Why did Comcast ever buy NBC?

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Longtime Verge fans know we have been disclosing that Comcast NBCUniversal was an investor in our parent company Vox Media for years now. That's all come to an end. Not only did that investment spin out with Versant, but Vox Media itself is splitting in two, and that Versant stake now lives inside of a shell company that is part of a joint venture with the Penske Media Corporation called PMX. And PMX technically does not exist yet. It is all very complicated. And I promise I will sort out a simpler disclosure when all of these deals close. But for now, the upshot is the same as ever. None of these companies have ever told us what to do or say in our reporting, and we wouldn't let them if they tried. Which is good, because Peter and I have a lot to say about Comcast. He and I have been covering media and telecom as friends, peers, and competitors for years now. And Comcast was the biggest bet on the idea that combining media assets like NBC with access and distribution like Comcast broadband network would somehow pay off. This idea, which you'll hear us loosely call content plus pipes, is irresistible to media and telecom people. They cannot stay away from it. AT&T tried content and pipes when it bought Time Warner. Verizon tried content and pipes when it bought AOL and Yahoo! Hell, AOL itself tried content and pipes when it bought Time Warner in the early 2000s. You might notice a trend here. All of these deals ended in disaster. But Comcast managed to hold it together with NBCU for 15 years, even though it could never quite explain what value there was in putting the content near the pipes. And as you'll hear Peter say, this big split feels like the company finally admitting it never really had that answer and capitulating to Wall Street's demands. Peter and I talked a lot about what comes next for Comcast and NBCU. Both companies have existential choices ahead of them and face stiff competition. And it's unclear if there are more deals coming to either sell or acquire more assets. We also talked a lot about how we got here and why content plus pipes always crashes and burns. You'll hear us talk a lot about net neutrality in that context. That's the idea that ISPs like Comcast have to treat all the traffic on their network equally. They can't throttle Netflix and prioritize Peacock. The ability to do that might have been the entire economic basis of content plus pipes. But Peter and I disagree on whether it was regulators or the market that kept the internet from turning back into cable TV in that way. This is a good one. As you'll hear, Peter and I really like talking to each other about this stuff. Okay, Peter Kafka on the Comcast split. Here we go. Peter Kafka, Chief Correspondent for Business Insider, as well as the host of the excellent media industry podcast, Channels. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you, Nilay. Thank you for having me. I have to say Channels is excellent because I was just on it. That's how I know it's good. That was an excellent episode. Yeah. And so we're trading it back. But I'm really excited to talk to you about what's going on with Comcast because it feels like you and I have spent our careers weaving in and out of covering Comcast around each other. You especially. Turns out we were stupid. We should have just slept for the last 15 years and woken up and then nothing would have changed. One of my favorite moments of all of the weaving back and forth was it wasn't Comcast specifically, but you had Reed Hastings on stage at an All Things D or a Code conference. And you asked him about net neutrality, which we will come to in the course of this conversation. And he was like, yeah, it's over. We're big enough. It doesn't matter anymore. And that's in many ways, this was a pivotal moment in the history of internet and content because what he was saying was that he had reached enough scale so that the distributors, the power now had to come to his terms. And if you look back, I think you can trace almost everything that's happened to that moment. Netflix announcing to you that they were big enough that everyone had to deal with them. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I always think of that as a classic, like, oh, nerds or people who care about this thing that we said we cared about. That's fine. We've just moved on because there was a huge part of the internet or internet culture that was just despondent about the fact that Netflix had been their sword carrier for this stuff and that they were done carrying swords. Shield carrier? Shield? Whatever. They had a sword and a shield. But yeah, you've nailed it. I mean, and we'll get into it, but I think Netflix is the great example of why this convergence dream that Comcast, among many others, chased doesn't, is not material for 2026. And they're finally acknowledging that. Yeah. Everyone had to go to Netflix because Netflix had built enough audience. And I think that's where you can begin this conversation. It might be where you can end it, right? That Comcast is going to break itself up into a content arm and a broadband arm. And maybe those two companies will work together and maybe they won't. But there's just a moment that I think you can point to and say, oh, this was inevitable. It was inevitable that the dream of the giant multinational conglomerate would have to unbundle itself. And we feel, I feel like we're in a time of great unbundling right now. Yeah, this is the classic cliche. The media bundles and rebundles. We're in the unbundling part of the pendulum shift. I'm sure at some point we'll move back to, hey, wouldn't it be great if we bundled? But yeah, I mean, the great thing is the bankers and lawyers remain undefeated because they get paid no matter what for every, you do a transaction and it makes no sense. You get paid to undo the transaction. Every time anyone says that to me, I'm like, why did I quit being a lawyer to be a journalist? I could have been getting paid on every one of these deals. Let's start at the very start. I jumped way into the weeds because it is true. You and I have covered Comcast together and around each other for so long. But let's just start at the start here. Comcast announced we're splitting itself up at a high level. What's happening here? So Comcast started splitting itself up earlier this year. It spun out what is now called Versant. That's their collection of cable networks that no one wants. And they split that off. And that was pure financial engineering. That was, hey, maybe if we get rid of this thing, this declining asset, Wall Street will value us more because their stock really has been sort of mired for many, many years. That did not move the stock. Cut to last week. They announced, okay, we'll split ourselves up even more. We are now going to be what we were before we bought NBC Universal. We're going to be a Comcast, the company that sells you broadband connections to your home and now some other stuff as well. That'll be one company. There'll be another company that is NBC Universal, which is NBC, the broadcast network, Bravo, the cable network for some reason, Peacock, the streaming network, the Universal Studios theme park business, big business and the actual film and TV studio owned by Universal. So those are big assets and they're all entertainment. And for years and years and years, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts would get asked by all sorts of folks, why do you own a media company and a infrastructure company? And he would have some answer that didn't really make sense. And the real answer is now, which is actually, we shouldn't have those two companies combined. They should be separate companies. Let's rewind just a little bit. Comcast buying NBC universal was a big deal at the time. And a lot of people made the argument that Comcast NBC was the only company of Let's talk about Versant for one second. That was the first thing to split off. You can see that they were just trying to cut costs there, maybe most definitively in the rebranding of MSNow, upon which they spent approximately zero dollars. Like the graphics packages from that is straight out of Microsoft Paint. Like zero effort was put towards rebranding MSNow. This thing is just going to be... I will take your word for it, because I cannot tell you I'm familiar with the graphics package of MSNow. See, this is the reason they didn't spend any money on it. CNBC did a little bit better. They kept the NBC in the name, because that's a household brand. That might be the biggest piece of that puzzle, is that CNBC is still doing well. What is the future of Versant? If all the cable channels that were distributed on Comcast network are declining, all of Paramount's cable channels are declining, it feels like that company has only one direction to go in, unless it radically reconfigures itself for the internet. That's what it seems like to me and anyone else from the outside. They go, if you thought this stuff was valuable, you would have kept it. Comcast has two responses to that. One is, hey, if we really thought this was a piece of shit, we would have loaded it up with a bunch of debt, like AT&T did with Warner Brothers, which then prevented Warner Brothers from ever doing anything else after that. And we have not done that. That is true. If they really wanted to like, really just make that a garbage disposal of a company, they could have done that. And then I had Mark Lazarus, the CEO of Versant, on. He is aware that his cable assets are declining, and his goal is to build them up with something else, to take things that are declining, but they still throw off a lot of money. Throw off less money each year, but the idea is, while that stuff is still making money, can we go and find other things that will generate more revenue for us? You and I have been covering Comcast forever. The main thing I've done forever is watch old media companies try to struggle with new technology. And even when they can see the future, because some of them can't see the future, but eventually they all can sort of see the future. Okay, we know the future is over there. The existing business we have is over here. We have to keep running that business or we can't get to the new thing. And they usually get screwed. They usually can't figure out how to go to the new place while staying in the old place because that would require some kind of time travel, right? Or a foot in each canoe is the easier metaphor. So that is what Versant is trying to do. We have this existing declining but profitable business. What can we turn that into? That's the pitch. We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted, but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in so the work is production ready from day one. Agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections. Then you review and publish what goes live. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams, and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. 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You could take rough notes like you normally would while Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then after you wrap up, it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes. Granola also works through your device's audio, integrating seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. It's your standard meeting setup, but enhanced. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally for free for three months. Just head to granola.ai slash decoder. That's granola.ai slash decoder to get your time back. Get three free months at granola.ai slash decoder. We're back with Business Insider's Peter Kafka discussing the unbundling of Comcast. The reason I ask that is usually a foot in each canoe is great, but you've got to turn down the money from the old canoe in order to go invest in the new money that you might make on the new platforms. Versant makes a lot of money because people have cable packages and they get paid for CNBC and MSNBC and whatever else, regardless of whether people watch it. This is maybe the greatest business model in history, right? We're just doing the podcast for each other at this point. Listeners should know that Peter and I share a lot of history covering these companies, if it's not obvious by now. This is the greatest business model in history. You get paid no matter what, just because people subscribe to a subscription bundle of cable channels. That business is not just in decline for Versant. It's in decline overall. You can see it because Comcast pay TV business is essentially in free fall. This is what's called cord cutting, and it is just happening every single month at massive rates. I think there are maybe 50% of their peak in 2008. They're like under 10 million pay TV subs. There's a lot of reporting that says YouTube TV is now bigger, which is wild considering how expensive YouTube TV is. If YouTube TV is not bigger now, it will be in a year or two. It will be the biggest pay TV company in America. Is there any way out of that beyond just cutting bait? Because it feels like Comcast splitting off its access division, its broadband and pay TV division, is a sign that that business is going away somehow or getting smaller somehow. Then Versant is tied to the economics of the pay TV business, unless it can reinvent itself. All the cable channels are tied to the economics of the pay TV business. Yeah, so we're talking about Versant or we're talking about Comcast, the broadband company. Well, I'm focused on the fact that this one company that has sort of intertwined economics is splitting itself into three, and the economics are still intertwined, and I don't see how the pay TV business ever recovers. And if the pay TV business never recovers, the cable business at Versant can't ever recover. And so everyone has to pivot away from their core businesses. Yeah, Versant needs to be in a... Versant can't be in the were you buying a package of MSNow and CNBC and the Golf Channel from us in five years, right? They know that. I mean, they might still have a segment of that, just like AOL still had a dial-up business for years. When I worked at AOL, it was like a dirty secret that people, old ladies, were still paying for dial-up. So that's like an interesting, you know, business school case study, right? How do you... You know this thing is happening. What can you do? How can you extract value out of it? Will this thing be a standalone company for X number of years? Or will it then get combined to something else? Will some version of bending spoons buy it for the digital glue factory that is bending spoons? The Comcast part of it is pretty interesting because for several years now, the Comcast argument has been, we're not really a cable TV company anymore. In fact, we don't actually care if you buy cable TV from us. We're happy to sell it to you, but we really... All we want is for you to buy our broadband. And that is an awesome business. It is super high margin. We have... They won't ever use these words. either a monopoly or a duopoly in almost every market we're in. If you want the internet, you're getting it from us. And after that, we don't care what you do. And that looked like an awesome business. And there was a point in which they formally crossed over and had more broadband subscribers than they had video subscribers. And that was a big moment. Like, they're It was inevitable that you and I would have this conversation. You thought this was boring when I was obsessed with it in like 2011. It was funny. We did a seven-part, eight-part narrative podcast about Netflix for the Vox Media Podcast Network several years ago. And I was like, oh, I've been following this company forever, and I know the beats of it, and I know what's important. And we're definitely going to spend one episode talking about Netflix's efforts to sort of... Netflix's huge fight with Comcast, the one you brought up at the beginning, and how crucial it was for them to figure out how to move bits around the internet more effectively and who was going to control how those bits were gated, etc. And this is nerdy stuff, but it was core to the company. And I would tell my colleagues about this, and they all just gave me a blank look. And no matter how many times I tried to retell the story, they gave me a blank look. My point is, no one in my world wants to hear about Comcast fighting Netflix over the future of the internet. But it was a big, big deal, like you referenced, what, 2010 to 2015. It was like a five-year, and they were angry. They were at each other. Now they're business partners. But it seemed at the time that this was an existential problem for both of them. Who was going to control those pipes? Was there going to be a toll booth for the data that moved through those pipes? And the answer is, well, all right, so this does interest me. Here we go. This is, if you're listening to this, this has been Peter and I debating whether or not this is important or interesting for over a decade. So here's my argument for why it's important and interesting. If you're a decoder listener, you had to know this was coming. The fight was whether Comcast and the other internet providers could turn internet access into cable TV, whether they could recapitulate that business model, which we have both agreed is the greatest business model in the history of the world. AT&T tried to do it. Comcast tried to do it. Literally every ISP tried to do it. AOL maybe did it the best, and that's why they bought Time Warner. You bought access from AOL over a phone line. You opened the AOL app, and it showed you content. And the idea that they could put economics around that content and preference their own was the heart of AOL's entire purchase of Time Warner. Failed disastrously, I think we should note. But that was their argument. The argument for Comcast, AT&T, whoever else, to buy content and put it on their pipes was that they would charge everyone else to reach you, the consumer, and give you their stuff for free. And then the economics of their stuff would increase in some way. Or, in the most hopeful scenario, you would pick Comcast as your ISP because they had NBC, and they would keep NBC away from Verizon, or make NBC so expensive to access on Verizon that when the Olympics came around, it was cheaper for you to switch to Comcast than to pay their rates on Verizon. Or maybe more simply, they would just say, Netflix, you have this great service. It only works if people can get it on the internet. So you're just going to pay us a little, a little, a little fig for each connection. Yeah, and I would get passed on to the consumers. Yes, yes. Right, and so your rates as a customer of the internet would vary in spectacular ways depending on who your ISP was. And this was the fear. And I think the reason in 2010, 2011, it was an outrageous fear was that all of the internet platform startups realized that this was an existential threat to them. That's why Alexis Ohanian, who was the co-founder of Reddit, styled himself as the mayor of the internet and toured around the country on a bus being like, we have to have net neutrality because if they can throttle Reddit, I won't be able to pay that big. And it's the ISPs will determine what platforms succeed or fail. The moment I'm talking about when Reed Hastings said to you, we're big enough so that net neutrality doesn't matter anymore. One, and I think we all saw that it was over, but the reason I'm saying I knew then it was over for the ISPs and their media dreams was that consumers had picked Netflix and they would not tolerate the fee. So Netflix had enough leverage to say, no, our content is going to be on your networks whether or not you want it to be. And everyone else could just piggyback on Netflix and say, nope, YouTube has the same arrangement. If you have a AT&T network or a Comcast network, you charge your customers a fee and then you charge them more to access the things they want. That won't work. And this was the argument. It's the argument from all the FCC people. It's the argument from the Verizon executives who have been on the show. Ultimately came to nothing because the market demanded net neutrality. If you had asked a telco person about this during this entire time and they go, point out one time where this has happened, where we have successfully extorted someone into paying us more for access to our pipes. I think honestly, this was much more of a fight with the cable networks who wanted distribution. This is Bloomberg versus Comcast. Is a long, was a long, long running fight about whether, what kind of carriage Bloomberg could get on Comcast owned pipes. And I think, you know, for the remaining companies that still have cable TV networks, that still is a big deal, right? Your cable TV network has zero utility if you can't get it over someone's, if you can't deliver it to someone's TV. And that was a real problem. Although I was saying that none of that matters now because you can just distribute it via a digital service provider. But yeah, that was, that was, I think net neutrality mattered much more to the cable TV nets than it ever did to an internet company. Well, I think the internet companies all needed it to matter. They needed it to not be there so they could preference their own content. This is the argument that I'm making. If Comcast had a Peacock and watching Peacock was free and watching Netflix incurred some additional charge, I think we all understand how Comcast customers would probably watch more Peacock today than they do. But they weren't allowed to do this. First, because they all insist the market wouldn't let them. But secondly, maybe more importantly, that big complicated Comcast NBCU merger agreement, the regulator said, you can't do that for some long period of time. So they weren't allowed to achieve their vision. AT&T tried this in weird ways. There was a time when HBO Max didn't hit the data cap for AT&T subscribers and it got real spiky when I asked them about it. And then they turned it off because they realized that they didn't want that fight and it didn't matter because no one was using their AT&T phones to watch HBO Max anyway. There's something here where it could have played out differently, right? Where the self-preferencing of the networks for their own content might have actually worked. I look back and I look at every attempt from every company to make you watch something you didn't want to watch as opposed to pay for something you don't want to pay for. That's different. That's the cable bundle. We agree. Best business model ever. But get you to watch the thing that you don't want to watch and the service you didn't want to watch. The internet says that doesn't work. What you can do is say, here's some free shit with ads. It's not great, but it's free and people will watch it. YouTube is that model. But so is, what is the Roku channel? Is it Howdy? No, actually there's the Roku channel, which is free and it's just on your Roku TVs. And it has a lot of shit, but it's free. And that is now a meaningfully sized internet company. You can... Internet... reasonably sized internet video provider. So that can work. But you can't say, you must watch Netflix or we're going to make Netflix $5 cheaper and thus you will have to pay for it as compared to Peacock. We haven't ever seen that play out. And it's dumb to get overly optimistic and cheery about the internet in 2026. But we have seen that at least that, you know, one thing that the overlords have not been able to pull off is to get us to consume things, get us to pay for video we don't want to pay for. That's the one little bit of freedom we still have. They're all moving to ad-supported one way or another. Actually, you brought up Roku. The question I have is where does the vertical integration begin and end? Right. Fox is buying Roku to get access to its distribution and its customers and all of those TVs. That kind of vertical integration seems alive and well. Right. Netflix was in the market to buy Warner. Paramount might still be in the market to buy NBCU. NBCU might be in the market to buy some other stuff. That kind of integration seems like it's going to keep happening. But you get to the actual pipe, the actual internet connection, whether that's wired or wireless. And that's the one that doesn't ever seem to work. Why do you think there's a big difference there? I don't know is the short answer. And also, I'm pretty interested to see what happens with Roku and Fox because Roku and Fox, in a lot of ways, is another one of these content distribution plays that we have seen not work for more than 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. Right. Going back to AOL, Time Warner. You could argue that this there's just less levered onto this. It's a smaller deal. There's no grand proclamations that this is going to connect everyone to everything. This is for a Even Ring 1 and or Even Clip when you add them to your Even G2 order. 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Is that the company you want to be at? I mean, everyone I talked to at Versant has a good face, has a good game face, that this is, you know, we can invest in our own future and we don't have to worry about feeding the parent company. They all have the same hymn book. I don't know how much they believe it. I think you can make a pretty strong case that NBCU as a standalone company is interesting. Again, either as a standalone company or as an asset to be acquired by somebody else. You can't replicate that theme park business. Can't really understate how big a deal that is, especially in a world where AI is going to be their future and people are going to want tactile experiences. Like that is a great thing to own. Studio is super valuable. Peacock has not really worked for them and they've been reluctant to sort of throw the same kind of money that their rivals have, so I don't know what becomes of that. And the broadcast, man. Broadcast is hot again. What you keep hearing from the Paramount folks is that, yes, they bought all those cable TV assets. They know that's not their future either. They're going to try to milk money out of them just like Versant is. But they really think that broadcast TV is a special thing. I think that mostly comes down to broadcast TV is a thing you can show football on and that's super valuable. But they seem to think that is a very valuable asset. And again, there are only a handful of broadcast TV networks. They own one of them. One other way of putting it is there are only a handful of places where you can distribute NFL programming to all of America and they own one of them. So yeah, it's a thing. It's the sports piece that makes broadcast viable. NFL is the big one. It's the World Cup right now. And the idea that you need big free distribution of sports that you control seems ascendant. And really the NFL, right? Like, I mean, CBS and Fox in particular kind of only exist, or their primary reason to exist is to distribute football. Like Fox basically doesn't have any other programming. They have some reality shows and then they have football. That's what they do now. It's funny. I was watching the World Cup on Fox One yesterday, which is their big streaming app. They're very proud of their streaming platform. You have to either pay for it or log into it with a cable provider. And I was watching it. I did what I think everyone does. I opened TikTok on my phone to be distracted from the thing I was ostensibly watching. And the first thing I got was an official Fox TikTok account that was streaming the same game for free. And I thought, the economics of this make no sense to me, right? You need to reach the young consumer on this platform for free. And who knows how you're monetizing this? Or you're going to make the old people pay to watch it on TVs and your app, which they don't know how to download. And they have to go through some auth flow that is horrible. How does any of that work? Does that ever get reconciled? The kids are all going to watch TikTok for free. A big thesis on the show is we all have to reckon with the fact that there's an army of teenagers making content for free on Instagram and TikTok every single day. And every media business has to just ignore it. Just ignore the elephant in the room that destroys their cost structure. That's well put. I don't know that they have an answer. Every time I hear them talk about it, it's the wrong answer. It is things like, well, if we make this in a format that works for phones, then people would pay for it, right? I mean, Quibi. But a million other things like that, right? And it's, no, it's not that no one can watch something on their phone. It's that no one wants to pay for the stuff that you have on their phone. They don't want to pay for most things. They can get most things for free. But that is why sports remains sports. Also, Fox paid almost nothing. They paid like $500 million for the World Cup deal of the century for them, especially with the extra water breaks. But that sports is the one thing that is immune to this. But even that's not really true because young people don't watch sports. Find a Zoomer and ask them to sit and watch a two-hour game or a three-hour football game. No fucking way. So this is one of those things where we keep saying, the economics for all of this is not sustainable. It has to collapse. It has to have a reset. Year after year, we say this, and year after year, the rights for sports go up and up and up. Because it's the only thing that can consistently draw an audience, right? There's no other thing. One day, it has to snap. One day, it will reach a point where an NBC or an ABC or a Paramount, one of them will cry uncle and say, we can't do this. I mean, you already saw Warner Brothers pass on basketball, which is a much, much smaller sport. And it'll be a big fucking deal when one of those companies bows out one way or the other. And that will be a giant, giant, giant shift. But we keep saying that, and it does not happen. My prediction, by the way, is that eventually YouTube just pays the money to have it all. They already pay for Sunday Ticket. They're already the big NFL partner. At some point, they're just going to be like, look, it's all on YouTube. The whole thing. We're just going to take the whole thing. And then the NFL will have to reckon with the fact that there's nothing next to YouTube that can compete the way that CBS can compete with, Fox can compete with ABC. Yeah, I mean, the NFL is obviously religion and politics all wrapped up in one. And so I don't know how you ever get to a place where the United States government allows all of football to be only in one place. I think they want it distributed. So we'll see. There's already some noise about this. This is a different episode, but the Green Bay Packers at the center of this noise, the economics of the Green Bay Packers are tied up in sports rights in the way that you're talking about. Could NBCU be a buyer? Could they buy a bunch of other stuff that's available? That's what they're saying. Could they get bigger? That is their argument, is we are a buyer, not a seller. That is their on-the-record, this is what we want to do. And so you'd buy a bunch of studios and content and put it on Peacock? I don't know what you'd buy. I don't really know what you'd buy. There's a bunch of cable networks available AT&T was the guy pushing for this for the AT&T Warner Brothers Discovery deal when he was COO, and then he became CEO and sold Warner Brothers and said, oh, that was never my deal to begin with, and everyone decided that that was a polite fiction they would live with. It's a great world. If you and I spend $83 billion in the wrong way, we have real consequences, and other people get raises. Well, Peter, I suspect over the next year or so, as all of these splits happen across all these companies, you and I will be talking to each other many more times, because none of this seems settled, and it also seems like there's a lot of money that's going to fly around without a thesis. And it's our job to figure out what the story actually is. It's great fun to write about, right? I mean, literally the last year or so, I was saying, I'm kind of getting tired of this beat. I feel like I spent years talking about what would happen if the internet finally showed up, and if the internet finally became TV, what would happen. And I'm like, well, it did become TV, and it's really fucking boring. It's just Peacock and some streaming services. It's not fun to write about. And it feels like it is now splitting again, and that is extra fun for us to cover. Yeah, the bundling part of the cycle is pretty boring. The unbundling cycle seems wild. There's a lot more characters. They're literally having to compete more. And somewhere in there, there's Elon Musk saying he will fund a rocket company with telecom margins, which, who knows, man. Peter, this is wonderful. We'll have to have you back soon. Thanks for being on. Thanks, Neil. I'd like to thank Peter for taking the time out of his show to come on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. To let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at the verge dot com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or Blue Sky. We're on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're also at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. I'm in Washington and we make Snap Judgment right here in the Bay. You can hear it in every story we tell, but Snap can't stay put. Tijuana racetrack, the world's largest women's prison, the edge of deep space. The person next to you might seem ordinary until you get close. Snap gets close. Snap Judgment from KQED. 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