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There is no wilder time than the present to build a company around artificial intelligence. The server bills are astronomical, for one. Also, the market for talent is red hot, and you’ll end up paying through the nose for good people. Even if you do get funding, staff up, get the product off the ground, and start making headway in a crowded field, there’s the specter of Big Tech looming overhead. The hyper-carnivorous raptors of Silicon Valley—Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta—will fix their steely eyes on the plump prey of your best employees and your intellectual property.
But they can’t just buy you. Not anymore; outright acquisitions could draw the attention of regulators in the US and Europe, where governments are ramping up their antitrust efforts. Now, instead of gobbling you up, a big tech company will license your tech and bring your top talent into their offices to collaborate with their employees. This maneuver—not an acquisition, more like an acqui-hire with some partnerships included—is something we’ve seen a few times in recent months. And we can expect more.
This week, we welcome WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave back onto the show to discuss the current trend of partnerships between small AI companies and the tech giants. We also talk about how regulators are really cracking down on Google in particular.
Show Notes
Read about the US court ruling that found Google engaged in monopolistic practices to increase its search engine’s dominance. Read more about Character AI, Meta, and customizable chatbots. Read all of WIRED’s antitrust coverage.
Recommendations
Paresh recommends playing games on Netflix, like Triviaverse. Mike recommends the new documentary Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, which is also on Netflix. Lauren recommends “Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich” from The Wall Street Journal.
Paresh Dave can be found on social media @peard33. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Lauren Goode: Mike
Michael Calore: Lauren.
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Lauren Goode: Let's say that you wanted to buy an AI company here at WIRED, but forces bigger than us wouldn't let that happen. Just on account of the fact that WIRED is too darn powerful, and it would be an unfair advantage.
Michael Calore: I can't foresee that ever happening, because I do not want to buy an AI company.
Lauren Goode: OK. But let's say that you did want to acquire one because you thought this company was really unique, but your purchase was going to be declined. What would you do?
Michael Calore: In that case, I would probably just ransack all of their best talent and bring them here, right? Is that the right answer?
Lauren Goode: That is the correct answer. Yes.
Michael Calore: OK. I'm guessing that there are all kinds of corporate gymnastics involved in doing that. But if anyone is going to hashtag innovate around this space, it's probably the big tech companies.
Lauren Goode: You are two for two.
Michael Calore: All right. Let's make it three. Is this what we're going to talk about on this week's podcast?
Lauren Goode: Let's do it.
Michael Calore: All right.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode, a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I'm Michael Calore. I'm WIRED's director of Consumer Tech and Culture,
Lauren Goode: And we're joined this week by WIRED's senior writer, Paresh Dave. Paresh, thanks so much for being here And by being here, I mean for all of us walking three feet from our desks into the studio.
Paresh Dave: I'm glad no one sued me from being aqui-hired onto your show today.
Lauren Goode: I'm very excited to have you. So a few days ago, Google, in a somewhat unusual move, said it was going to pay out $2.5 billion to venture capitalists who had invested in a startup called Character.AI in order for Google to basically buy back the talent of that startup. The founders of Character.AI, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, had worked at Google before, and this new deal brings them back into the fold there.
The deal also means that Google gets a non-exclusive license for Character.AI's artificial intelligence tech. This is definitely a kind of maneuver. It's not an acquisition, but it's more like an aqui-hire with some technology partnerships included. And it's not the first of its kind we've seen in recent months. So later in this show, we're going to talk about how regulators are really cracking down on Google in particular. But first, Paresh, tell us what's going on with this trend of AI startup acquires.
Paresh Dave: Some might call it a trend. Others might call it a game of copycat. So Microsoft started this first when it acquired Inflection AI, or not acquired, but sort of acquired. Then Amazon did it with Adept AI. And now, we have Google doing it with Character.AI. And I think these are all companies that have former Googlers as cofounders, and they were all trying to compete with OpenAI and develop things kind of like ChatGPT, but not quite. So in character's case, they were trying to build chatbots based on people and characters. So everything from Socrates to anime characters to Elon Musk, and they've all had to raise tons and tons of money to develop the large language models that underlie those chatbots. And there's only so much money out there, Lauren.
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Lauren Goode: Sorry. You said that honestly. I'm the one attempting to raise right now. I too can spin up a character AI chatbot if you guys would like me to. I'm pretty sure. OK. So these startups have been developing their own technology, but they're expensive to run. So what is the most valuable part of them? What makes them desirable targets?
Paresh Dave: Very smart people. I I think that's part of it. Noam Shazeer, who you mentioned, is one of the cofounders of Character, was very instrumental in developing Google's spelling correction technology, some of their ad technology, and also the technologies that made ChatGPT possible and as powerful as it is today. So I think that's part of it, really smart people. And the technology, you can see where the value is in the sense that character going forward, what's left of it is going to not use its own technology that it developed, but rather open source technologies or licensing technologies from others.
And so that tells you a little bit. It's so expensive to build these and continue to improve them that they're kind of giving up on that. And so when people say, "Are we in an AI bubble?" I think you got to sort of narrow it a little bit. We might be in a large language model startup bubble. It's become so cost prohibitive to develop these specifically large language models that some of the companies that tried to do it are giving up on that part of the work.
Michael Calore: So what is it that is so cost prohibitive? Is it just the talent? Is it all the computing resources? All of the above?
Paresh Dave: It's really the computing resources to scrape the entire internet, which we can have the arguments of whether that's legal or not, and then ingest all that data and then process it to develop the relationships and create the lines between different words so that these machines that are designed to pick the next word in a sequence can pick the next word in a sequence. And it's that computing resource to train the model billions upon billions of dollars that these companies need to succeed in the long term that when Google is doing a decent enough job of it and providing cloud technologies, Microsoft is providing cloud technologies, and Meta and other companies are providing open source technologies that anyone can use. Why do we need the umpteenth one?
Lauren Goode: Right. OK. And in some cases, these startups are raising tens of millions or even hundreds of millions in venture capital funding. And unless it's a down round, their private market valuations basically balloon. So they may now be worth over a billion dollars in the minds of the broader tech market. That means that a company like Microsoft or Google, if they go to buy those startups, they get scrutinized. What's going on there?
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidGearEverything Apple Announced TodayBy Boone AshworthGearThe Best Hearing Aids We’ve Personally Tested and Vetted With an ExpertBy Christopher Null
Paresh Dave: Yeah. Exactly. These companies have been told by regulators, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in the second half, that we are going to be monitoring AI acquisitions. This is the future. This is where things are going. And we don't want to realize five years from now that we should have stopped some of these deals, and we should have stopped Google, Microsoft, and Amazon from amassing too much power.
And so as a result, that's why Microsoft came up with maybe this weird situation where we're going to let inflection AI keep existing, but we're going to take most of their most valuable resources and bring them in house. But I think it's also important to remember that though we are seeing this copycat game, there are still some others around. There's a French startup called Mistral. There's a Japanese startup called Sakana. There's Cohere here in the US, also all started by former Googlers, or at least one former Google cofounder that they're all still pursuing LLMs in their own flavors. So it's not completely dried up out there, but some people are realizing that maybe we can focus on building the product and not necessarily the model.
Michael Calore: There's still fruit on the tree to be picked by the big companies.
Paresh Dave: That's another way of looking at it. Is Apple going to acquire one of these companies now that they're pursuing things like Apple Intelligence to improve Siri and various products? Yeah. You could keep going down the list of big tech companies. There are more companies that could be acquired.
Lauren Goode: Do you remember there was that period of time when Apple just would make a ton of acquisitions and they would have to disclose it in their quarterly earnings and they would use literally the same sentence. They were small acquisitions. They would use the same sentence every time. They were just buying a bunch of companies for like $30 million.
Michael Calore: Yeah. And that's interesting because that was a big trend, particularly with Apple. They've always shopped for features. I feel like every big tech company does this. Apple needed a voice assistant. It bought Siri. It felt the need for some reason to plug a social network into iTunes. So it bought a social network.
Lauren Goode: Was that Ping?
Michael Calore: Yeah. It was Ping.
Lauren Goode: Throwback.
Michael Calore: It wanted to redo its weather app, so they bought Dark Sky. There's all of these things where they're basically shopping for features, and it seems like this is a step beyond that. The big tech companies are buying the talent and getting these exclusive rights to use the key feature, but not actually sucking up the whole company.
Paresh Dave: Yeah. I would put it as the copycat game. Let's just get this piece. And then the next company goes, "Oh wow, they did that. We need to do that." And so I wouldn't be surprised if Apple gets on the trend as well. I think the other thing to point out here is to, is the bubble popping? Is everything going to big tech? I think we need to just appreciate that these deals also tell us that the sort of generative AI ramp-up is going to be very slow.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidGearEverything Apple Announced TodayBy Boone AshworthGearThe Best Hearing Aids We’ve Personally Tested and Vetted With an ExpertBy Christopher Null
There's a great story in Bloomberg last week talking about Google's efforts to pursue generative AI in healthcare. And there were two very important anecdotes in there talking about how the generative AI system missed important info on a handoff note between nurses and then missed something important that a patient said when it was sort of summarizing what the patient said.
And I think it shows what we've all been experiencing. These systems continue to hallucinate and give us wrong information a lot of the time, and they're just not fully trustworthy. And so what you see is Google also realizing, "Let's just play the long game here. Let's bring this talent, let's keep working on research," while these startups are still trying to pursue the product and make money while they can in the short term.
Lauren Goode: I have to ask, I imagine these deals are pretty sweet for the cofounders or founders of these startups. To your point, many of them had worked at Google before. What does it mean for the hundred or so rank and file employees who had joined this startup, maybe hoping at some point that they would have some kind of liquidity event and now they get absorbed into the board, they go their separate ways. How does that work?
Michael Calore: And not only that, but they thought that they were going to be working on this cool groundbreaking technology that they don't get to work on anymore
Lauren Goode: And no shit at Microsoft, but now they work for Microsoft.
Paresh Dave: Well, a couple of things there. One for the founders and the people at the top of the company who wanted to do research, I do think it's kind of funny or maybe ironic, some of these people have been critical of Google. Some of these people have been critical of big tech in general. That's why they struck out and sort of built these startups. And now, they've ended up back in big tech companies. So there is some irony there. For the people that are left behind in sort of the remnants of these companies like Inflection, like Character.AI, it seems like a bizarre state of affairs, but you could imagine that perhaps a lot of the people staying behind are the ones who really want to pursue commercialization, who want to generate revenue, want to focus less on the research, want to build a product. So it's a fit potentially for them.
Lauren Goode: It's like that vibe you get at a certain point in your career where you think, "I don't want to care so much about my job anymore. I don't want it to define my life. I would just like a salary."
Paresh Dave: Well, there will be a cut potentially in that salary or whatever their total compensation is because these startups has they lose all of that research and LLM sort of talent, there will be a cut in valuation.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidGearEverything Apple Announced TodayBy Boone AshworthGearThe Best Hearing Aids We’ve Personally Tested and Vetted With an ExpertBy Christopher Null
Lauren Goode: OK. Paresh, thank you so much for those insights. We're going to take a quick break and come back with more about the regulatory environment and what that has meant for Google in particular.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: US regulators are having a moment or really a lot of moments. The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department has spent the past few years really scrutinizing big tech. Google and Apple have been hit with lawsuits from the DOJ. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, has filed suits against Facebook and Amazon. This means that big tech companies get swept up into multi-year lawsuits with federal agencies and can't easily make big acquisitions. It's supposed to level the playing field in an era when these giant tech companies wield so, so much power. But that also has trickle-down effects into the world of startups, which as you might expect is kind of upsetting to those on the startup side of things. Paresh, tell us a little bit about how this has affected Google in particular lately, and what we can expect next.
Paresh Dave: So the big news this week is that the US Department of Justice won a case against Google in which the government had alleged that Google's search engine was an illegal monopoly, and the Google search ads business was also an illegal monopoly. There were some narrow wins for Google in the case. But largely a judge in Washington DC, a federal judge, sided with the US Department of Justice. And now in the coming months, we're going to find out what sort of punishment Google will have to face as a result of that.
Google, of course, is appealing the verdict. So it could be years before it has to actually comply with anything, but we're just going to start to get an idea of do they have to sell off part of Google? Do they have to make really big changes to the setup process on phones so that you can choose a different default search engine on an Android phone or on the Chrome browser other than Google? But there's this general environment for the past few years that the US government is not going to be OK with tech companies growing bigger and bigger and bigger in a way that is unlawfully anti-competitive.
Lauren Goode: And you wrote in your story on WIRED.com this week about how Google is zero for two right now with these big antitrust lawsuits. So just tell us quickly the difference between the two.
Paresh Dave: Yeah. So it also lost a jury verdict back in December in a lawsuit brought by Epic Games, which makes Fortnite arguing that Google's Play store was an illegal monopoly. And so this month, we're going to start to see the punishments get debated before a judge.
Michael Calore: What can you tell us about the key players here, the two people in the US government who are really stepping up antitrust enforcement?
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Paresh Dave: I can tell you that they're aligned on their mission. So Lina Kahn who chairs the FTC told a Harvard Law School publication in February, "The AI space, as you noted, is so fast moving. And so we really want to make sure that the opportunity for competition and the potential for disruption is preserved rather than this moment being co-opted by some of the existing dominant firms to double down on their dominance." And Jonathan Kanter, the head of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice who brought that case against Google, he said in May at a conference that I attended at Stanford, "If firms in the AI ecosystem violate the antitrust laws, the Antitrust Division will have something to say about it."
And so the two of them have been pursuing sort of lawsuits or pursuing investigations against big tech acquisitions. So you saw the Adobe Figma deal get called off. You've seen scrutiny of the Microsoft Activision deal though that ended up going through. Most recently, Google wasn't able to finish an acquisition of Wiz, a cybersecurity company because it seemed like Wiz was concerned that the deal would get caught up similar to the Figma deal in regulatory scrutiny, and they wouldn't be able to complete it, and they would've had wasted a year or two years going through all this legal craziness.
Lauren Goode: NVIDIA wasn't able to buy Arm as well.
Paresh Dave: There's another one. And so the pair of them, Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter also have the backing of the UK, the EU, Australia, India, and all these other markets where the antitrust enforces there are also concerned about big tech growing too big again in a way that they argue you would be unlawful.
Michael Calore: So how does this environment influence these deals that we were talking about in the first half of the show where big tech is doing these sort of talent acquisitions and licensing deals with AI companies?
Paresh Dave: Well, when you make an acquisition, you typically have to report it. If it meets certain thresholds, you have to report it to the government. And by doing these sort of licensing deals and Acqui-hires or however they are structuring it to avoid it being a traditional acquisition, they are not having to report it. That seems to be the MO here.
Can we get what we want without having to go through the normal regulatory process? And I think the FTC has already been looking at investments that the big tech companies made in some of these companies. And you could imagine that that investigation is going to bring in whether these arrangements that have been struck by Microsoft Inflection, Amazon and Adept, Google and Character can really stand. So this may not be the last that we hear of these deals. There could still be some scrutiny as part of the investigation that the FTC has been running. They would have to open up a new investigation if they really wanted to unwind these deals. But that's also possible. The FTC and Khan have shown that they are willing to go back in time and look at acquisitions that were done years ago and try to get those undone, basically hit the undo button.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidGearEverything Apple Announced TodayBy Boone AshworthGearThe Best Hearing Aids We’ve Personally Tested and Vetted With an ExpertBy Christopher Null
Lauren Goode: Wow. OK. Interesting. And there are some venture capitalists, and I'm thinking of two in particular right now who've been pretty vocal about the fact that they feel these regulators are being quite hostile to the broader tech environment because they are pror-little tech.
This is Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz who run the famed venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. And the thing is, Marc, in particular writes who has blocked all of us on Twitter, but we still get to read his stuff. He writes these manifestos every so often, and they sort of lodge themselves into the collective brain of Silicon Valley. And we start, whether we realize it or not, kind of using these phrases that he has put out there. And the one that he and Horowitz have really put forth recently is that they are pro-little tech and that this is bad for little tech, which means that this it's bad for startups. And startups are good, and startups are innovative, and they all say, "I'll create jobs and all this stuff." And the fact that big tech companies can't buy them is bad, right? Paresh, it's more nuanced than that. So explain some of the conversation that's happening in the startup world about this.
Paresh Dave: Yeah. It's a little bit more nuanced, but I think the idea is that startups eventually do view one of their paths to sort of success is either going public on the stock market and turning all of that equity that they've earned into actual cash or getting bought out by a big tech company. And if that avenue is shut down, that is hugely detrimental to startups and the ability for their investors to turn all of their stock into cash.
And so that's what you're seeing. And so it's funny because Marc Andreessen is on one side of the political spectrum. Reid Hoffman, who is another investor and one of the cofounders of LinkedIn, he's on a very different end of the political spectrum. Yet they may be aligned in this where Reid Hoffman actually went on TV recently and said that he wanted Lina Khan to be dumped as FTC chair. And another big investor, Barry Diller, called Lina Khan a dope. They both sort of apologize for the terms that they used, but they still maintain their criticisms of the approach that the FTC has taken by, sort of, in their words, waging a war on big tech companies.
Michael Calore: And that war is far from over because the next US presidential election, which happens in just a few months, will determine what the regulatory environment is going to be like. Kanter and Kahn are both Biden appointees, and if Donald Trump wins another election, then he will probably fire them or replace them.
Paresh Dave: No. That's sort of the interesting another irony here is that JD Vance, the vice presidential nominee running alongside Donald Trump, has been very supportive of Lina Khan and what she's been doing. And Donald Trump has also been sort of generally supportive of scrutiny of big tech, in part because he's concerned about what he views as censorship of conservative ideas by big tech companies. And he has been very supportive of investigations by the FTC and other government agencies into big tech companies. Whereas the comments that Reid Hoffman made about Lina Khan came with him calling for Kamala Harris if she's elected to get rid of Lina Khan. So there's actually more concern that the regulatory scrutiny could go away if Kamala Harris is elected.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidGearEverything Apple Announced TodayBy Boone AshworthGearThe Best Hearing Aids We’ve Personally Tested and Vetted With an ExpertBy Christopher Null
Lauren Goode: Wow. Are they saying this about Kanter too because it seems to be a lot of focus on Lina Khan and I don't know, I'm getting whiffs of misogyny here.
Paresh Dave: No. I think that is certainly part of it. But no, as far as I've seen, I haven't seen explicit calls for Jonathan Kanter removal. But he's also a little bit more behind the scenes, and there's a lot of other criticisms that Trump has at the Justice Department that are unrelated and probably more of his attention.
Lauren Goode: So Paresh, what should we be looking out for next with regards to antitrust in big tech?
Paresh Dave: Well, the Department of Justice isn't done. They have a trial coming up against Google, another one this time about Google's ad tech business starting next month in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. And that could be hugely consequential because of all the money that Google makes from its ad technology. It drives the profits. It drives the entire company. And if parts of that operation have to be broken up, it would be the end of Google as we know it.
Lauren Goode: And I'm sure we'll be talking about that in the coming weeks. Thanks again. Let's take another break, and then we'll come back with our recommendations.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: Paresh, what's your recommendation aside from don't try to buy an AI company right now?
Paresh Dave: My recommendation is games on Netflix.
Michael Calore: Bold.
Paresh Dave: I had never clicked on the little games icon in the Netflix app before, but my nephew was visiting recently and he wanted to play Triviaverse, which is actually very hard. I didn't know half the answers. I don't know how he could have possibly known many of the answers, but it is a fascinating experience to not watch trashy rom-coms and instead be playing games on Netflix.
It is a little bit annoying in that you have to download things. You would wish that it would be built in, but then the app would be too big. But anyways, they've had a lot of success recently. Netflix said the amount of gaming—starting from a low base—tripled last year. Grand Theft Auto apparently was a huge hit on Netflix. There's this game based on a TV show I've never watched, Too Hot to Handle. That's apparently really popular, and Netflix is saying that they have over a hundred games. They have 60 or 80 in production right now. Anyways, it's a growing thing. I'm curious if they'll introduce real money games and start to, I don't know, if you can make money, Netflix and chilling.
Lauren Goode: Netflix and chilling. Do you use those standard controller?
Paresh Dave: So a lot of these are mobile. So you're playing on your phone,
Lauren Goode: Playing on your phone. Oh, OK. Is it cast to your big TV?
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Paresh Dave: I think you probably can, but this was while we were sitting at the airport, so I think, most people, as far as I understand, are just playing on their phones.
Lauren Goode: OK. Got it.
Paresh Dave: Wow.
Lauren Goode: Huh. Have you ever played those, Mike?
Paresh Dave: Nope.
Lauren Goode: Same. There was a period of time where the people were trying to make that a thing on your TV.
Paresh Dave: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: And I think the remote experience was too cumbersome. Amazon had it too.
Paresh Dave: They are talking about doing stuff on TV. But right now, as far as I understand, the focus is mobile.
Lauren Goode: Cool.
Michael Calore: They have to figure out a way to incorporate the phone as controller, which doesn't really work because you have to look at the phone, and it takes your focus and attention away from the screen.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: So it's a little bit too hard for normal people's brains to handle.
Lauren Goode: Thanks for that. Oh, and it's just part of your Netflix sub.
Paresh Dave: Correct. Correct.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Paresh Dave: As far as I know, you don't have to pay anything extra for any of the games.
Michael Calore: Yet.
Lauren Goode: All right.
Paresh Dave: That is an important point.
Lauren Goode: Thank you for that. Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: I'm going to recommend a piece of storytelling content on Netflix that is not a game, but it's not a trashy rom-com. It is, in fact, a very good documentary. It is called Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, and it's a Netflix exclusive. It's about a mountaineer, a woman who has summited Everest 10 times, and she is the record holder of women who've summited Everest.
She's a Nepalese woman. She is a single mom. She washes dishes to make ends meet. She has two teenage daughters. She was denied an education as a young person in her country and ended up in an abusive marriage. She's overcome all of these things to build this new life for herself as this person who climbs mountains. It's really incredible. And not only for the scenery, because the scenery is, of course, beautiful, but the story is beautiful too. It's a really uplifting. You're really, really rooting for her. I was rooting for her in a way that I rarely root for protagonists in climbing documentaries, I will say that. Also, we would be remiss not to mention that our own Wendi Jonassen, who all of us in this room know well because she used to work at WIRED. She was a video producer at Condé Nast for years.
Lauren Goode: Also a member of our very unofficial but fun run club.
Michael Calore: Yes. We go run around the lake with Wendi once a month. She's an associate producer on this.
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Lauren Goode: Very cool.
Michael Calore: So yes, props to Wendi. Also, you don't have to take my recommendation on its own. The movie currently has a 100 on the Tomatometer.
Lauren Goode: Oh, wow.
Michael Calore: Yeah. So universal praise, I think, is how they qualify that.
Lauren Goode: Very cool.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Mountain Queen on Netflix.
Lauren Goode: On Netflix. All right. It's a Netflix kind of day.
Michael Calore: It really is. What is your Netflix recommendation, Lauren.
Lauren Goode: My recommendation is not a Netflix movie, although I can imagine it being made-
Paresh Dave: Not good.
Lauren Goode: … into one, at some point. My recommendation is this incredible story in The Wall Street Journal, headlined Inside the Secret Negotiations to free Evan Gershkovich. Evan, of course, is the Wall Street Journal reporter who was wrongly imprisoned in a Russian jail. He was freed last week as part of a massive, complicated prisoner swap. This story has everything, not only Evan, but a US Marine, Vladimir Putin, Russian oligarchs, Brittney Griner, Eric Schmidt, Tucker Carlson-
Michael Calore: What?
Lauren Goode: … Jake Sullivan, a Bulgarian investigative journalist, the CAA, the FBI, and a mom you would definitely want on your side if you were ever thrown in jail is Mom Ella, who became known as Ella—the reporter during this process was so fastidious and really incredible—and working behind the scenes to get her son, Evan, freed. It's an incredible tale. And, of course, I think we're all very happy that Evan is out of jail.
Michael Calore: I want to know how the Journal got the exclusive on this.
Lauren Goode: Seriously?
Paresh Dave: It wasn't necessarily the exclusive.
Michael Calore: That's true.
Paresh Dave: Others had similar stories. This one was the long one.
Lauren Goode: But I think the Journal had unique behind-the-scenes access, because some of the top editors, one in particular, Almar Latour, was very involved in the discussions about Evan's release as well.
Michael Calore: Awesome.
Lauren Goode: But it's wow, this story. Yeah.
Michael Calore: Can't wait to read it.
Lauren Goode: So we will link to that in the show notes. All right. That's our show for this week. Paresh, thanks again for joining us.
Paresh Dave: Thanks for having me.
Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on all the socials. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now, and we'll be back next week.
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