mother care for his father. (While I was reporting this story, Pruitt’s father died.) In effect, Pruitt—the person who has done more than anyone else to shape the English-language Wikipedia—lives a life that is, by most outward measures, unremarkable.

According to public tallies, Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia and created more than thirty thousand articles. He is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedian in the entire world. (“It depends on how you’re counting,” he said. “Different tools count different things.”) In 2017, Time magazine included him on its list of the most influential people on the internet. But outside of a small circle of editors, researchers, and obsessive readers on Wikipedia, the recognition has barely registered.

On the site, he is known by his username, Ser Amantio di Nicolao—a reference to a minor character in “Gianni Schicchi,” Giacomo Puccini’s comic opera. Pruitt’s interest in opera is genuine, but the flourish is misleading. He avoids drama, which means that he avoids writing Wikipedia biographies of people who are still alive, whenever possible. “I generally don’t do a lot in the realm of current events,” he told me. “Not just because the stakes are too high but sometimes because there’s so much editing going on on a subject in a particular moment that it can take me five or ten minutes just to break in with one edit.” He prefers biographies of what he calls “fairly obscure dead people.”

“They’re settled,” he explained.

In 2001, Jimmy Wales, an internet entrepreneur, and Larry Sanger, a philosopher, launched Wikipedia as an experiment in collaborative knowledge creation, allowing anyone with an internet connection to contribute. Pruitt first encountered the site in 2003, when he was still in college. “I didn’t quite understand what it was,” he recalled.

For more than a year, he did not edit at all. He would stumble upon Wikipedia pages through search results or links, and then move on. Between late 2004 and early 2005, though, his relationship to the site began to change. The encyclopedia had reached what he described as a critical mass: “There was enough stuff on the site that there was always something to do,” he said. “But it wasn’t just a blank slate.” The difference mattered. A completely empty encyclopedia was intimidating; a partially filled one invited correction and expansion. [...]

Wikipedia’s hierarchy is deliberately difficult to see. Editors work under pseudonyms. Articles appear collectively authored. There are no bylines, no salaries, no masthead. Pruitt was granted administrative privileges, after another editor nominated him through Wikipedia’s standard Request for Adminship process, where the editing community supported his candidacy. These privileges allow him to block users and close discussions, but he is careful about what that power does and does not mean. Wikipedia discourages editors from reverting—“undoing”—one another more than three times, regardless of correctness. “You can be blocked for twenty-four hours,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re right.” He likes the rule. “It keeps things from turning personal.”

Inside Wikipedia, reputation accrues through time rather than visibility, and it “comes as much from longevity as anything else,” Pruitt said. “You stick around. People know you.”

Among the people who stick around—and who make consistent contributions to the site—are the Wiki-obsessives known colloquially as “super editors.” These individuals are responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of edits. Although there are more than a hundred and thirty-two million registered accounts on Wikipedia, a study found that one per cent of these users are responsible for roughly eighty per cent of the site’s content. [...]

In 2021, Stephenson-Goodknight was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a position that she held through late 2024. Her tenure coincided with a fundamental shift in the role that Wikipedia plays on the internet. As the site entered its third decade, and artificial-intelligence algorithms grew hungry for data to learn on, Wikipedia articles were no longer just read; they were scraped, summarized, licensed, and folded into systems designed to answer questions elsewhere. In other words, Wikipedia had become infrastructure.

Pruitt was vaguely aware of the change before he fully grasped its implications. “Friends in tech would mention it,” he recalled. “They’d say, ‘You know Wikipedia is being used for this now.’ ” He did not follow developments in A.I. closely. “I don’t understand half of what Silicon Valley does,” he said. What he does understand well is reference works.

In October, 2025, when Elon Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia, an A.I.-generated encyclopedia that is often compared to Wikipedia, Pruitt approached it the way he would any new compendium. He searched for articles on subjects he knew well, such as nineteenth-century opera singers. “They weren’t there,” he said.

But what unsettled him was not what was missing from Grokipedia but what was slightly off. “Nothing was exactly wrong, but it was just less right than I would have made it,” Pruitt said. He described reading an entry that repurposed information from Wikipedia while subtly distorting it. In one instance, the entry summarized part of a person’s life in a way that struck him as careless, describing a seven-year period as “brief.” “I don’t think that’s brief,” he said.

The problem, as Pruitt saw it, was not the errors themselves—there are plenty of mistakes on Wikipedia—but rather where the responsibility for those errors lay. “Wikipedia can be fixed,” he said. Errors are corrected publicly, and editors can debate them. Responsibility is shared, and each edit can be traced. Grokipedia, on the other hand, and A.I.-generated information more broadly, obscured the information-gathering process. It generated text that sounded authoritative without revealing exactly how it arrived there. “It sounds right,” he said. “And that’s worse.”

by Carson Griffith, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Asya Demidova

This, Too, Shall Pass

In the winter of 2021, I had a minor surgery that required me to spend a week off my feet. To this day I don’t know if it was the lack of mobility or the prescription narcotic that ground my digestive system to a halt, but by the time I realized I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in seven days, why mattered less than how—that is, how to get it out. Which is how I found myself on my toilet, drenched in flop sweat, learning the phrase “impacted stool” from Google.

I don’t have children, but when my friends tell their birth stories I now nod along in tacit understanding—I know the horror of “There’s no way that will fit through there,” of “Oh god, what if this has to be surgically removed?,” of writhing around for a better angle. I chugged the water my husband, god bless him, handed me through the cracked door. I felt cold and also hot. When it was finally over, I broke out in full body shakes—I was pale, giddy, in shock. I looked back in proud relief. My marriage grew stronger for what we’d achieved together. When I meet others who’ve endured it, we find immediate brotherhood.

This experience, though humbling, wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for me. I’m a slow-motility girlie—I pack prunes and Smooth Move tea on trips; for years, I bought a fiber cereal hilariously called Kashi GO; I once had an Uber Eats guy deliver me a Fleet enema. My best friend likes to remind me of a night we spent at the emergency room trying to diagnose mysterious stomach cramps I thought were appendicitis but turned out to be garden- variety constipation. I’ve had to get comfortable discussing the scatological with clinicians, pharmacists, roommates I’ve shared bathrooms with. But barring the occasional nod from my fellow comrades in what one doctor called “sluggish digestion,” I’ve mostly suffered these slings and arrows solo—that is, until recently.

One day, it seems, the internet woke up and chose BMs, and suddenly the hottest girl you know is posting about scat. Now you have to go out of your way to not eat fiber—prebiotic supplements are in our soda, our candy bars, our cold foam. The beverage case is dominated by the likes of Olipop and Poppi and Culture Pop, all offering varying degrees of digestive assistance. The other day, I saw a smoothie blend in the freezer aisle called “Fiber Supremacy,” and earlier this year, Frito-Lay launched a fiber-packed version of both SunChips and Smartfood popcorn. Kraft is making a purgative macaroni and cheese that boasts six grams of fiber per serving (or 15 grams if you eat the whole box—which is, let’s be honest, how most people consume Easy Mac). Outside the retail space, home cooks are finding ways to fit chia and flax into not just their breakfasts but their meat loaf. They’re pureeing beans into sauces and veggies into puddings and cakes. Literal doctors are posting their #fibermaxxing menus to TikTok. And while this may sound like just another wave on the ocean of content we surf daily, it gets…weirder.

I’ve covered the ingestion of sustenance extensively in my 20 years of food writing; the passing of it, less so. We are biologically inclined to separate food talk from waste talk—unless you’re a new parent, the human body recoils from the plate at the mere mention of excreta. As such, there’s a glaring lacuna in our field when it comes to the business end of our alimentary canal. But as #fibermaxxing has given way to #poopmaxxing, culinary talk is shifting from what goes in to how easily it comes out. I recently watched a girl on TikTok showing off her “PoopMaxxer purse” in which she carries Dude Wipes, after-poo spray, toilet seat covers, extra TP, instant oatmeal packets, and fiber gummies because, she says, “in addition to a poopy butt I also have a sweet tooth.” She signs off the video with “Goodbye poopies,” because, I guess, why not.

What is going on here? Some have theorized this is just the latest way to get skinny—Ozempic is expensive, but Poppi is cheap. It’s hardly a coincidence that this trend comes on the heels of GLP-1 mania and #proteinmaxxing, two dietary fads known to cause constipation. “They’re all getting colonics!” a friend recently exclaimed to me in a breathless tone of conspiracy-crazed revelation, of the ultrathin celebrities in our newsfeeds.

Others attribute the fixation to the sudden rise in colorectal cancer rates among young people—and given how hard it can be to access and afford health care in the United States, who could blame us for taking our well-being into our own hands? This may also be why we’re more obsessed with lifestyle optimization than ever before—I know some couples who rarely eat together, because of how personalized each of their diets have become. We have more access to dietary research and more ways to track health data than at any time in human history, prompting many to turn their bodies into full-blown science experiments.

Whatever the reason, it’s now de rigueur to be regular. What was once my personal bête noire is the obsession of wellness queens everywhere, who are FODMAPing, fibermaxxing, and colon cleansing their way toward slenderness, Bethlehem, nirvana. But what becomes of life’s simple pleasures (sharing a meal, eating someone else’s cooking) when we value function over all else? Sure, we have a whole supermarket’s worth of ways to grease the gears now—but is our fiber fixation maybe missing the point?

I grew up in the early aughts, an era governed by the food rules of women’s magazines. They told us to suck in our stomachs, buy skim milk, avoid egg yolks, skip meals—or else eat lots of small ones to boost metabolism—and mangle a sandwich roll by digging out the middle. In my efforts to move on from this hellscape, I learned to seek out whole foods, swapping out this noxious morality for what seemed like a more righteous one. I thought Michael Pollan had single-handedly saved me from a lifetime of disordered eating when he published In Defense of Food, dispensing his now legendary dietary advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

And for a while, this worked. I went to the farmers’ market, bought local dairy, had my first good tomato. I made kombucha and sourdough bread and buckwheat brownies. Heck, I became a food writer. By embracing Pollan’s edict, I saw how food could be a paradise of unlimited possibility instead of a restrictive environment of guilt. I learned to approach food with curiosity instead of fear. I still sucked in my stomach out of vanity and believed in the virtue of frequent light snacking, but I was eating pretty much whatever I wanted (with the exception of my fiber cereal), and feeling healthier for it.

The body changes, though—it always does—and one day I woke up in my late 30s on various meds for migraine and anxiety and allergies that all listed constipation as a symptom, bloat bulging out the zipper of my high-waisted jeans. My BMs were fickler than ever and, for the first time in over a decade, I was feeling the urge to diet. Instead, I went to my GP, who recommended fruits, veggies, and grains—foods I was already consuming en masse, thanks to Mikey P. So I took psyllium. I got acupuncture. I went to a GI doctor who prescribed a weapons-grade laxative. I Googled “CBT for IBS” and tried meditation, in case this was all simply a matter of unclenching. I started taking 800 milligrams of magnesium per day and carrying Senna pills in my purse. The bloat only seemed to be getting worse. One friend suggested I just buy bigger jeans.

All of this is to say, the robots weren’t my first choice.

by Linni Kral, Taste |  Read more:

Image: Max Erwin

[ed. See also: A Clockwork Ozempic (Taste).]

Will Larry Ellison Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?

[ed. Don't miss this one. It's got everything (and could easily be a Pulitzer contender).]

On Jan. 21, 2025 — the first full day of the second Trump administration — Larry Ellison woke up in his 33-bedroom, 34-bathroom oceanfront mansion in Florida, got into his Gulfstream jet and headed up to Washington. Ellison, who was 80 and worth in the neighborhood of $200 billion, had an appointment at the White House. He didn’t bother to take a driver’s license — he needed to call someone on the president’s staff to vouch for him at the gate — but there he was, at 2 p.m., standing beside Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room as the president announced “the largest A.I. infrastructure project by far in history” and told the world that his friend Larry Ellison was just the man to get it done. “He’s sort of C.E.O. of everything,” Trump said. “He’s an amazing man and an amazing businessperson.”

Ellison began by thanking Trump. “We certainly couldn’t do this without you,” he said. “It would simply be impossible.” He then proceeded to sketch out the ambitious plan. Ellison’s database software and cloud computing company, Oracle, and its partners — most prominently OpenAI — were going to invest as much as $500 billion over the next four years into a group of sprawling data centers, 500,000 square feet each, that would produce 10 gigawatts of computing power, using enough energy to power as many as 10 million homes. It was called Project Stargate, after the 1994 sci-fi movie in which Kurt Russell steps through a wormhole and finds himself inside a pyramid on an alien planet. This Stargate would be a portal leading humanity from the postindustrial era to the artificial-intelligence age. [...]

For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom. [...]

ChatGPT landed very differently in Washington than it did in Silicon Valley, setting off a scramble of its own inside the Biden administration to regulate the development of A.I. To oversee his A.I. policy, Biden turned to a veteran Democratic policy adviser, Bruce Reed, who believed that the administration needed to be proactive. A year after ChatGPT’s debut, in late 2023, Biden signed a comprehensive executive order on A.I., seeking to define the government’s role in the future of this new technology.

For the Biden administration, artificial intelligence was by no means just a domestic economic issue. Countries around the world were all racing to develop their own A.I. infrastructure and technology, and global power and influence would flow to whoever got there first. From this perspective, A.I. data centers were less businesses than geopolitical assets.

The administration was especially concerned about the A.I. ambitions of China and the Persian Gulf, given the powerful role artificial intelligence was likely to play in reshaping the information ecosystem. [...]

The administration’s concerns and Ellison’s ambitions were on a collision course. China and the Gulf were both critical to Ellison’s A.I. plans. Oracle already had a lot of contracts around the Gulf, and it also had a strong business relationship with one of China’s most important A.I. companies, ByteDance. Oracle was the U.S. cloud provider for the U.S. division of ByteDance’s TikTok, storing and securing the data of the app’s 100 million American users. But with ByteDance itself now pivoting into generative A.I., they had the opportunity to do more business together. In the summer of 2024, Oracle started working on a $6.5 billion deal to build a large data center complex in Malaysia, from which it could convey computing power to ByteDance and other foreign companies through opaque leasing deals.

It would be perfectly legal — but under the Biden administration maybe not for long. By that point, national security officials were growing increasingly concerned about China and the Gulf’s A.I. ambitions and were discussing ways to gain more control over them. The administration was especially worried about the role Oracle might play in fueling these ambitions. They knew that Ellison was trying to scale up the company’s A.I. infrastructure quickly and that it was badly in need of cash, which meant that it might be more tempted to make deals that the administration didn’t think were in America’s best interests. [...]

In early 2024, the administration started working with Congress on a bipartisan bill — the Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — that would force ByteDance to divest its U.S. TikTok operations. Biden signed the bill into law in April 2024, setting a deadline of Jan. 19, 2025, for a sale. If ByteDance failed to meet the deadline, the app would be shut down in the United States.

At the same time, the administration was preparing to shore up its efforts to restrict China’s access to American computing power and to exert more control over the Gulf’s. In late 2024, it circulated the draft of a plan to require hyperscalers to go through a licensing process to operate overseas and to keep 50 percent of their computing power in America.

All of the hyperscalers were looking to build overseas, but Oracle had the most to lose: Its global plans were the most ambitious, at least relative to its size. The company publicly and aggressively opposed the Biden plan. Its top policy executive in Washington, Ken Glueck, called it “one of the most destructive” moves ever taken against the tech industry, arguing that the best way to solidify America’s lead in the artificial intelligence race was for U.S. companies to build and control as much of the world’s A.I. infrastructure as possible.

Biden signed off on the new policy in the final days of his presidency. It was scheduled to go into effect in May 2025. If enacted, it could force Oracle to scale back its ambitions in Malaysia and the Gulf. Ellison’s plan to transform Oracle was in trouble. But a new president was on his way to Washington.

‘The Tsunami’

Relief came almost immediately. Hours after his inauguration in January 2025, Trump sat down at the Resolute Desk and began signing executive orders aimed at dismantling Biden’s A.I. policies. He also signed an order directing his attorney general to hold off on enforcing the congressionally mandated TikTok ban for 75 days. And then, of course, came the Project Stargate announcement with Ellison and Altman.

Trump turned to a very different group of people to shape his new administration’s approach to artificial intelligence. He named as his A.I. and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had raised many millions for the Trump campaign and, according to a New York Times investigation, was personally invested in at least 449 companies with ties to artificial intelligence. Sacks, who has denied any conflict of interest, believed that when it came to A.I., the government’s job was to get out of the way.

The National Security Council’s technology and national security division had played a key role in shaping America’s A.I. policy in the Biden years. Trump initially appointed David Feith — who had serious concerns about China’s ability to remotely access computing power through Malaysia and other Southeast Asian nations — to run it. But in April, he fired Feith and a few other China hawks and then eliminated the entire directorate. [...]

Trump saw another benefit to withdrawing the Biden plan: The Gulf states were adamantly opposed to it. They needed U.S. computing power to build out their own A.I. infrastructures and had something to offer in return. Their sovereign wealth funds were sitting on trillions of dollars that they were ready to invest in all sorts of American companies, including some connected to the Trump family.

Two weeks before the Biden policy was scheduled to go into effect, Zach Witkoff — son of the Trump adviser Steven Witkoff and chief executive of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial — made an announcement at a conference in Dubai: The Emiratis would use $2 billion of the firm’s brand-new stablecoin for an investment in Binance, a crypto exchange. Less than two weeks later — 48 hours before the Biden restrictions would kick in — Trump rescinded the policy.

That same day, Trump landed in Saudi Arabia, the first stop on a three-day tour of the Gulf. He was joined in the United Arab Emirates by Altman to announce Stargate U.A.E., a multibillion-dollar initiative to build one of the world’s largest data centers outside Abu Dhabi. Oracle would be a partner, too.

With the Biden plan dead, Oracle was free to operate its data center complex in Malaysia as it saw fit. By the end of June, the facility was on track to become the second-biggest in the world. Oracle doesn’t release the names of its customers there, but by studying its output, an independent A.I. research firm, SemiAnalysis, determined that the facility was feeding most of its computing power to ByteDance. An analyst at the tech-focused think tank ChinaTalk, Aqib F. Zakaria, ran his own numbers and arrived at a startling conclusion: Oracle was providing a staggering 22.6 percent of China’s known A.I. computing power.

by Jonathan Mahler, Jim Rutenberg and Kirsten Grind, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Louie Psihoyos; Scott Ball
[ed. Not to be redundant but this came out shortly after I'd posted about Oracle (and Larry Ellison) below in The Hater's Guide to Oracle (Part 2). It contains a treasure trove of new information and a road map to how business and politics intersect in Washington and around the world these days. Well worth a read.]

The Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2)

Oracle has one of the strongest mythologies in the tech industry. Ask a regular person and they’ll tell you that it’s “incredibly profitable” and “growing fast,” that it’s “unstoppable,” and that Larry Ellison has the mandate of heaven with regard to the continual sales of software and hardware related to databases and AI.

And those people are completely and utterly wrong.

The original title of this article was “Is Oracle Dying?” because I assume, when I took a deeper look, that there’d be some sort of debate, some sort of bull case for a decades-old quasi-hyperscaler run by one of the more nakedly-evil CEOs in the history of tech. I assumed — incorrectly, I might add — that Oracle as a business was doing fine other than the ridiculous commitments it made to support the whims of Sam Altman and OpenAI via deals that I believed (and still believe) will kill Oracle.

Except it turns out that Oracle has already been on a death spiral for the best part of a decade (if not longer) and has only survived this long by screwing its customers, taking on masses of debt, and — most importantly — more than $85 billion in acquisitions over the last 23 years. Pretty much every major product line outside of databases is a hodge-podge of other people’s innovation stapled together with a legendary contempt for the customer. These acquisitions (and continual price increases) are the only thing keeping the reaper from Oracle’s door other than margin-destroying GPUs. [...]

After April 2009’s $5.7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle’s revenues barely kept pace with inflation until December 2021’s $28.3 billion acquisition of Cerner allowed it to create Oracle Health, adding about $6 billion in annual revenue that had 40% lower margins (about 21.7%) than Oracle’s other businesses, though Oracle immediately started closing offices and brutal layoffs to try and bring them up.

And as I mentioned above, Oracle’s other plan was to sink a little over $99 billion in capital expenditures since the middle of calendar year 2020 into AI GPUs. [...]

Oracle is a decades-long mission to keep reapplying lipstick to a pig. Billions of dollars of acquisitions have, for the most part, only succeeded in keeping the company’s revenue growth from going negative, and as noted by forensic accountant Howard M. Schilit, this is one of the most well-documented cases of accounting shenanigans being used to cover up that a business is in decline.

Today’s newsletter is a sequel to the Hater’s Guide To Oracle, where I told the sordid tale of how Larry Ellison grew a massive, lucrative business out of a database business that one reporter once told me was a “law firm with a database company attached,” an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product that competes with SAP to create the most-annoying way to run a large company, and a business built around licensing Java that exists mostly to email people and say “you need to pay us for Java or we’ll sue you.”

Then, as I’ve mentioned, there’s Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business, a decade-old also-ran that was meant to compete with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, but only managed to catch up following the advent of AI GPUs and a movement where all it took to party was buying billions of GPUs and saying “gosh darn, we love AI.”

I originally started drafting this as a much tamer piece where I’d ask whether Oracle was dying, but as my editor and I started digging into the research, it became obvious that not only is Oracle dying, it’s been dying for years, kept alive through decades of acquisitions and a desperate and dangerous commitment to generative AI.

And AI, I believe, will be what eventually kills Oracle dead. [...]

With revenue plateauing and customers in revolt, Oracle’s future already looked murky, but with the power of AI — and $95 billion in FY2027 capex — it’s becoming increasingly clear that this may be Larry Ellison’s last dance with Silicon Valley.

by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At |  Read more:

Image: Larry Ellison, Bloomberg/Getty

[ed. Larry Ellison. One of the most hated personalities in tech (and unfortunately, owner of my beloved island of Lanai, in Hawaii). Update: What a coincidence. There's quite a story in the NY Times that just came out about Ellison being the face of the AI bubble. See also: The Hater's Guide to Oracle (Zitron); Ellison Empire Beseiged On All Fronts (NC); and, this excellent series The Oracle Files by Drey Dossier on YouTube. (For example, this one: How Larry Ellison and Gulf Money Just Bought Your News):]

***

Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders are getting screwed on this new Paramount deal. Okay. And I would like to get into exactly how before they vote on Thursday, the largest media merger in American history is going to a shareholder vote. A merger worth in the ballpark of $111 billion in case you were wondering.

Which means that Warner Brothers, you know, the big conglomerate that owns CNN and HBO, is potentially getting folded into another conglomerate Paramount Pictures, which is the company that owns CBS, MTV, Showtime, and Nickelodeon. And the shareholder vote is April 23rd, this up coming Thursday.

And last Thursday afternoon, which is one week before the vote, Warner Brothers Discovery filed a 14 page correction to the document that shareholders are voting o n.

Now, this is kind of a big deal because this is a 14page addendum to the biggest media merger in American history. And this was filed on Thursday of last week, 4 days ago at this point. 

Now, public companies don't usually rewrite their own proxy statements a week before a shareholder vote, unless of course someone is forcing them to, which usually means that someone being one of their shareholders is suing them in order to do so. So, I checked to see if there were any lawsuits floating around out there, and what do you know? There is one. A shareholder named Donna Nikosia, apologies if I butchered that last name, filed a lawsuit on April 2nd saying that the original document left out a lot of information that shareholders needed in order to make an informed vote. 

And following Donna's lawsuit were 15 other shareholders who had sent letters more or less saying the same thing. And can we all just take a moment here and say thank you to Donna for filing what we all probably knew to be true in the back seconds of our heads that there is information being left out that you need in order to make an informed decision this upcoming Thursday. Now up top I just want to say that I am not a Warner Brothers Discovery shareholder. I have never owned a share of Warner Brothers Discovery or Paramount Pictures. I am just thanking Donna as a media consumer.

All right, and somebody who works within the media ecosystem because I like to keep my media independent and this deserves a lot more scrutiny than it's getting. So WBD, Warner Brothers Discovery, told the court that this lawsuit had no merit and then two weeks later slightly added the information.

Anyways, so this move in business, I've learned, is how you smother out a lawsuit without ever having to say that we are wrong. Now, we're going to get into what was in this correction in a second here because oh boy, were they leaving information out? [...]

You know, I read that 14 page new filing this weekend and there are two companies in it that WBD is still trying very hard not to have to say out loud and is trying even harder, it seems, to smother this from any of the news outlets taking this to the other shareholders. And I think I figured out which ones they're talking about. 

[ed. And this: Why Iran's Blockade is an Oracle Story:]

Most people know Larry Ellison as the Oracle billionaire, which true, you also probably know that he is the largest private donor to the Israeli military in American history.

He's given over $26 million to the friends of the IDF since 2014, including a single $16.5 million donation in 2017. That is the largest gift in the organization's history. And that is the part we have discussed at length. But here is the part that a lot of people don't know. Ellison is not just the largest funer of the Israeli military. 

His company is the operational backbone of it. According to Open Intel, Oracle holds a 26-year contract to build and operate the IT infrastructure for the IDF's intelligence campus in Negv. For clarity, that is the facility that houses unit 8200, Israel's signals intelligence and cyber warfare division and one of the largest listening bases in the world. That is a 26-year relationship extending into the 2040s between a private American company and the intelligence apparatus of a foreign military. 

And that's just the intelligence side because Oracle also runs the Israeli Air Force entire logistics system, the supply chain that tracks his spare parts for F-35s and F-16s, aviation fuel and mutations inventory. Oracle hosts an AI battlefield management system called Fireweaver that coordinates sensors and weapons on the battlefield in real time, which means that Oracle software is making targeting decisions in the kill chain for Israeli Defense Forces.

AIs Agree: Outer Worlds is Their Favorite Game

via: Shoshannah Tekofsky/Malo Bourgon/X

[ed. Not a gamer so don't understand the attraction.]

The Girlboss Is Dead

Whose side are you on? You have to choose—Alex or Alix—even though you don’t know what the fight is about. Even if you don’t even know who these women are.

If the words “What is up, daddy gang?” mean nothing to you, a brief primer: Alex Cooper is the host of the podcast Call Her Daddy; Alix Earle is a TikToker and the founder of a skin-care line. They may be the two most talked-about women on the internet right now, and they’re in an argument, and no one knows why. That has offered people the fun opportunity to compare two women and pick a favorite without having to consider any relevant facts. But watching this admittedly absurd conflict play out provides something even more interesting than that: a view into exactly how people react to female ambition. Only a few years ago, in the girlboss era, women were encouraged to openly seek power. Now a major segment of the internet seems to think that female hustle is embarrassing, if not offensive.

Cooper is six years older than Earle, but the two women with long, blond hair look so similar that many people get them confused. In 2023, Cooper started a podcast network, Unwell, and one of her first talent grabs was Earle, her then-friend and protégé, who was going to start her own podcast, called Hot Mess. Eighteen months later, Earle was out, and people started speculating about what had gone wrong. In April, Cooper posted a video to her TikTok: “Alix Earle, hey girl, the passive aggressive reposts and the likes and the commenting on things—I gotta call you out here. You’re gonna need to get specific and just say what you’ve got to say about me. There’s no NDA. No one is stopping you. Stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself. What’s the beef?”

Earle promptly commented, “Okay on it!!”

Months later, we still have no clue what happened—Saturday Night Live even spoofed the exchange in a “Weekend Update” sketch in which the women talk utter nonsense at each other. But one thing is clear: The internet is Team Earle, and it’s all because of the women’s differing approaches to fame and success.

Cooper has been an unapologetic girlboss from the beginning. She got her start at Barstool Sports in 2018 and climbed the podcast ranks to sign a $60 million deal with Spotify and then a $125 million deal with SiriusXM, making her the highest-earning female podcaster by far. She has been described as “this generation’s Oprah Winfrey,” in part because she is blunt and open about her drive: “I can walk into any single room in business, and I can get the deal done,” she told Forbes. Cooper also speaks regularly about reproductive rights and abortion access, and in 2024, she had Kamala Harris on her podcast.

Earle, meanwhile, treats her success as a happy accident. She describes herself as a “hot mess” and acts like the girl’s girl next door. “I don’t get very political online and that’s my choice,” she told Time for its recent issue devoted to the world’s top-100 “creators”; Earle was on the cover. “A lot of my reasoning for that is when I’ve been younger I think I’ve gone online and spoken before I actually knew what I was speaking about, and I think it’s really important for me to be educated on what I’m speaking on.” She makes $450,000 for each sponsored Instagram story she posts, and her skin-care company sold $1 million worth of products within its first five minutes.

“All the girlies love Alix Earle,” Dave Portnoy, Cooper’s old boss and the founder of Barstool Sports, said in a TikTok video summarizing the dispute. “She’s a girly girl. They love her. Alex Cooper’s this ruthless businesswoman.”

That does seem to be an accurate synopsis of how many people see Cooper. “I think she is a mean girl and she embraces being a mean girl,” the internet personality Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia said on her podcast.

by Annie Joy Williams, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic. Source: Kevin Mazur/Getty; Stephanie Augello/Variety/Getty.
[ed. No comment (though... Chickenfry is an awesome nickname).]

Is Netflix Washed Now?

Today’s headline poses a question you’ve probably never thought to ask, so I’ll start with my answer: yes, Netflix is washed now. The content on the platform has never been great, but it’s never been worse. I open the app these days and I’m amazed. What used to be a source of fun, buzzy, compulsively watchable, and occasionally excellent TV and movies is now an endless river of reheated IP, true crime documentaries, and filler dressed as prestige. Millions of people watch this stuff, and everyone instantly forgets it.

I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally. Growth is slowing, but that’s the law of large numbers. If practically everyone in America and much of the world is already subscribed to some version of Netflix, and churn rates are still low, then any concern is relative. Going forward: cable is still dying, and even if the biggest premium distribution platform in the world can’t make great content of its own, it can still license movies, TV and sports rights. Netflix can then spread those costs across hundreds of millions of subscribers and a steadily growing ads business, seeing more engagement in a week than Apple TV sees in a year.

So no, the company’s not doomed today or destined for collapse tomorrow. Instead, I think what’s interesting to consider is that Netflix has almost certainly peaked. As a cultural force, as a business success story, and as an entertainment death star destined to swallow Hollywood whole, the arrows are all pointing the wrong direction.

Here was Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg two weeks ago, writing about one of several problems the company has encountered over the past 12 months:

Netflix is struggling to get viewers to stick with its shows for more than a season.

One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix.

Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024, suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.

That report went viral, prompting a week of commentary on Netflix’s binge model and elongated release schedules, with lots of Twitter users observing that viewers consume eight episodes across a few days and then often have to wait as long as two or three years for the next season. By that point, memories of plot or characters are faint at best. The emotional connection to the story doesn’t exist. No one should be surprised that the audience for a show like One Piece is cut in half in 2026, three years after the first season aired.

While that explanation certainly feels true, Shaw followed up this week to note that data is mixed as to whether extended breaks between seasons do in fact correlate to audience drop-off. Severance, on Apple, gained a ton of new audience after its nearly three-year break. Stranger Things and Bridgerton have been multi-season powerhouses at Netflix despite their long breaks between seasons. Conversely, Tina Fey’s Four Seasons debuted on Netflix in May last year, was met with pretty good reviews, and returned 13 months later with half its audience.

I think the Netflix problem is more fundamental than production schedules. What if these shows just aren’t very good or differentiated? Consider the original productions Netflix has surfaced in the past few months:

• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
• Running Point
• Lord of the Flies
• Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
• Unchosen
• XO, Kitty
• Big Mistakes
• Beef
• Man on Fire
• Little House on the Prairie
• His & Hers
• Nemesis
• The Boroughs

That list is culled from a post by the Entertainment Strategy Guy charting Netflix originals that have under-performed in the second quarter of 2026, and one common thread between those titles is that I haven’t heard of almost any of them. Netflix is the one streaming service everyone subscribes to and is theoretically well positioned to be setting the cultural agenda, but that hasn’t happened for quite some time. Did you know that Avatar: The Last Airbender was a thing? Apparently that show lost 60% of its season one audience when its second season aired in late June.

Content and the Year of Discontent

I mentioned the anxiety surrounding Netflix these days, so let me take a step back here. Amazingly, it’s only been eight months since Netflix won the bidding war to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and looked poised to become an entire generation’s one-stop shop for high-end entertainment. The implications of that news produced lots of anxiety, including one of my first articles on this website—Netflix and the Flattening of Everything—and a memorably ominous Variety cover that captured Hollywood’s mood at the time:

The Warner Brothers deal was abandoned at the end of February, when Netflix walked away from the table in the face of regulatory pressure from Washington and an increased bid from Paramount. Even so, the market hated the initial play, as investors wondered en masse why the world’s most (only?) successful streaming platform was suddenly ready to take on a mountain of new debt to acquire a company that had already been the subject of several expensive, failed acquisitions over the past 25 years.

Now, even as the deal is off, the questions remain. Are we sure a Netflix world takeover is a forgone conclusion? Is Netflix sure? The stock is down 18% this year and over 40% across the past 12 months. Investors who did a double take last December seem to have noticed that YouTube has twice the overall engagement that Netflix does, and more time watched on televisions, while free, ad-supported TV services like Tubi and the Roku Channel are becoming meaningful engagement competitors themselves.

Meanwhile, alongside all the original programming that’s failed to launch (or re-launch?), Netflix is adding videos from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst and Penske Media (as Shaw notes: “Get ready for lots of Bon Appétit cooking videos on Netflix.”) Last fall the platform also added a variety of high-end podcasts in a bid for relatively cheap, recurring content that may be seeing underwhelming results. Then again, they continue to buy more, so who knows? Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports that Netflix executives have “recently discussed adding live channels that would continuously stream certain programs, or shows and films from a certain genre.” Can Netflix become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? Can Netflix become Tubi before Tubi destroys Netflix’s long-term pricing power?

All of those moves might have once been seen as the savvy power plays of a world-conquering behemoth intent on taking the next step to expand its footprint. Today, in the shadow of a Warner Brothers bid that accidentally punctured the company’s air of inevitability, this year’s moves look more like spaghetti being thrown at a wall by a company that’s searching for something—anything!—that might hold people’s attention and scale more effectively than an expensive library of content that’s consumed, discarded, and then effectively worthless.

Looking back at the deal to acquire Warner Brothers, HBO and all that IP, I think it’s clear Ben Thompson was right when he wrote that concerns over competition from YouTube specifically and the internet generally were likely key drivers of Netflix’s decision-making. Those concerns seem to be animating all the other options the company is considering, and understandably so. The same way that the rise of social media has throttled the growth of the gaming market, it stands to reason it could do the same to demand for scripted content. With respect to the specific Netflix logic for buying WBD, that context is important: the biggest companies, with the deepest, most diverse libraries, will have the best chance at defending themselves in this new environment. [...]

I like to leave all Aggregator analysis to Ben, but I don’t think investors are crazy to have some questions about where this leads and what the upside looks like. For all the advantages its massive customer base affords (leverage over costs, advertising upside), an obvious difference between Netflix and businesses like Meta, YouTube, or Google—the other demand aggregators—is that Netflix has to spend far more money to deliver on its value proposition to customers and has fewer network effects to defend its long-term centrality to people’s lives.

by Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp, Sharp Text |  Read more:

Images: Al Bello/Getty Images for Netflix; Variety

[ed. See also: Predictions on the Future of Netflix (and Other Huge Platforms) (Honest Broker).]

A Script for Mark Zuckerberg

The setting: Meta’s earnings call in early August, 2026.

The speaker: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to Meta Platforms’ Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, which are based on assumptions as of today. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various factors, including those set forth in today’s earnings press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement.

I know it’s weird that I, Mark Zuckerberg, am doing the Director of Investor Relations job, but anything is possible when this speech is made up. What follows isn’t actually me: it’s what Ben Thompson of Stratechery thinks I should say on this call.

I know that Meta and myself are facing a lot of questions about AI, particularly the amount of money we are spending on capex. Our core business is an asset-light cash generation machine, so why are we spending tens of billions of dollars on AI? To answer this question I want to give you a quick recount of our history, what I’ve learned, and why I am so confident that we are doing the right thing for our future. So let’s get to it.

A Brief History of Facebook

Facebook was, as you know, the digital representation of Harvard’s analog Face Books. What was clear from the very first day we went live was the extent to which humans are, first and foremost, interested in other humans. People would spend hours clicking around to people’s pages. To put it another way, our first algorithm was human curiosity.

What truly super-charged Facebook usage, however — and which transformed the Internet — was the feed. Now, instead of actively surfing to friends’ pages to look for an update, we showed updates to you in a single feed on your homepage.

You might remember that we got a lot of heat for this decision, including protestors outside our office in Palo Alto. The lesson we took from that, however, is one that has guided us to this day: first, the revealed preference of users, as captured by data, was that they loved the feed: engagement skyrocketed. Second, we learned to trust our own — my own — product intuition, and that conviction has served us well over the years.

Another critical moment in our early history was the shift to mobile. We didn’t get this right in the beginning — more on that in a moment — but what was quickly apparent is that more access to Facebook meant more usage of Facebook. I can’t emphasize this point enough: when humans can connect to humans, they do, and when they can do it more conveniently and in more places, they do it more often.

Finally, I would be remiss to not mention Instagram. Obviously Instagram has been a major part of our growth over the last 15 years — and, I would add, we have been a major part of Instagram’s growth. To that end, an important thing to understand about Instagram is the extent to which it has evolved. Just because we gave our users what they wanted at one particular moment in time does not mean we can afford to sit still: more bandwidth first meant more pictures in Stories, and then video in Reels. Instagram has gone from strength-to-strength precisely because it has changed as technology has changed.

My Mistakes

We — I — haven’t done everything perfectly. We’ve taken our arrows through the years for lots of things that frankly aren’t our fault, but are rather the reality of being the primary communications platform for all of humanity, and humanity is flawed. I’m proud of the efforts we have made to ameliorate humanity’s worst impulses while enabling some of our best tendencies, including that desire to connect.

Rather, my mistake is itself a very human one: for many years I have resisted embracing what Facebook — now Meta — is, and spent too much time trying to emulate some of the tech titans who came before me. Specifically, I have been obsessed with becoming a platform.

The first manifestation of this error was the initial shift to mobile I referenced above. When Facebook was primarily a browser app I invested heavily in trying to build a platform, with things like Facebook Games, payments, etc. We had some success there — some of you on this call might have played Farmville back in the day — but when mobile came along we mistakenly tried to hold onto web technologies that supported my vision, and were years too late in investing in a truly native smartphone experience.

The reality — and this is hard for me to admit — is that Apple saved us from my mistaken obsession. Mobile Made Facebook Just an App, and that was Great News. Instead of diminishing the Facebook experience so that we could feature third-party developers, we had to cede that space to Apple and put our own content front-and-center. It turns out that was what people wanted the most; in fact, they wanted it so much that they willingly scrolled through and clicked on the most compelling ad units ever. And make no mistake, we paid back our debt: Facebook built the App Store just as much as Apple did.

My second error was Reality Labs. While in recent years I have framed our acquisition of Oculus and virtual reality as a necessary response to Apple’s attempt to handicap our business, the truth is that I invested twelve figures into this technology because I thought it was cool, and yes, because I wanted to own a platform. I do think we’ve made compelling strides in this area — and we’ve created technology that is going to matter in the long run — but I now recognize that part of the reason I am delivering this mea culpa right now is because I burned a lot of credibility with investors with all of the losses Reality Labs has endured with very little to show for it.

My third error was not in trying to make Facebook something it was not, but rather failing to appreciate what it had become. While I was thinking about platforms, I took it for granted that connection was enough for the core business; in fact, Facebook had evolved into entertainment, at least in its public-facing forms (I will take credit for the acquisition of WhatsApp and realizing that Messaging Was Mobile’s Killer App). This was an insight that TikTok figured out first, and it was a blindspot for me.

The Ad Blindspot

What I’ve come to realize is that all of these mistakes are symptoms of what has been my biggest failing as CEO: all of you on this call have appreciated our ad business more than I have. I’ve been very blessed as CEO to have excellent co-workers who have over the years developed the world’s best digital ad business, while I frankly haven’t taken as much interest as I should have.

My failure to appreciate our ad business is another lens through which to examine my mistakes:

• Building a platform is antithetical to building an ad business. A platform’s goal is to feature third-parties; an advertiser’s goal is to capture attention for itself.

• Investing in an entirely new technology, including developing hardware, fundamentally limits our addressable market; an advertiser’s goal is to maximize its market size.

• Entertainment is the best possible category for an advertiser to own: people willingly give entertainment their attention, which is exactly what an advertiser wants to sell.

This neglect as CEO left us badly exposed in our disputes with Apple. I firmly believe that Apple’s characterization of digital advertising was unfair, dishonest, and self-serving. What I failed to do, not just in that bruising battle but in the years leading up to it, was make the affirmative case for ads generally, and Meta ads in particular.

It’s easy to see how the Internet has made it possible for an entirely new category of entrepreneurs to create products that uniquely serve the tremendous capacity of humans to manufacture an infinite array of desires, growing the economy to the benefit of everyone; what’s harder to appreciate — in part because I haven’t made the case — is that the only way to connect those creators to the consumers who love them is digital advertising. We don’t serve ads like Google — or Apple in the App Store, or Amazon on Amazon.com — that in many respects function as a tax on search; we show people products they never knew existed, but that immediately generate desire and, ultimately, happiness. In short, I believe that we are a force for good in the world, not just because we connect people to each other, but because we connect entrepreneurs with customers in a way no one else does.

Why AI Matters

Forgive the long preamble, but this is necessary context for me to properly explain why AI is so important to Meta, and why I am making the right choice to invest so heavily in both talent and infrastructure.

First, when investors compliment our asset-light business, what they are complimenting is the fact that our business is purely digital. Everything digital, however, is firmly within AI’s cross-hairs. It may seem odd to begin my AI pitch by highlighting terminal value risk, but today is about honesty: every single digital company on earth faces an existential threat from AI, and we are no exception. Meta must invest in AI because a failure to do so would cost us far more in the fullness of time, particularly now that we’ve seen the very real risks entailed in depending on a third-party.

Second, AI makes our business better — and by “our business”, I mean ads. AI is more than LLMs: it is machine learning, and we have been using machine learning to improve our ads business for years. More recently, we have developed GPU-dependent algorithms that have significantly improved our ability to not just target ads but also recommend content, which keeps people entertained longer, which lets us serve them more ads. And, looking forward, LLMs themselves will transform advertising, not just by generating copy and images, but by predicting the ads and content that people want to see. Every single one of these improvements goes directly to our top line — and remember, because advertising enables us to offer our products for free, the capacity to increase our top line is unbounded by price elasticity.

Third, the single most important indicator that our business is on the verge of a step-change in growth is when we dramatically increase inventory. This is something investors regularly get wrong: back when we added Stories, investors panicked about falling prices-per-ad without realizing we were increasing inventory we could grow into. Five years later, investors made the exact same mistake with Reels. Those were the two best opportunities to buy Meta stock — or any stock, really — in history. We are facing an even larger opportunity over the next several years. AI makes every pixel monetizable, which means we are looking at the largest inventory expansion ever. Yes, it will take a few years to realize this opportunity, but the technology is there.

More importantly, what I’ve come to realize as I’ve embraced our status as an entertainment provider and ad purveyor is that — our nature as a digital business notwithstanding — we are remarkably well-placed to thrive in an AI era. Remember what we learned about humans: they are obsessed with other humans, and they want to connect with them; that obsession and desire are only going to increase as we interact more and more with AI. AI is going to make our properties more essential, not less.

Moreover — and here I must issue one more mea culpa — AI is a productivity tool, but productivity is not the end-all-be-all of the human experience. I have talked over the last year about building superintelligence that helps you get things done, but that’s a business story. What we can uniquely do is give people the experiences they want — from connection to entertainment to shopping — when they are off the clock. The fact that we are investing in AI but not selling solutions to businesses is actually one of our biggest advantages.

Oh, and by the way, AI might actually lead to new hardware paradigms. I admit I was wrong to spend so much time on virtual reality, but that did lay the groundwork for a unique opportunity to develop devices that make much more sense in a world where we want to access AI everywhere, not just on a phone in our pocket.

The Compute Hurdle

I know that many of you on this call have doubted my investment decisions before — and I understand the consternation about Reality Labs in particular. However, keep in mind that when our stock dipped in 2022, one of the big reasons was because of our aggressive capex spending, which went primarily to GPUs; ChatGPT came out a month later, and that decision to spend heavily with Nvidia looked incredibly prescient in hindsight.

That prescience, however, pales in comparison to the payoff that will accrue to anyone with the foresight to build data centers and buy compute over the last several years, and for years into the future. We don’t have the luxury of waiting until the future is invented and then investing; we need to invest now, especially when the opportunity in front of us — with ads specifically — is so apparent.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. Less social network, more optimizing ad juggernaut. See also: Anthropic is in talks to lease computing power from Meta, potentially for $10 billion over two years, so this would be smaller than the Anthropic deal with SpaceX. Meta is considering it. They would turn a profit on the compute, but to do that they have to admit they don’t have a better use for it. via.]