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We're halfway through August and summer is rapidly coming to a close. But this year, something about the season was different. It's the first year in over 100 years that there hasn't been a definitive song of the summer.

Is the absence of a “2025 song of the summer” just a quirk of this year’s charts or a symptom of a music culture permanently fractured by personalization, speed, and saturation. I called up Anthony Fantano to help me answer this question.

We dive deep into what makes a good song of the summer, how the concept emerged in culture, why we don't have one this year, and what a post song of the summer society might look like.

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A few days ago, 18 year old social media star Lil Tay made over $1 million by launching an OnlyFans shortly after her 18th birthday. The launch generated a massive backlash online, people on the left and the right are calling for OnlyFans to be banned and for the criminalization of porn.

On today's free speech Friday Kat Tenbarge and I break down Lil Tay's rise, what actually went down with her OF launch, and how this viral moment is already being weaponized by both influential Democrat and far right accounts to silence speech, dismantle civil liberties and push dangerous censorship laws that would lead to even more exploitation of women and children.

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Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The tool is embedded in more and more areas of daily life and new research shows that it's also transforming how we write and even speak.

A group of researchers analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes from before and after ChatGPT’s release to track the use of ChatGPT-affiliated words like "delve" and "examine."

All of this has major implications. Adam Aleksic is an etymologist who studies the way the internet is reshaping language. His new book Algospeak tackles all of this. He joins me to discuss how ChatGPT and AI is transforming the way we talk, what words we use, and how we communicate.

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