Our social media feeds are being inundated by clips. Big names like Justin Bieber, reality shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and even AI companies like Perplexity — they’re all using bite-sized video segments to advertise themselves on social media. And they’re not just posting from their own accounts; they’re paying thousands of anonymous people to do it for them. 

This practice, a marketing tactic known as clipping, is everywhere — and still spreading. The Verge’s Mia Sato recently wrote a piece breaking down how the practice works and how it might be an existential threat to more nuanced, full-length content. 

Sato spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why everything is a clip now, the companies behind it, and what comes next.

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.

How would you describe what’s happening on our Instagram feeds? 

It’s basically the TL;DR-ification of the entire internet. It truncates everything we make and it all goes down to “We need a way for people to discover our content.” And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is. 

Think about the politics videos. You see Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting. Or sports highlights from the game the night before. You see this with sort of every podcast becoming a video. A major reason that happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, to put on Reels, to put on YouTube Shorts.

What made you want to write about this now? 

The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of Clavicular. 

Clavicular is really a great example where the point of his online existence is clips rather than the full live streams. They know him through these disembodied short videos of this other thing that exists, but nobody is seeing. And you have this person who comes from obscurity into getting a 60 Minutes interview. 

I wanted to take this one example to illustrate a larger point about the nature of content on the internet and how people are working to go viral.

Is there a difference between the podcast clips that we talked about at the top of the show and what Clavicular is doing?

Clavicular is basically the industrialized version of a podcast that is just posting its own clips organically. The difference is that there’s an ecosystem under it that is paid. 

For the month between March and April, I believe there were something like 1,600 clippers working on his behalf, generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views, and all of that is paid. People are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. And so it is completely a scale game. It’s a hundred percent trying to take advantage of the algorithms of social platforms. These pseudo-anonymous accounts are profiting based on how much these clips are showing up on all of our feeds.

How much money is there to be made here?

[Clavicular] oversees 62,000 clippers on his platform. Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month. He claims the average is around $3,000 a month. It’s not nothing. Is it enough to support a family? Can you support a family on clips? Maybe not. But brands are paying companies like this clipping platform; [they] basically say, here’s $10,000, make us go viral.

What kinds of companies are paying for this service?

I was kind of surprised by how many household names were using this type of service. RuPaul’s Drag Race. There were clip campaigns for AI companies like Perplexity. Dan Bongino, former second in command at the FBI, who has now gone back to being a full-time podcaster. I found clipping campaigns that appeared to be for Call of Duty, the video game. Political candidates, which really gets weird. So it really spans different industries. There’s definitely a variety.

When I’m scrolling through, say, Twitter, I know when something being put in front of me is an ad because it’ll say ad, but I don’t know when I’m seeing something organically or when I’m seeing something that’s been paid to be elevated into my feed. And I imagine it’s the same on Instagram or TikTok? That you’re seeing things that have been sort of pushed upon you alongside things that maybe have organically entered into your feed? 

Yeah, and I think one of the things that clippers do is they make content that looks like it could blend in with organic content.

One rule of thumb that I like to share is, you can probably picture it now, you’re scrolling and you see a clip of the Joe Rogan podcast. The background is black, and on the black background there will be a caption that’s like, “I can’t believe bro said that. Shocked emoji.” You know what I mean?

I’ve seen that before. And then watch the video. And then nothing shocking is said, and I’m just like, “I hate the internet.”

There’s a really good chance that you were seeing paid clips. One of the campaigns that I found was promoting Perplexity via Joe Rogan’s podcast because Perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. And so these clippers were hired to pump out a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about Perplexity, and it would be hard, unless you checked the hashtags, to see that it was a paid piece of content. Buried in the hashtags, it says ‘Powered by Perplexity’, ‘hashtag sponsored’. 

Even that is a better example of a disclosure. A lot of this content has zero disclosure whatsoever. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not, including, like I mentioned, I had found some political candidates hiring clippers. There was a candidate in Florida, a GOP congressional candidate who was running a clipping campaign with zero disclosure, which is, from my understanding, against the law. 

It is really the Wild West because a lot of these companies are not disclosing that they’re paying these accounts.

Can I read you the most depressing pair of sentences in your piece that you wrote? That I sent to many people to be like, how depressing is this?

Yes, please.

“But overindexing on the clipped version means eventually, the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped, complete content in the first place.”

That is really sad. 

Whoever wrote that.

That’s crazy.

It is so brutal because some of these things that are being clipped are, like, artful. 

Yeah. I will say, I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this. 

I’m a features writer. I write long things that are thousands of words long and are often behind a paywall. I make clips of my stories. I do the short-form video thing. I talk in front of my phone and explain my stories to audiences, and I know that very, very few people who watch that video will actually go and seek out my story and read it.

I wonder if you think — from having written this piece on “The Clippening,” as you call it — if this is just our moment or if this is our forever,

For me, it’s really hard to see an exit from vertical video because it is so dominant right now. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should completely put their trust into the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don’t want to put your trust into a tech platform that can change things on a dime and you will have no control over it. 

I think the balance is, if you’re someone who wants new people to find out about your show or your story or whatever, you maybe need to be on short-form video. But how do you make it so the sad sentences that I wrote in my story do not become the reality, where the clips are the justification rather than creating the longer version, the real art or the real journalism or whatever? How do you avoid that as much as possible?

President Donald Trump’s second term began at a breakneck pace, with a wave of executive orders and other actions imposing tariffs; targeting law firms, universities, and individuals he believed had wronged him while he was out of office; and reshaping the US immigration system.

Nearly a year and a half into his second term, the White House appears to be losing momentum. Much of Trump’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress, the war with Iran has dragged on longer than the administration seems to have expected, and Trump’s proposed “anti-weaponization” fund” went down in flames after some unusual pushback from Republican lawmakers.

To understand the current state of the Trump White House, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Megan Messerly, a White House reporter at Politico, who recently wrote about the “funk” Trump and his staff are in.

Below is an excerpt of the 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 recently wrote for Politico about how the president and his administration are kind of in a funk — and not just over the slush fund fiasco. Remind us how else we’re seeing this funk, for those who have disassociated.

We are now more than three months into the Iran war, and this is just not going anywhere anytime soon. We have seen the president over the last week and a half now say that he’s close on a deal to extend this ceasefire with Iran that still has not come through. There was this two-hour Situation Room meeting on Friday. Nothing came out of that after two hours. 

Talking to folks in and around the White House, they just want to find a face-saving way out of this war, but they have been unable to do that. They’ve been unable to get Iran to agree to something that would open the Strait of Hormuz. And in the meantime, everyone’s just very over it. 

According to my reporting, that’s including staff inside the White House; one of my sources said that pretty much everyone is in a funk and described it as being stuck in this quicksand of Iran.

Is there a legislative funk too with this administration? Because it doesn’t feel like the Trump administration is getting anything done.

That was one of the big things that I was talking to folks about for this story — this idea that Iran has really taken up so much of the president’s time that it is in some ways distracting from some of these other priorities. And that includes the president’s legislative agenda. 

Some allies I spoke with also blamed that squarely on Senate Majority Leader John Thune and said, Thune is being too much of an institutionalist, protecting the filibuster. The president has called for firing the Senate parliamentarian. And so you have a very frustrated Trump, but a frustrated Trump who has rhetorically turned the screws a bit on Thune, but really hasn’t put the full force of pressure on Thune to get his legislative agenda through. 

That includes things like the president has talked a lot about this Save America Act, an elections-focus piece of legislation. That’s one of his top legislative priorities. There’s this housing bill that includes this institutional investor ban that he wants to see across the finish line. And then of course he wants to see security funding for his ballroom/bunker.

It feels like [Trump] doesn’t care about the midterms. But then there’s all the gerrymandering that he’s pushing, which implies that he very much cares about the midterms and his endorsement of candidates. What’s your read on what’s going on with the president when it comes to the midterms?

Yes, it definitely feels like those two things are at odds with one another. 

I think the way that White House allies view it is the president needs to be able to say, I don’t care about the midterms. I don’t care about high gas prices because that language is for Iran. 

He’s saying, I’m willing to take this gamble because he needs Iran to believe that he will take the maximalist position, that he will let gas prices rise however high they need to rise in order to notch a deal. White House allies would say that that’s a negotiating tactic. So what might be helpful rhetorically with Iran is not helpful rhetorically with Republicans as they’re fighting it out in these really key midterm races. 

It feels like it’s such a tough spot that even the things that should be easy wins — like a sesquicentennial concert on the National Mall. What is going on with this concert?

What we’re seeing is even some of those folks now pulling out and saying, “Hey, we were interested in sort of celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, but this is far too political for us. This is not what we wanted. This is not what we signed up for.”

And to me, and many of the folks that I spoke with, this is just such a deviation from where we were at the beginning of the president’s term last year when he was just really taking the culture by storm. He was just steamrolling these law firms and Ivy League institutions, and you’ve seen other pop culture figures come on board to the president’s agenda like Nick Minaj.

This is a moment where the president wants to be taking a victory lap and yet he’s stuck in this quagmire that is Iran, one that he desperately wants to get out of.

And Trump even lost his name on the Kennedy Center? 

This has been one that has been near and dear to the president for months now — his fight to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center and this planned massive renovation of the center, all put on hold by a federal court last week. We saw the president take to Truth Social to express his sincere displeasure at that decision.

Do they have any wins that they should be celebrating right now that they could be parading in front of the American people?

The White House pushed back on my story and said we do have things that we are doing. 

For instance, their efforts to reduce the cost of prescription drugs through TrumpRx and the coming launch of “Trump accounts” for millions of children. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was on the road last week in California and elsewhere touting these investment accounts that are supposed to sort of build generational wealth for the next generation. But that is all getting overshadowed right now by Iran.

But ultimately, I think the challenge, and this is what I hear when I’m talking to regular voters, is, “Okay, these Trump accounts are great, but I’m being crunched right now by the cost of gas, by the cost of my groceries when I’m buying ground beef and it’s $9, $10 a pound.” 

So these wins are great, but when the pressing concern is putting food on the table and making ends meet and paying the bills, that has been cold comfort and that sort of exposes some of the challenge of the White House’s efforts to message here.

Do you think watching some half-naked men brutally beat the living daylights out of each other on the South Lawn will make the president feel better — and on his birthday, no less?

The president is a longtime fan of the [Ultimate Fighting Championship] and we are certainly seeing him celebrate his 80th birthday, which is the day of the UFC fight. In accordance with that, the president is sort of this mercurial figure and something like that really could raise his mood and honestly produce a policy breakthrough, because he has been stuck for so long. 

Talking to allies, I think they think that if the president gets a win, that could sort of put them back on track to passing the president’s agenda. And that could be a policy win or it could just be a triumphant UFC fight on the White House lawn.

Before Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took his great big American road trip, Mikah Meyer did it first. 

Meyer is a travel writer and blogger. In 2019, he became the first person to visit all of the National Park Service sites in a single journey — over 400 in total. The full list includes national monuments, battlefields, and rivers — and the 63 national parks that most of us think of when we plan our summer trips. 

Now, with ultra-high gas prices, park staffing shortages, and funding cuts to the NPS, Meyer has some guidance for how to enjoy the outdoors responsibly this summer. He told Today, Explained that Americans should start with exploring their own backyard this summer — and think outside the box. 

Meyer talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the hidden outdoor gems in each region of the US and what his number one spot in the country is. Hint: It’s not one of the heavy hitters. 

Below are some of Meyer’s favorites, divided by region and 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 Northwest

One of my favorites in the northwest is the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument [in Oregon]. There’s a unit called the Painted Hills Unit, which has these incredible red stripes that cut through the earth. And whether you live in Seattle or Portland, you can access it within a day’s drive and you’re not going to have any of the crowds that you’ll experience at Mount Rainier or at Olympic [National Park]. It’s just one of the most otherworldly places I’ve seen up there.

The Southwest

For the Southwest, I would not go to Saguaro National Park. If you go a few more hours away to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the cactuses are way cooler looking.

There are way more epic hikes. There are way more epic vistas and views. It’s on the border with Mexico. If it’s between just Saguaro or Organ Pipe, I would go to Organ Pipe.

The Southeast

If you are in the Southeast, I would skip the crowds of the Everglades and hop a short flight over to the Virgin Islands, where there is an island off the island of St. Croix, which is called Buck Island Reef National Monument. 

It’s a natural turtle nesting ground that you can actually snorkel underwater down a trail that the Park Service has made. It’s incredible. It’s not going to be crowded because most people, when they go to the Virgin Islands, go to Virgin Islands National Park, which is the majority of the island of St. John. And so St. Croix is like the forgotten kid, [which] is amazing. You just have to take a little boat over there.

The Midwest

Through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, there is a 72-mile river corridor called the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, and it is a federally protected riverfront that is full of places to fish and hike and run and see amazing wildlife. And it’s one that I actually go to on a daily run every day. 

The Northeast

Acadia is a really popular one, but really close to there and far from the crowds is the end of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, which starts in Georgia and runs all the way up to the center of Maine. You don’t have to do the whole thing, but in just one day you could go hike the final few miles to the center of Maine and you can actually see people finishing their months-long trek. 

It’s this super cool experience just as a day tripper to get to meet these folks, to talk to them. You get to the top of this mountain, and you get to witness people complete a historic National Park Service trail and feel just a little bit of that for yourself. 

His all-time favorite

My favorite National Park Service site in the whole system is in Utah. And when I wrote a blog ranking all of Utah’s Park Service sites, I got a lot of flack because my number one was not Zion, it was not Bryce, it was not Arches. It was Dinosaur National Monument. 

Because it’s a national monument and not a national park, most people haven’t heard of this site. If tomorrow Congress upgraded it to Dinosaur National Park, it would get millions of visitors. But that’s just because most people think America’s park system is only the 63 parks. They don’t realize that it’s over 400 sites. 

Dinosaur National Monument only gets 7 percent as many visitors as nearby Rocky Mountain National Park or Zion National Park, but I think it’s the best that the entire National Park Service system has to offer, all in one less-visited site where you, for example, can touch a dinosaur bone if you would like.

The United States indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro in federal court last week, one of its most aggressive actions against the island since the end of the Cold War.

The unsealed indictment charges Castro, the 94-year-old brother of deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and five others for alleged involvement in the shooting down of two small planes over Cuba in 1996. Four people, three of them US citizens, were killed.

The indictment is the most recent in a string of US moves that have left the island in a tough spot. The US embargo on Venezuelan oil to the country has plunged Cuba into a massive energy crisis, with blackouts affecting everything from homes to hospitals. The crisis is so acute that Cuba has cut the work-week to four days for state-owned companies; school days have also been shortened, and universities have waived in-person attendance requirements.

“For the last 50 years or so, the US has ensured that no country — other than a couple that the US didn’t hold sway with, such as Venezuela — [would] export oil to Cuba,” Cécile Shea, a Cuba expert and nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “Now that Venezuela is also not exporting oil to Cuba, it means that they’re out of oil, and that’s completely on us.”

With Cuba already in a vulnerable spot, the Castro indictment has resulted in a fresh round of speculation: Is the US about to invade Cuba? Is this the same playbook the Trump administration used to oust former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and usher in new leadership in Venezuela?

Sean spoke with Shea to get a better sense of how the Cuban government and everyday Cubans are thinking about the US, as well as what could come next.

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.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a video last week about Cuba. What did he say?

He spoke Spanish; of course, he’s a Cuban American. And he said, Listen, Cuban people, it’s not the United States’ fault that you don’t have any energy, that your electricity grid is down. It’s the fault of mismanagement by your government. Don’t blame us. It’s not because of our embargo. It’s because you are badly led, and it’s time for you to pressure your government to step down.

That’s a paraphrase, but that’s generally what he said.

Is that generally true?

No. It is not generally true. 

There is truth to it in that the government has not always been a great government. But the reason that Cuba is in the current crisis — which is that there is no oil at all for consumers or businesses; they’ve reserved some for hospitals and the like — is the US is forcing Venezuela not to ship oil to Cuba.

For the last 50 years or so, the US has ensured that no country — other than a couple that the US didn’t hold sway with, such as Venezuela — [would] export oil to Cuba. Now that Venezuela is also not exporting oil to Cuba, it means that they’re out of oil, and that’s completely on us, and anyone in Cuba listening to Marco Rubio’s speech would have known that.

What makes this moment different? Is it that this administration is willing to go further than previous ones?

What could be interesting about this moment is that Cuba seems ready to deal.

If we believe the press reports, Cuba has offered to release political prisoners, which would be huge because it would create a political opposition in the country. Cuba has agreed to open its economy. Cuba has agreed to allow Cuban exiles back into Cuba. Things that we have been asking for for decades, it now appears that Cuba is willing to do. And I wish we would take the win. I wish we would accept these things and then add something to it: Promise to have a free and fair election two years from now.

That would just make so much sense, and we wouldn’t be talking about the military, and we wouldn’t be talking about going in and kidnapping 94-year-old men. And President Trump could finally be what he wants to be. He wants to do what every president since Eisenhower has wanted to do, which is to end the communist-oriented regime that we have in Cuba. 

Eisenhower tried; JFK tried. Trump was alive during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was an adult. So was Biden. This is all very real personal history to them.

And I do think that part of what is going on is Trump wants to be the president who can accomplish what no other president has done. And I happen to think he could be, but I don’t think it’s going to be through a military method. 

He has the attention of the people in charge of Cuba. We have a lot of leverage there. The government of Cuba these days seems willing to listen to us and to do some of the things that would keep us happy. And that’s particularly true of the younger generation in Cuba: I think they would like to see the government open up relations with the US and move beyond revolutionary Cuba.

So the Cuban government is willing to concede in a way we haven’t seen in decades. Young Cubans want there to be an opening-up of Cuban society. They want the government to play ball. And yet it sounds like you’re saying it’s more than likely the Trump administration will not go for it?

Unless there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that nobody sees, it seems like there would be a lot more talking and taking the win right now, especially if the Cubans actually did offer the things that the press has been reporting. 

I don’t understand, for instance, the indictment against Raúl Castro. He wouldn’t still be alive by the time that the trial would start. He and his family are still heroes in Cuba, particularly with the older generation. So why mess with the Castros?

Can I offer a theory? 

Yeah, please do.

Is it what the diaspora wants?

That’s a good question, and is it in particular what the older diaspora wants? 

In part because of pressure from us, Cuba began allowing more people to emigrate from Cuba over the last 20 years, and a lot of them came to the US. There’s some evidence that among that million and half or so émigrés, they really want to move forward. They’re really not interested in fighting the wars of the 1960s anymore.

I think we’ve heard your best-case scenario, Cécile — that the United States takes concessions from Cuba and allows the country, on its own terms, to transition to free elections that organically replaces the Castro regime. What’s the worst-case scenario here?

The short-term worst-case scenario is that we end up with something worse than we have now. 

The long-term worst-case scenario is that we further alienate the Cuban people who have already suffered from our sanctions and our embargoes for the last 60-some years, and it harms our ability to create a close relationship with a country 90 miles away over the next 20, 30, 40 years. 

It’s hard for politicians to look past the next election. It’s one of the weaknesses in our government. But we should also be thinking about what kind of relationship we want with Cuba 15 years from now. Invading the country is not a way to make the odds of having a good relationship in the future strong.

You keep talking about this tension between the United States and Cuba as something from another generation — a holdover from, from the ’60s and ’70s, the Cold War. I feel like most Americans right now are not thinking about Venezuela nor Iran nor Cuba. They’re thinking about their gas prices and interest rates. How should Americans be feeling about this intervention that we may soon be executing on this island?

Here’s what I would say to some of those Americans: Imagine we could go two routes right now. Imagine we could start selling spare parts that Cuba desperately needs to keep their machines running. Imagine we could make an agreement with them that would allow them to begin importing American vehicles again, tariff-free. Imagine that you could take vacations to Cuba again, which are fairly inexpensive. 

Would you choose all of those things, or would you choose sending more young people into harm’s way 90 miles away from Florida? Being even more of a pariah in the world than we already are? Because if you’ve been to Europe lately or Canada lately, you know that Americans are very unpopular right now. And just imagine what will happen if we take military action in Cuba.

I think we should also talk about the morality of the situation. There are people who can’t get kidney dialysis right now because the hospitals are running out of oil. There are people who can’t get to work and therefore can’t get paid because they can’t put gas in their vehicles.

These people are just 90 miles away from us. Are we really going to let this kind of pain and suffering continue through the hottest part of the year? What will be the long-term harm not just to them and their health but to their view of the United States? We should not just be sitting by and watching this happen.

Welcome to the era of the big three.

We’re not talking rappers here — although according to Kendrick Lamar, it’s “just big me” — we’re talking AI companies: Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI. 

These three leading artificial intelligence companies are all expected to go public this year. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which recently acquired another Musk company, xAi, is on track to open up to investors later this month. Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, just filed confidentially with the States Securities and Exchange Commission for its own initial public offering. Reports say OpenAI could also go public as soon as September. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

SpaceX’s IPO, when it happens, could be the largest in history and mint Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. With Anthropic and OpenAI, the combined value of AI IPOs could total over $3 trillion.

But it’s not as simple as going public and raking in cash. “There’s this race that’s been going on between SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic,” Liz Lopatto, a senior writer at The Verge said. “There’s this fear that if you don’t go public at the right time or you don’t go public first, investors aren’t going to wait for you.”

To understand why some of the world’s richest men, at the helm of some of the world’s richest companies, are now courting the public’s money, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Lopatto. 

She’s been deep in SpaceX’s public filings and has been covering the court drama between Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Her latest piece for the Verge is titled “The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you.” 

Sean and Lopatto chat about what each of the companies hope to gain from the public, why this moment could be like internet 1.0’s dot-com bubble, and whether these companies chasing shareholder profits will be good for us.

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.

Why do [these companies] need to go public right now?

Whoever goes public first is going to scoop up better investors or have an easier time convincing investors. That is fueling this rush toward the market. So that’s thing one. 

But thing two is that AI is extremely expensive. And I think that’s something that people often forget about because right now we’re sort of in, like, the early days of Uber, where you’re using this very expensive tool for free and then they’re going to try to get you hooked on it so that you’ll pay real prices later on. 

In order to get the money that you need for compute, to build all of these data centers, to do all of the things that you need to do in order to have these frontier models, that’s just an incredibly capital-intensive business. One way to get capital is to go public.

Anthropic has had some better discipline than the other companies in terms of behaving like actual adults. They might actually tell us a little bit less before it happens than we’ve heard from, for instance, SpaceX.

Tell me more about behaving like adults when it comes to IPOs, which feels like a very adult thing to do.

There are sort of a lot of things that come into play with an IPO. And basically what you’re doing is you are setting out what your company is, what the company’s vision is, how you plan to make money, and what you’re going to do with all the money that you’re raising in the IPO. And for SpaceX, there’s a bunch of nonsense about Mars in there that doesn’t really feel real to me. There’s nothing about the biological risks of going to Mars, for instance, and the risk factors, which, if that were a real thing, you’d see it. 

One of the things that’s been notable is that both Anthropic and OpenAI seem to have better businesses, based on what we know. Anthropic is actually about to make a profit. Anthropic in particular didn’t make any images with its AI. It stuck to text and it focused specifically on programming. It’s not a sexy business, it’s enterprise software. But you don’t have to be sexy to make money.

Just looking at the difference between like the flash we’re seeing about, like, spreading the light of human consciousness among the stars and actually making money, which is the point of a company. I would say that Anthropic seems like it’s run by adults by comparison. And then I would put OpenAI somewhere in the middle.

Why? What is Open AI doing that isn’t very adult-like behavior?

OpenAI as a business is really scattered. They created and shut down Sora, which was AI-generated videos. They have these AI image generators that have created a whole new level of headaches for them. They’re embroiled in a number of lawsuits.

Sam Altman, the CEO, was running it effectively as a startup composed of little startups within it and was like, “Well, we’ll just see which one of them wins.” And that’s maybe not the best way to run a company. It’s a fine way to run a portfolio, but a company is not a portfolio.

Liz, you’re very tapped into this world out there in Silicon Valley and you were at the trial between Altman and Musk. It sounds like these companies are all being talked about in the same breath even though two of them are very specifically AI companies and one of them wants to colonize Mars. Why is that? Is it just because they all may IPO soon?

I think that’s part of it. I also think there’s been this investment thesis that frontier AI models are effectively going to be a boom on the scale of internet 1.0, if you remember 1999.

This is sort of the moment where we’re going to find out who’s Google and who’s Amazon and who’s Pets.com, right? And so I think that’s why people are talking about them in this way, because it’s not just these three companies that are AI companies. Obviously Google has an AI arm that is very good. But then you have companies like Databricks, which you maybe haven’t heard of. 

Can’t say I know her.

Yeah. This is a perfectly fine company. It’s got a business. But it’s not in that conversation because I don’t think people expect it to be one of the behemoths in the way that they’re looking at these three as the potential behemoths of this generation of technology.

This reminds me that when social media companies went public, they started prioritizing things like shareholder profit rather than safety. I think Facebook — Meta — is probably the most prominent example of this. 

Do we want the still mostly dudes holding our future in their hands to be beholden to market forces and profits above all else?

Arguably they already are. 

This is one of the arguments that has been made about OpenAI: that the reason they’ve had some of these issues around safety has been because they are motivated by chasing the market and trying to raise money. Because unlike social media, this is a very capital-intensive business.

You need to be showing investors something. You need to be proving yourself out in a way that you didn’t necessarily have to with social media right off the bat. So I think that’s part of it. But I think that going public potentially makes that worse. The chatbot will try to keep you engaged. It will give you an answer and then it will ask a tag question. And that’s an engagement tool that keeps you engaged with the AI. 

You see that also with some of the sycophantic behavior you see with these AI where they’re like, “Wow, that’s such a smart question. Gee, you’re so bright.”

And is that really good for us? I don’t think it is. But it does keep people involved, and it does keep people engaged with the AI, and if you need to be showing user numbers or otherwise showing metrics to investors, those are the ones you show.

It seems almost silly to ask if being a publicly traded company could make these companies more accountable or even safer. But then again, if you think about Anthropic and their whole dustup with the Pentagon, without being publicly traded, they said, you know, you guys are crossing the red line and we have to reassess our relationship.

Do you think something about being publicly traded post-IPO could make a company like Anthropic or OpenAI a little bit more conservative in their developments and their technology?

To the degree that you can say, “Hey, like I was misled by this company as a shareholder because they told me there were these safety practices that actually were not in play and then take them to court” — that is something that can be done, sure. Unless you’re talking about SpaceX, which has a governance structure that effectively bars shareholder suits, unless you have a specific percentage of holding.

So not SpaceX, but maybe Anthropic, maybe OpenAI have this additional measure of accountability where shareholder lawsuits can potentially move the needle.

But most likely of all we just start to see a lot more ads.

I think that’s right. I think you also see prices go up for the enterprise products — and maybe for all of the other products as well.

Summer travel is just ramping up, but our country’s pride and joy is being put through the wringer. 

Since President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the National Park Service has been gutted. Staff have left or been laid off, historical signage has been removed, and funding to maintain and operate the parks has been slashed.

Still, Trump doesn’t seem to be slowing down. The administration’s proposed 2027 budget would cut more than a fourth of the remaining annual budget for national parks.

Despite this, Trump still wants Americans to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday by visiting the underfunded parks system (and he’s stamped his face on the annual national parks pass). 

He’s hoping Americans follow the example of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the former reality TV star whose new YouTube show, The Great American Road Trip, captures Duffy’s travels around the US.  

But the parks aren’t ready for it, experts warn. A funding shortfall could further damage the experience and preservation of America’s most visited parks, but journalist Stephanie Pearson tells Today, Explained that she’s most worried about the damage visitors can’t see. 

Pearson has written for Outside Magazine for decades and authored two books on our national parks. Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram asked her how the parks are doing in light of big cuts from the Trump administration. 

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 are our parks doing? Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is encouraging Americans to hit the road. I think a place Americans tend to go when they hit the road is to the national parks, especially in the summertime. What will they find when they go?

It’s a moving target. There’s a lot happening in parks right now. There is almost a quarter of full-time National Park staff have lost their jobs. That’s more than 4,000 positions. 

When you lose a quarter of your park staff, what do you end up losing?

A lot of the public-facing people will still be there. People may not necessarily notice that. They’re still going to be greeted at visitor kiosks. They’re still going to have information people. 

Where they’re really diminishing is in scientists, biologists who are studying the flora and the fauna or the wildlife, people who are critical pieces of these parks who are trying to balance visitation with wildlife, for example. Infrastructure people who are taking care of the parks and maintaining them. The way that’s translating is that people who are left have a lot of hats, and they have to do a lot of different things.

And can they? Do they?

It’s amazing what the National Park Service staff is continuing to do. Anyone who sees someone in a National Park Service uniform should probably go up and give them a hug or, you know, a high five or something.

You have to ask before you give them a hug, though. You don’t wanna make their lives even worse.

Yes, very true. But I would say that I think their jobs are really hard right now. And so just to keep that in mind. However you want to do that, send them good vibes.

I don’t know if you watched the trailer for Sean Duffy’s Great American Road Trip, but he really seems to be emphasizing that this country has so much to offer, and especially its natural beauty, its parks. 

I imagine the maintenance and the infrastructure of our national park system is included in that marketing campaign that they’re on right now. And you’re telling me that the parks are struggling in that regard.

Yes, they are struggling in that regard, and it’s all documented. You can do your own research and see where these cuts are being made. And I do agree with Duffy. I think it’s an amazing, amazing park system, but it is being drastically reduced in terms of the budget that is going toward it and the workforce that they have. 

They are hiring seasonal employees, but what they’re doing is they’re increasing “seasonal employee” to mean a nine-month position. So they’ll get maybe health insurance, but they won’t get other benefits. But what that means is they’re just not a full-time workforce and so a lot of them are also being shifted to different positions.

Can you give us some specifics on what conditions might be like at some of these parks that are really struggling and understaffed? I mean, are you not able to use a porta-potty in a park? Are there no facilities to speak of at this point?

There are facilities, and these parks are not closing down. But, for example, at Yosemite National Park, the first weekend of May, it took an hour and a half to get to the entrance for people. When they got in the park, what is also happening is they’ve lifted all the reservation systems.

[At] some of these iconic parks — Yosemite, Glacier National Park, Acadia National Park — you used to have to make a reservation to drive your car, for example, on Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. They have lifted those, and so it’s sort of a free-for-all. 

It all depends on which park you’re going to. There are parks that are in the system that are a lot less visited; for these iconic parks where everyone seems to want to go all the time, there’s going to be a lot of people who want to see the same things that you do.

Beyond budgetary cuts to these parks, there’s also a bit of an agenda here to sort of reshape the culture and historical educational programming at our national parks. How’s that going?

It’s being implemented as we speak. In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. And what that does is, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum put it, is to eliminate depictions at the Park Service that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living, including in colonial times.

What that means is Acadia National Park climate change signs have been taken down. The [Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail] had to do a big review, and the Park Service staff identified, which was the mandate, I think something like 80 things that they needed to take out of that park.

It’s happening in places, in parks all across the country. For example, Stonewall in New York City — they pulled down the [pride] flag, but it went back up because New York City officials wanted it to go back up.

Do you think this could be an added incentive to get out there this summer and see these parks despite the gas prices, because it’s America 250 and the parks are being ruined, so you may as well see ’em before they’re trashed? 

It almost breaks my heart to even think that. I still have some hope. I have hope that they will not be trashed. I have hope that people on both sides of the aisle understand the value of these parks. I am a proponent of understanding our American history because there’s so much to offer through these parks. You’re going to gain some understanding when you visit Ancestral Puebloan land in New Mexico or you see the geology of Big Bend National Park. 

I am really hopeful that people understand the value of these places. In Big Bend National Park, people are rallying around the fact that they’re trying to build a border wall through it. People have rallied, on both sides of the aisle, to say, We do not want a border wall in Big Bend National Park.“ And so I think that there is hope that people will rise to this occasion.

What you’re saying in Big Bend is that you can only push people so far, and they will eventually stand up if you go too far.

Absolutely. I think Teddy Roosevelt is a perfect example of this. Teddy Roosevelt is the conservation president. Teddy Roosevelt was changed, fundamentally changed, by the Badlands landscape. And that’s my hope that people go to these landscapes and are fundamentally changed and understand what we have to lose here.

In May, Ferrari introduced its first entry into the electric vehicle market: the Luce. With an exterior like a Nissan Leaf, and an interior designed by the guy who designed the iPhone, it received a lot of hate. So, if Ferrari can’t make a cool EV, who can? 

Enter the Slate truck. It’s a Jeff Bezos-backed, American-made compact truck with no bells, whistles, or even AC — the antithesis of the Tesla Cybertruck. It’s kind of cute. And it might just get more Americans to drive an electric car.

At a time when American manufacturers have fallen far behind countries like China in the automotive industry, companies are still trying to get Americans excited about electric. 

Andrew Hawkins is a transportation editor at The Verge who has been following the EV industry in the US. He tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the problems stopping American drivers from fully adopting EVs and discusses whether this bare-bones truck can fix them. 

Below is an excerpt of the 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.

There’s another electric truck that we have to talk about.

Oh, yes, indeed. The Slate truck. 

This to me represents the dichotomy in the EV market today, right? On the one hand, you’ve got your Ferrari Luce. That is a $640,000 car that no one you will ever meet will probably buy. And on the other hand, you’ve got this Slate Truck that is the most bare-bones two-seater that you could possibly imagine. There’s no radio, there’s no touchscreen, there’s no central screen inside the vehicle. There’s no paint. You even have to opt in to get power windows; otherwise, they will just give you the [window crank]. 

I love the idea of an electric truck that has manual roll-’em-down windows.

When I heard that, that blew my mind. This is a new startup. They’ve got a lot of investment cash from Jeff Bezos and some other people. This is their first vehicle. And the theory behind it is that we will make this thing as stripped-down as we possibly can. Take out all the bells and whistles. People can add a bunch of stuff. They could turn it into a small SUV by adding a back section to it if they want. They could add wrapping decals. You could personalize it and make it look however you want it to look. Or, you could just buy the bare-bones version. 

The idea being that electric vehicles, as they stand today, are above the average cost of a new gas-powered vehicle. So, we need to bring this price down. How are we going to do that? Well, still the most expensive part about any electric vehicle is the battery. So, in order to have a good battery while still having a decent car, you need to take out everything else. 

That’s how they’re saying that they’re going to sell this thing for under $30,000 when it eventually comes out at the end of this year.

So, unlike the [Ferrari] Luce, people responded well to this Slate truck. Why is it a truck? Why not a sedan?

Trucks are very popular in the US. They’re amongst the best-selling vehicles, typically. The Ford F-150, for example, was the best-selling vehicle in America for a long time. 

But, this is America. We love our trucks. We love our big trucks. This is not a big truck. This is a small truck. And a lot of people have been saying trucks have gotten too big. They’re oversized behemoths out on the road that are dangerous to pedestrians that are out walking around. They don’t offer enough safety protections. And so, maybe we need to come back to more of a midsize or compact.

And then, obviously, gas prices are soaring. People are looking for something that’s a little bit more downsized in general. So, I think the truck prospect is an interesting one. Then again, trucks aren’t for everybody. If you want to turn this thing into a four-seater compact SUV, that’s something that will be an option to you, as well.

Okay, so this reason to make a little truck seems based on market research. People want a truck, and here’s a very different truck that we can offer them. What about this decision to literally strip away every single feature, including the paint, including the power windows, including the radio? 

It’s a real risky bet from Slate. I think what they’re trying to say is that maybe cars have become too bloated, right? We’re starting to see a pullback from too many convenience features, especially in the car market with people feeling a lot of pressure on their pocketbooks and how expensive new cars have become. They’re looking for something that is a little bit more downmarket. 

But also, I think it’s a reflection of where the expenses are in building a new car and a realization that you can’t just put out a car, especially an electric vehicle today, without some plan to make it profitable. One of the original mistakes of the auto industry, and especially the American auto industry, was that they could take a lot of their most popular cars, retrofit them to be electric, and that people would respond to them. 

That was, I think, a pretty understandable bet from a lot of these companies. But, I don’t think they were really taking costs into effect for a lot of that. And what we ended up with was a lot of cars that were indistinguishable from their gas counterparts, but were 20 to 30 percent more expensive than those gas cars.

In so many ways, the automotive industry is a stand-in for our whole economy. We hold up the auto industry as being this kind of beacon which represents our innovativeness and our leadership on the global stage. And I think that we’ve ceded that leadership now to China. 

China is now leading. They sell the most cars, they export the most cars, and they have the best technology. They’ve cracked the code on cheap EVs. I feel like America is always going to have an outsized reputation, but whether that reputation is actually earned anymore, I think is a very open question right now.

Do the people want EVs in this country yet, or do they still have range anxiety and a preference for the combustion engine? Does the war in Iran factor into how the people feel right now?

People vote with their pocketbooks, right? That’s where their preferences are today. And I think when electric vehicles were first gaining popularity, you heard a lot about charging anxiety. You heard a lot about range anxiety. 

I think those are still considerations, but I feel, right now, the number one consideration for most people is, “I’m living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s costing me $80, $90 to fill up my F-150.” The used EV market right now is extremely attractive to a lot of people. You can get a very good electric vehicle for around $20,000. You take it home, you set up a home charger, you charge that thing overnight. You never have to go to a gas station again. That’s a pretty attractive proposition to a lot of people.

With a little over five months until the midterm elections, Democrats in Washington and on the campaign trail are trying to show voters they care about cost-of-living issues. 

To make that pitch, some parts of the party’s usual message may be going by the wayside. That includes the conversation about combating climate change. Once a pillar of the Democratic agenda, it may now be fading into the background. According to Matt Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University and the author of Climate Change as Class War, Democrats, and the climate, might be better off for it. 

Huber, who recently wrote an essay for the New York Times titled “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore,” spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why Democratic candidates can and should de-center climate change from their platforms and streamline their campaigns on affordability issues. 

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.

What made you want to write this appeal to Democrats to essentially shut up about climate change right now?

I try to argue that it’s the end of a 20-year period in Democratic Party politics where a lot of Democrats were thinking that climate would be this urgent issue that could galvanize this mass majoritarian coalition around green jobs. 

What I’ve come to in the last few years is that I’m just not sure that rhetorically centering the climate crisis as the impetus of this kind of politics is actually going to be effective in building that power, building that majority. Most Americans don’t really prioritize this as an urgent issue, and they prioritize other cost-of-living issues much more.

When did fighting climate change become such a core issue for the Democratic Party? 

2006, which was 20 years ago, was a big flashpoint where Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released. And that did coalesce in the zeitgeist with a massive financial crisis a couple of years later. 

There was a lot of feeling, just like in the Great Depression, that there had to be this mass jobs program, public investment program, and that climate change actually provided the urgency and impetus to center around that kind of large scale investment program and it could create jobs and appeal to these more economic concerns.

When the Green New Deal became a big deal, spread by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, I think they too were thinking it would actually be a more effective politics in the context of a large-scale economic crisis like the original New Deal was. 

Unfortunately for them, I think we never really entered that kind of crisis since the Green New Deal politics took off. We did have a recession, but it was this Covid recession that was a strange kind of economic shutdown and not the kind of crisis that called for this big jobs program.

That label,“Green New Deal,” became so polarizing. And it was a strategy to make it so, obviously. Do you think anything like that kind of messaging is just bunk now?

I’m really sad [about it]. I was a big Green New Deal stan, if I can use that word. I really loved this broad vision and a positive vision. I think a lot of climate politics can be pretty doomer-ist. 

It did go wrong, though. I think when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the House resolution on a Green New Deal in 2019, she did this media blitz around it and she released this FAQ document — or her office released this very bizarre FAQ document — with the sort of media blitz about the Green New Deal. And in the document it had some very stream of consciousness language about how we’re not quite ready to ban farting cows and airplanes.  

Of course, as you would expect, that language got taken up by the Fox News culture war machine and almost immediately the Green New Deal became “We’re going to ban hamburgers. We’re going to ban air travel.”

What was supposed to be this broad-based majoritarian politics that could appeal to working-class people became yet another kind of polarized culture war issue, unfortunately.

Biden clearly realizes he can’t use this Green New Deal marketing to get this kind of legislation through Congress. But he does get this kind of legislation through Congress, weirdly called the Inflation Reduction Act.

Here we are in 2026 and no one ever talks about [the IRA], even though when they were doing it, they said it was the most consequential environmental legislation in American history. How did that happen?

In many ways the Inflation Reduction Act was based on this Green New Deal idea that jobs and investments in the green economy will lead to material benefits and help win back some of these working-class voters who had been shifting to Trumpism. 

Of course, a lot of these investments were very long term. The style of policymaking that has been in vogue for a while in the Democratic Party is to incentivize these investments through tax credits, which means you’re incentivizing the private sector to do a lot of the building of these projects. I cite a study in the piece that found, basically, when you survey communities where these investments are going, they actually didn’t identify it with a political project coming from Biden. They just associated it with the private firm that is investing. 

Meanwhile, inflation is really hammering the working class and the cost of living is skyrocketing as the number one issue voters care about. The Biden administration was saying that the economy was actually really good. If you look at unemployment, if you look at GDP numbers, everything’s going great. And so you really had no answer for the core material cost-of-living concerns that really shaped the 2024 election. 

Of course, with Trump in office, they’ve repealed a good portion of that legislation. Emissions in 2025 in the United States went up, which is very depressing. It was a real disaster on a number of fronts.

You write in your opinion piece in the Times about how we’re already seeing Democrats shift away from climate change. Where do you see it specifically?

You can see a lot of working-class candidates that are union members that are fighting for this progressive agenda of taxing the rich, public investments, Medicare-for-All. But they are steering clear from the climate issue. And if they are talking about climate change, they’re linking it directly to cost-of-living issues like energy affordability. To win and to campaign, they’re realizing that talking about the apocalyptic existential nature of the climate crisis is not going to really inspire and motivate people to support them. 

I profiled someone named Sam Forstag in Montana. And he is a smoke jumper — someone that literally parachutes out of planes to fight forest fires in the west. Because he’s a government employee, he is a union member too, and he is fighting on this kind of working-class agenda. Bernie Sanders and AOC have endorsed him. I profile an iron worker in Oklahoma. A flight attendant in Minnesota. Some of their websites literally don’t mention climate change at all, and if they do, it’s just very brief and links it to energy affordability jobs, things like this. 

That’s a real shift. These are exactly the types of candidates that I would say five or six years ago would’ve been the central messengers of this kind of Green New Deal message of unions, jobs, blue-collar workers that are going to kind of build the energy transition. These would be the kind of workers that’d be front and center, but they’re not, and I think that’s telling. 

One thing I mention in the piece is Zohran Mamdani, who ran a very successful campaign. But there’s been reporting showing that he barely talked about climate change in his campaign. And that’s after he had really been a climate activist in the Democratic Socialists of America and ran on climate change and public power in his assembly campaign in 2020. The whole affordability message, I think, came out of his campaign and people realizing that’s a way to build a mass coalition. And that’s a way to win. 

As someone who’s written the books, who’s done the research, who’s a college professor talking about these issues, how much does it break your heart that this is where we’re at, that you have to write an opinion piece in the New York Times that tells politicians that they need to Trojan horse climate issues into their platforms?

It doesn’t really break my heart. It actually reinforces what the Climate Change as Class War book was arguing, which is that the climate challenge is really a question of power.

I mentioned in the book four years ago that it’s convenient that the sectors we need to decarbonize are energy, transport, things like housing. These are end-of-month concerns for working-class people. So if we can kind of build a decarbonization agenda around those sectors, we can link climate to those working-class needs. 

Since the book, I’ve become less convinced that shouting about the climate crisis as this existential threat is going to be the central motivating impetus of that kind of politics. Why not just focus directly on those material needs? Once you build the power, you figure out how to really make those investments and build towards decarbonization.

Almost a century ago, public health agencies began mandating that milk be pasteurized for human consumption. We’ve been fighting about it ever since.

Many, many scientific studies have shown that the process of pasteurization — heating milk to 161° F for 15 seconds and then rapidly cooling it — significantly kills off harmful bacteria, viruses, and parasites and reduces the risk of transmitting foodborne illnesses.

Those illnesses — including listeria, E. coli, salmonella, tuberculosis, and bird flu — can be fatal for children, the elderly, and immunocompromised people.

Raw milk advocates steadfastly claim that pasteurization strips milk of beneficial bacteria and enzymes, but without evidence: Public health organizations — including the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — say that claims of raw milk’s unique nutritional benefits are unsupported.

While the FDA has banned the interstate sale of raw milk since 1987, some members of Congress hope to lift that ban (a House bill to do so is currently in committee). Meanwhile, 18 states are considering more than 40 bills to make it easier to buy and sell raw milk.

Sales of raw milk have spiked as “food freedom” activists argue for their right to make personal health decisions, and wellness influencers promote raw milk as “nature’s superfood.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed raw milk and — before joining the Trump administration — vowed to loosen federal restrictions on interstate sales.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones, about why raw milk is having a moment, the arguments for and against drinking it, and why advocates are disappointed in Kennedy’s lack of action on raw milk.

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.

Raw milk is having a moment right now in the United States. What is going on with raw milk?

There is definitely an increasing interest in raw milk, especially the idea of increased raw milk legalization and selling raw milk across state lines, which I think even under the second Trump administration and RFK Jr. is not super likely.

There are 40-plus bills across 18 states that have to do with raw dairy and raw cheese. Raw milk is legal to some degree in 43 states, but it varies widely. In some places, like California, where I live, you can go to the store and buy raw milk. In other places, you can access it through what’s called a herd share, which is a legal agreement where consumers have access to a milking animal or a herd, and they can buy or get the milk directly from the farmer. In other places, raw milk is only legal as pet food, but obviously there’s nothing stopping people if they really insist on it from buying and drinking milk labeled as pet food. 

DC is one of the places where raw milk is illegal. In Rhode Island, it is totally illegal, except you can get raw goat milk with a prescription from a doctor. It’s also illegal in Hawaii. But in most places in the US, you’re going to be able to get raw milk in some form.

Remind us why we decided to pasteurize our milk, or what the benefits were?

One of the first big pushes for pasteurization of milk came in the 1930s after the discovery that raw milk could transmit tuberculosis, which was killing a lot of babies. There was a pretty direct relationship between more and more places requiring pasteurization and infant mortality rates going down. And so after that, it was pretty clear to most people in most public health bodies that this was a good idea. 

They were saying basically, “Pasteurize your milk and we will keep more kids alive.” And then since that medical breakthrough, we’ve been trying to dial it back. Why are we trying to dial it back? And who’s doing the dialing?

Pretty much since pasteurization became a widespread thing, there has been opposition to it. And the raw milk movement has always argued that raw milk is better for you, that it’s more natural. 

For instance, when I talked to Mark McAfee, who’s the founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the biggest raw milk producer in the country, he told me that raw milk makes asthma go away, which is not true, according to public health experts, virologists, and asthma experts. You’ll see arguments that raw milk is good for allergies, that it has beneficial enzymes or bacteria, and this is pretty much the argument that’s been made since the raw milk movement organized and took force — that raw milk inherently has nutrients and good qualities that are stripped from pasteurized milk.

Do these groups that are advocating for more raw milk hew to a certain political party?

Historically, raw milk, like anti-vaccine ideas, cut equally across the right and the left. I grew up in a pretty blue part of New Mexico and would certainly see raw milk being sold and discussed, though not the way that it is now. But a lot of the places that you’re seeing raw milk legislation especially picking up are red states, because of ideas around government regulation and health freedom.

And of course, red state, blue state, crunchy or libertarian, distrustful of government, wherever it might be, you might find some affinity in our current secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last year famously did a shot of raw milk at the White House.

He sure did. He did a little shooter of raw milk to celebrate the publication of the [Make America Health Again] report, which was meant to be his big capstone piece of writing, presenting solutions for chronic disease, and was full of AI slop and fake citations and which you will notice they don’t talk about very much anymore.

Did that quash his attempt to normalize raw milk at the federal level?

This is what’s super interesting: Before Kennedy was in office as HHS secretary, he was famously really bullish on raw milk. He had this famous tweet in 2024 where he talked about all the things that the FDA was going to stop suppressing under his leadership. He said the FDA’s war on public health is about to end, and he listed all these things, including raw milk. But since then, much to the frustration of big players in the raw milk industry, there actually hasn’t been any federal action to make raw milk more legal or to make it legal across state lines. Kennedy actually hasn’t done anything on that. And Mark McAfee told me that he can’t get Kennedy to return his calls.

One thing that has happened instead, though, is that the Trump administration has suddenly been trumpeting their emphasis on whole milk. You might’ve seen this a few months ago. They were saying, “We’re bringing whole milk back to the schools.” Whole milk is no longer illegal in America, which it never was. A lot of their language around whole milk echoes the language around raw milk that you see among raw milk advocates. But they actually have not talked about raw milk at all. 

You can speculate why this might’ve happened — if this is a liability issue, if there are still people at the CDC and the FDA who are like, ‘It would be a really bad idea for the federal government to promote this’ — but I would say that for raw milk and raw dairy advocates, the fact that the Trump administration has not been on their side is clearly a big disappointment.

Are public health officials other than the secretary of health and human services worried about raw milk?

Earlier this year, an infant died in New Mexico from listeria that public health officials there think was probably linked to the infant’s mom drinking it during pregnancy. And there have been a bunch of foodborne illness outbreaks. I think this is a concern for people because raw milk can carry E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, things that can make you really, really sick.

One, obviously, is the increasing availability of raw milk in various places. Another concern is that it is being marketed by health influencers and other people with big social media followings as a miracle cure in a very simplistic way. And it is especially being marketed to parents as a cure-all for children, which is concerning because raw milk and dairy are especially risky for infants, immune-compromised people, and elderly people.

An illness like E. coli that could be serious, but that you would make it through, potentially, as an adult, is incredibly serious for a child and can lead to this thing called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which has sickened and killed children. 

The raw milk industry tends to talk about this idea that raw milk is safe if you trust your farmer. But when you talk to a virologist, they will tell you that no matter how well you know your farmer, how much you think you trust the dairy, if you’re not pasteurizing your milk, you’re going to be at more risk of common foodborne pathogens. So you can find the farm to be delightful in every way, and it will not prevent illness. 

Ideally, we would not be continuing to litigate really well-established pieces of science, and we could move on to other stuff. But instead, we are talking about raw milk again.

There’s a page on the FDA right now with counterarguments to these common claims that people make about raw milk — for instance, that it contains beneficial bacteria or enzymes or something. There’s very, very good evidence about raw milk’s actual dangers and risks.