Decoder with Nilay Patel

Luis von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. There are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI, and we talk about all that — but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning, generally. Duolingo is a global product, and there are a lot of tech tensions there, dealing with different user needs worldwide. We talk about it all in a pretty direct way... including all those unhinged things the owl does on social media.

Links: 

• Duolingo Introduces AI-Powered Innovations at Duocon 2024 (Duolingo)
• Video Call with Lily (Duolingo / YouTube)
• AI Boosts Duolingo As Company Posts First Profit (Nasdaq)
• Foreign Language Training (US State Department)
• Exploring My Villain Origin Story (Duolingo / TikTok)
• Duolingo cuts workers as it relies more on AI (The Washington Post)
• Why Silicon Valley Is Talking About Founder Mode (The New York Times)
• Duolingo's Math and Music lessons finally hit Android a year after iOS (Android Police)
• Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on taking it back to basics (Decoder / The Verge)
• How Duolingo is using its 'unhinged content' with Duo the Owl (Digiday)
• How we turned Duo's butt into a viral Super Bowl commercial (Duolingo)
• A Duolingo employee has apologised for joking about Amber Heard (The Tab) 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24031882

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’m talking with my good friend David Pierce, Vergecast co-host and The Verge’s editor-at-large, about something he spends an ungodly amount of time thinking and writing about: software.

Scores of new workplace apps are cropping with clever metaphors to try to make us work differently. Sometimes that works… and sometimes it really, really doesn’t. And it feels like the addition of AI to the mix will accelerate the pace of experimentation here in pretty radical ways.

Links: 

• Why software is eating the world | Wall Street Journal (2011)
• Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on why email makes sense for Intuit | The Verge
• Why would anyone make a website in 2023? | The Verge
• Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami isn’t worried AI will kill the web | The Verge
• Figma CEO Dylan Field is optimistic about AI | The Verge
• We don’t sell saddles here | Stewart Butterfield (2014)
• The CEO of Zoom wants AI clones in meetings | The Verge
• Dropbox CEO Drew Houston wants you to embrace AI | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rabbit’s adorable R1 gadget launched with a lot of hype, but early reviews of the device were universally bad. Now, a core feature, its long-promised LAM Playground has arrived. I had a lot of big questions for CEO Jesse Lyu about how it all works — not just technologically, but if his plans are sustainable from a business and legal perspective. 

Links: 

• Rabbit R1 review: an unfinished, unhelpful AI gadget | The Verge
• Loopholes aren’t a technology | Buzzfeed News (2012)
• I tested Rabbit R1's next generation LAM — and it tried to gaslight me | Tom’s Hardware
• I tried Rabbit's LAM Playground, and I'm still disappointed | Android Authority
• Rabbit's AI bot will try to help you do anything (keyword is 'try') | Fast Company
• Rabbit’s web-based ‘large action model’ agent arrives on R1 October 1 | TechCrunch
• Rabbit R1 founder defends “unfinished” AI gadget | City AM
• AI hardware is in its flip-phone phase | Fast Company
• The iPhone 16 will ship as a work in progress | The Verge
• Humane AI Pin review: Not even close | The Verge
• Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24024222

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg journalist and author of the new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. If you don’t know Blizzard, you do know its games — the studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch has achieved legendary status over three decades. At the same time, the company has become emblematic of many of gaming’s biggest failings.

Jason’s book is out on October 8th, and it’s an incredible, detailed accounting of how Blizzard started, grew into a hitmaker and, eventually, became a victim of its own mismanagement. Oh, and there are a series of chaotic acquisitions along the way, culminating in Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard last year. In this episode, Jason and I get into all of this and more. 

Links: 

• Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment | Hachette 
• How Blizzard’s canceled MMO Titan fell apart | Polygon
• Blizzard was built on crunch, co-founder says, but it’s ‘not sustainable’ | Polygon
• Inside Activision and Blizzard’s corporate warcraft | Bloomberg
• Blizzard cofounder’s new company Dreamhaven aims to recreate old magic | Bloomberg
• Activision Blizzard’s rot goes all the way to the CEO, alleges report | The Verge
• Activision Blizzard’s workplace problems spurred $75 billion microsoft Deal | WSJ
• California settles Activision Blizzard gender discrimination lawsuit | The Verge
• Microsoft completes Activision Blizzard acquisition | The Verge
• Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees | The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Matt Strauss is the Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer at NBC Universal. That’s a big fancy title that means he’s not only in charge of Peacock but also every other streaming video offering the company has worldwide. So you can bet Matt and I got into what that structure even looks like, and how it all operates under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition as its traditional cable TV business continues to fade. There’s a lot in this one – tech, media, sports, and culture, all at once. It’s quite a ride.

Links: 

• Comcast's new DVR ditches the hard drive, stores your recordings in the cloud (The Verge, 2013)
• Comcast and Charter Lost Another 269,000 Broadband Customers Last Quarter (The Motley Fool)
• It's official, people aren't watching TV as much as they used to (The Verge)
• The future of TV is up in the air (The Verge)
• Peacock Quarterly Loss Narrows to $348M as Subscribers Drop to 33M (THR)
• OTA and free online video drives higher US TV-video viewing hours (S&P Global)
• Streaming was part of the future — now it’s the only future (The Verge)
• US pay-TV losses reach a nadir (Light Reading)
• The 2024 Olympics were a big win for TV of all kinds (The Verge)
• Court blocks Disney-Fox-WBD sports streaming bundle (The Verge)
• An AI version of Al Michaels will deliver Olympic recaps on Peacock  (The Verge)

Transcript: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. This year, before his interview with Mark, Alex got to try a new pair of experimental AR glasses the company is calling Orion. 

Alex talked to Mark about a whole lot more, including why the company is investing so heavily in AR, why he's shifted away from politics, Mark's thoughts on the link between teen mental health and social media, and why the Meta chief executive is done apologizing for corporate scandals like Cambridge Analytica that he feels were overblown and misrepresented.  

Links:

• Hands-on with Orion, Meta’s first pair of AR glasses | The Verge
• The biggest news from Meta Connect 2024 | The Verge
• Mark Zuckerberg: publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI | The Verge
• Meta extends its Ray-Ban smart glasses deal beyond 2030 | The Verge
• The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses actually make the future look cool | The Verge
• Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race | The Verge
• Instagram is putting every teen into more private and restrictive new account | The Verge
• Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss | The Verge
• Facebook puts news on the back burner | The Verge
• Meta is losing a billion dollars on VR and AR every single month | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24017522

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt; our editor is Callie Wright. This episode was additionally produced by Brett Putman and Vjeran Pavic. Our supervising producer is Liam James. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, a relatively new software maker that develops the Arc browser. The company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages, which puts it right in the middle of a contentious debate in the tech industry around paying web creators for their work. 

We’ve been talking about these topics pretty much nonstop for last year here on Decoder. So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explore why he built Arc, what he hopes it will accomplish, and what might happen to browsers, search engines, and the web itself as these trends evolve. 

Links: 

• Researcher reveals ‘catastrophic’ security flaw in the Arc browser | The Verge
• The Arc browser is the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for | The Verge
• Arc’s mobile browser is here — and it’s not really a web browser at all | The Verge
• Arc is getting better bookmarks and search results, all thanks to AI | The Verge
• Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new | The Verge
• Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case | The Verge
• Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be Safari’s default search engine | The Verge
• One startup's quest to take on Chrome and reinvent the web browser | Protocol
• Scenes from a dying web | Platformer
• Perplexity’s grand theft AI | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24011410

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google’s in the middle of its antitrust case in just as many months, after it lost a landmark trial in August over anticompetitive search practices. This time around, the DOJ is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market. 

Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner has been on the ground at the courthouse to hear testimony from news publishers, advertising experts, and Google executives to make sense of it — and, ultimately, to see whether a federal judge hands the company another antitrust defeat. 

Links: 

• Google and DOJ return for round two of their antitrust fight | The Verge
• Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case | The Verge
• In US v. Google, YouTube’s CEO defends the Google way The Verge
• Google and the DOJ’s ad tech fight is all about control | The Verge
• How Google altered a deal with publishers who couldn’t say no | The Verge
• Google dominates online ads, says antitrust trial witness, but publishers are feeling ‘stuck’ | The Verge
• US considers a rare antitrust move: breaking up Google | Bloomberg
• This deal helped turn Google into an ad powerhouse. Is that a problem? | NYT

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Roy Jakobs. He’s the CEO of Royal Philips, which makes medical devices ranging from MRI machines to ventilators. Philips has a long history —- the company began in the late 19th century as a lightbulb manufacturer, and over the past century it’s grown and shrunk in various ways. Basically, while every other company has been trying to get bigger, Philips has been paring itself down to a tight focus on healthcare, and Roy and I talked about why that market is worth the focus. 

Roy and I also talked about an ongoing controversy at Philips that he had a part in: In 2021, after years of consumer complaints, Philips was made to recall millions of its breathing machines. Those devices were eventually tied to more than 500 deaths. That’s a pretty big decision, with massive life-or-death consequences, and you’ll hear us talk about it in detail.

Links: 

• Problems reported with recalled Philips ventilators, BiPAP & CPAP machines | FDA
• FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines | CBS News
• Philips kept complaints about dangerous breathing machines secret | ProPublica
• Top Philips executive approved sale of defective breathing machines | ProPublica
• Philips reaches final pact with DOJ, FDA on ventilator recall | WSJ
• Philips suspends U.S. sales of breathing machines after recall | NYT
• CPAP maker reaches $479 million settlement on breathing device defects | NYT
• Philips exits shrinking home entertainment business | Reuters
• Original TSMC investor Philips sells off final shares | PC World
• Philips unveils new AI-powered cardiovascular ultrasound | Mass Device

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24006874

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt could completely reset our cultural relationship to photography. But one argument keeps cropping up in response. You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s when people say “it’s just like Photoshop,” with “Photoshop” standing in for the concept of image editing generally. 

So today, we’re trying to understand exactly what it means, and why our new world of AI image tools is different — and yes, in some cases the same. Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed recently dove into this for us, and I asked her to join me in going through the debate and the arguments one by one to help figure it out.

Links: 

• You’re here because you said AI image editing was just like Photoshop | The Verge
• No one’s ready for this | The Verge
• The AI photo editing era is here, and it’s every person for themselves | The Verge
• Google’s AI ‘Reimagine’ tool helped us add disasters and corpses to photos | The Verge
• X’s new AI image generator will make Taylor Swift in lingerie and Kamala Harris with a gun | The Verge
• Grok will make gory images — just tell it you're a cop. | The Verge
• Leica launches first camera with Content Credentials | Content Authenticity Initiative
• You can use AI to get rid of Samsung’s AI watermark | The Verge
• Spurred by teen girls, states move to nan deepfake nudes | NYT
• Florida teens arrested for creating ‘deepfake’ AI nude images of classmates | The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the industry. Anthropic’s main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT. 

Mike has a fascinating resume: he was the cofounder of Instagram, and then started AI-powered newsreader Artifact. I was a fan of Artifact, so I wanted to know more about the decision to shut it down as well as the decision to sell it to Yahoo. And then I wanted to know why Mike decided to join Anthropic and work in AI — an industry with a lot of investment, but very few consumer products to justify it. What’s this all for? 

Links: 

• Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger is Anthropic’s new chief product officer | The Verge
• Instagram’s co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app | The Verge
• Yahoo resurrects Artifact inside a new AI-powered News app | The Verge
• Authors sue Anthropic for training AI using pirated books | The Verge
• The text file that runs the internet | The Verge
• Anthropic’s crawler is ignoring websites’ anti-AI scraping policies | The Verge
• Golden Gate Claude | Anthropic
• Inside the white-hot center of AI doomerism | New York Times
• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, on the paradoxes of AI safety | Hard Fork
• No one’s ready for this | The Verge
• OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine | The Verge
• Amazon-backed Anthropic rolls out Claude AI for big business | CNBC

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24001603

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isn’t static, parts of it sometimes just… vanish.

But it’s not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. In 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, joins Decoder this week to explain both why and how the organization tries to keep the web from disappearing.

Links: 

• When Online Content Disappears | Pew Research
• Game Informer is shutting down | The Verge
• When Media Outlets Shutter, Why Are the Websites Wiped, Too? Slate
• MTV News lives on in the Internet Archive | The Verge
• The video game industry is mourning the loss of Game Informer | The Verge
• Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future | Decoder
• How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral | Decoder
• The Internet Archive is defending its digital library in court today | The Verge
• The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend ebooks | The Verge
• The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending | The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday. In the meantime we thought we’d re-share an explainer that’s taken on a whole new relevance in the last couple weeks, about deepfakes and misinformation.

In February, I talked with Verge policy editor Adi Robertson how the generative AI boom might start fueling a wave of election-related misinformation, especially deepfakes and manipulated media. It’s not been quite an apocalyptic AI free-for-all out there. But the election itself took some really unexpected turns in these last couple of months. Now we’re heading into the big, noisy home stretch, and use of AI is starting to get really weird — and much more troublesome. 

Links: 

• The AI-generated hell of the 2024 election | The Verge
• AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election | Decoder
• Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy | The Verge
• Donald Trump posts a fake AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement | The Verge
• X’s Grok now points to government site after misinformation warnings | The Verge
• Political ads could require AI-generated content disclosures soon | The Verge
• The Copyright Office calls for a new federal law regulating deepfakes | The Verge
• How AI companies are reckoning with elections | The Verge
• The lame AI meme election | Axios
• Deepfakes' parody loophole | Axios

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday, and I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule. 

But while we’re out, we’d like to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season, for a deep dive into Disney. Can it be a tech company? It’s the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney Plus — and it also tells us where it needs to go in the future to compete with Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. 

Links: 

• Disney Is a Tech Company? | Vulture
• Why Disney plussed itself | Vulture
• Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander | Decoder
• The clock is ticking on Disney’s streaming strategy | Decoder
• The Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is now available | The Verge
• Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus | The Verge
• How baseball's tech team built the future of television | The Verge
• The year Netflix ended the streaming wars | The Ringer

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Onion is a comedy institution — and like everything else in media, it went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. We could do an entire episode on the G/O Media calamity, but the short version is: A bunch of friends just managed to buy The Onion, and they're busy relaunching the website, going back to print, and, clearly, having a blast doing it. CEO Ben Collins and chief product officer Danielle Strle joined me to explain how that even works in 2024.

Links: 

• The Onion sold by G/O Media | The New York Times
• Sam Reich on revamping the game show - and Dropout’s success | NPR
• Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse | Decoder
• Craig Silverman: Digital advertising’s structure has been weaponized | Digiday
• US Warns a Gaza Ceasefire Would Only Benefit Humanity | The Onion
• The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies are Free | Current Affairs
• A newsroom expands and The Onion is out again on paper | Washington Post
• Report: Nuclear War Sounds Fucking Amazing Right Now | The Onion
• Google defends AI search results after they told us to put glue on pizza | The Verge
• Jury awards nearly $1B to Sandy Hook families in Alex Jones defamation case | CNN
• ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens | The Onion

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23989633

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I’m talking with Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. GitHub is the platform for managing code – but since 2018, it’s also been owned by Microsoft. We talk a lot about how independent GitHub really is inside of Microsoft — especially now that Microsoft is all-in on AI, and Gitbhub Copilot is one of the biggest AI product success stories that exists right now. But his perspective on AI is pretty refreshing: It’s clear there’s still a long way to go.

Links: 

• Original GitHub landing page | Wayback Machine
• Introducing Entitlements | GitHub Blog
• ashtom (Thomas Dohmke) | GitHub
• The developers suing over GitHub Copilot got dealt a major blow in court | The Verge
• GitHub Copilot can now help start a project with AI | The Verge
• GitHub users can mess around with different AI models | The Verge
• GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot will help you write code for $10 a month | The Verge
• Google DeepMind co-founder joins Microsoft as CEO of its new AI division | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23986019

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. At a high level, KOSPA could radically change how tech platforms handle speech in an effort to try and make the internet safer for minors. 

It’s a controversial bill, with a lot going on. To break it all down, I invited on Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner, who’s been covering these bills for months now, to explain what’s happening, what these bills actually do, and what the path forward for this legislation looks like.

Links: 

• Senate passes the Kids Online Safety Act | The Verge
• The teens lobbying against the Kids Online Safety Act | The Verge
• How the Kids Online Safety Act was dragged into a political war | NYT
• House Republicans won’t bring up KOSA in its current form | Punchbowl News
• Why a landmark kids online safety bill is still deeply divisive | NBC News
• Why Sen. Schatz thinks child safety bills can trump the First Amendment | Decoder
• Child safety bills are reshaping the internet for everyone | The Verge
• Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block | The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda, and I will just tell you right away, we get all the way to people marrying their AI companions, so get ready. It’s a ride.

Replika’s basic pitch is pretty simple: what if you had an AI friend? The company offers avatars you can curate to your liking that pretend to be human, so they can be your friend, your therapist, or even your date. That’s a lot for a private company running an iPhone app, and Eugenia and I talked a lot about the consequences of this idea and what it means for the future of human relationships. 

Links: 

• The AI boyfriend business is booming | Axios
• Speak, Memory | The Verge
• Your new AI Friend is almost ready to meet you | Verge
• What happens when sexting chatbots dump their human lovers | Bloomberg
• AI chatbot company Replika restores erotic roleplay for some users — Reuters
• Replika’s New AI App Is Like Tinder but With Sexy Chatbots — Gizmodo
• Replika’s new AI therapy app tries to bring you to a zen island — The Verge
• Replika CEO: AI chatbots aren’t just for lonely men | Fortune
• Gaze Into the Dystopian Hell of Bots Dating Bots | Slate

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23980789

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. This is Jonathan’s second time on the show, and it’s a bit of an emergency podcast situation. On Monday, a federal court issued a monumental decision in the DOJ’s case against Google, holding that Google Search and the text ads in search are monopolies. 

The court hasn’t decided on the penalties for all this yet — that process is scheduled to start next month. But it’s the biggest antitrust win against a tech company since the Microsoft case from two decades ago. I wanted to know what Jonathan thought of the ruling, what it means for the law, and most importantly, what remedies he’s going to seek to try and restore competition in search. 

Links: 

• Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case | The Verge
• All the spiciest parts of the Google antitrust ruling | The Verge
• Now that Google is a monopolist, what’s next? | The Verge
• DOJ’s Kanter says the antitrust fight against Big Tech is just beginning | Decoder
• The DOJ Antitrust Division isn’t afraid to go to court | The Verge
• The US government is gearing up for an AI antitrust fight | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23979725

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, which owns a large portfolio of familiar travel brands: OpenTable, Kayak, and Priceline, as well as its largest subsidiary, Booking.com. This episode is pure Decoder bait all the way through — from Booking’s structure, to competition with hotels and airlines increasingly going direct to consumer, even to how European regulation affects competition with Google. Oh, and of course, how Booking is incorporating AI; Glenn has some fascinating thoughts there.

Glenn really got into it with me — there’s a lot going on in this space, and it’s interesting because there are so many players and so much competition across so many of the layers, even among Booking’s own subsidiaries. I think we probably could have gone twice as long. 

Links: 

• The oral history of travel’s greatest acquisition | Skift
• Long-term travel looks like a strong growth industry, says Booking’s Glenn Fogel | CNBC
• Ryanair wins screen-scraping case against Booking.com | Airways
• Aggregation Theory | Stratechery
• A Call for Embracing AI—But With a ‘Human Touch’ | Time
• Booking.com launches new AI Trip Planner | Booking
• Priceline releases new AI platform and ‘Penny’ chatbot | Skift

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23976178

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Amanda Rose Smith. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every time we talk about AI, we get one big piece of feedback that I really want to dive into: how the lightning-fast explosion of AI tools affects the climate. AI takes a lot of energy, and there’s a huge unanswered question as to whether using all that juice for AI is actually worth it, both practically and morally. 

It’s messy and complicated and there are a bunch of apparent contradictions along the way — so it’s perfect for Decoder. Verge senior science reporter Justine Calma joins me to see if we can untangle this knot.

Links: 

• This startup wants to capture carbon and help data centers cool down | The Verge
• Google’s carbon footprint balloons in its Gemini AI era | The Verge
• Taking a closer look at AI’s supposed energy apocalypse | Ars Technica
• AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle | WaPo
• AI Is already wreaking havoc on global power systems | Bloomberg
• What do Google’s AI answers cost the environment? | Scientific American
• AI is an energy hog | MIT Tech Review
• Microsoft’s AI obsession is jeopardizing its climate ambitions | The Verge
• The answer to AI’s energy needs could be blowing in the wind | The Verge
• AI already uses as much energy as a small country | Vox

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Callie Wright and Amanda Rose Smith. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Hanneke Faber, the CEO of Logitech. Hanneke’s still pretty fresh to the role: She joined the company last October, after former CEO Bracken Darrell left following the pandemic boom and subsequent economic slowdown that halted Logitech’s growth. Hanneke, who comes from Unilever and Procter & Gamble, is new to the world of consumer electronics. 

So we talked about the structural changes she’s already making at Logitech, and the changes she intends to make in the future. It sounds like some Logitech products, like its smart home doorbells and cameras, are not long for this world. You’ll also hear Hanneke talk about a concept called the “forever mouse” — a mouse you buy once and upgrade over time with new software features — features that of course might carry a subscription fee. Subscription mice! It’s a lot.

Links: 

• How Logitech bet big on work from home | Decoder
• Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell is leaving for another job | The Verge
• Webcams have become impossible to find, and prices are skyrocketing | The Verge
• Logitech appoints Hanneke Faber as new CEO | Reuters
• Logitech’s new low-profile keyboard fits Cherry MX keycaps | The Verge
• Logitech’s Meta Quest stylus helps artists work in 3D | The Verge
• Logitech targets faster growth via education, health and AI | Reuters
• Logitech wants you to press its new AI button | The Verge
• Logitech’s best gaming mouse just got better | The Verge
• Logitech’s articulating arm webcam launches on Indiegogo | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23970888

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Supreme Court has just taken on the entire idea of the US administrative state — and the Court is winning. Earlier this month, a conservative majority overturned a longstanding legal principle called Chevron deference. The implications are enormous for every possible kind of regulation — and net neutrality looks poised to be the first victim. Verge editor Sarah Jeong joins me to explain why.

Links: 

• Supreme Court overrules Chevron, kneecapping federal regulators | The Verge
• What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more | The Verge
• FCC votes to restore net neutrality | The Verge
• Reinstatement of net neutrality rules temporarily halted by appeals court | The Verge
• Clarence Thomas' 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel | ProPublica
• The Supreme Court's coming war with Joe Biden | Vox

Transcript: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe. RJ was on the show last September when we chatted at the Code Conference, but the past 10 months have seen a whirlwind of change throughout the car industry and at Rivian in particular. This year alone, the company unveiled five new models in its lineup and also just announced a $5 billion joint venture with Volkswagen. We got into all that and more. 

If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk to a lot of car CEOs on the show, but it’s rare to talk to a car company founder, and RJ was game to talk about basically anything — even extremely minor feature requests I pulled from the forums. It’s a fun one.

Links:

• Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe isn't scared of the Cybertruck | Decoder
• VW will invest up to $5 billion in Rivian as part of new EV joint venture | The Verge
• Rivian blazed a trail with its adventure EVs — can it stay on top? | The Verge
• Rivian R2 revealed: a $45,000 electric off-roader for the masses | The Verge
• Rivian surprises with R3 and R3X electric SUVs | The Verge
• Rivian puts its Georgia factory plans on pause | The Verge
• Rivian’s R1 vehicles are getting a gut overhaul | The Verge
• Rivian R1S review: king of the mountain | The Verge
• Rivian’s long, narrow road to profit | WSJ
• Tesla’s Share of U.S. Electric Car Market Falls Below 50% | NYT

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23965790

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week I’m talking to Matthew Ball, who was last on the show in 2022 to talk about his book “The Metaverse: How it Will Revolutionize Everything.” It’s 2024 and it’s safe to say that has not happened yet. But Matt’s still on the case — in fact he just released an almost complete update of the book, now with the much more sober title, “Building the Spatial Internet.”

Matt and I talked a lot about where the previous metaverse hype cycle landed us, and what there is to learn from these boom and bust waves. We talked about the Apple Vision Pro quite a bit; if you read or watched my review when it came out, you’ll know I think the Vision Pro is almost an end point for one set of technologies. I wanted to know if Matt felt the same and what needs to happen to make all of this more mainstream and accessible.

Links: 

• Fully revised and updated edition to the “The Metaverse” | W.W. Norton
• Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not | The Verge
• Apple’s Vision Pro: five months later | Vergecast
• Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball | Decoder
• Interviewing Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on the Metaverse, VR/AR, AI | Matthew Ball
• Interviewing Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and author Neal Stephenson | Matthew Ball
• An Interview with Matthew Ball about Vision Pro and the state of gaming | Stratechery
• Tim Sweeney explains how the metaverse might actually work | The Verge
• Fortnite is winning the metaverse | The Verge
• Is the Metaverse Just Marketing? | NYT

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s a cabinet-level position, where she works as the chief science and tech advisor to President Biden. Arati and her team of about 140 people at the OSTP are responsible for advising the president on not only big developments in science but also about major innovations in tech, much of which come from the private sector. 

Her job involves guiding regulatory efforts, government investment, and setting priorities around big-picture projects like Biden’s cancer moonshot and combating climate change. More recently, Arati has been spending a lot of time talking about the future of AI and semiconductors, so I had the opportunity to dig into both of those topics with her as the generative AI boom continues and the results of the CHIPS Act become more visible. 

One note before we start: I sat down with Arati last month, just a couple of days before the first presidential debate and its aftermath, which swallowed the entire news cycle. So you’re going to hear us talk a lot about President Biden’s agenda and the White House’s policy record on AI, among other topics. But you’re not going to hear anything about the president, his age, or the presidential campaign.

Links: 

• Biden’s top science adviser resigns after acknowledging demeaning behavior | NYT
• Teen girls confront an epidemic of deepfake nudes in schools | NYT
• Senate committee passes three bills to safeguard elections from AI | The Verge
• The RIAA versus AI, explained | The Verge
• Lawyers say OpenAI could be in real trouble with Scarlett Johansson | The Verge
• Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet | Decoder
• Meet the Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT | WIRED
• Biden releases AI executive order | The Verge
• Biden’s science adviser explains the new hard line on China | WashPo
• Where the CHIPS Act money has gone | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23961278

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I’m talking to Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic. I was really excited to talk to Nick. Like so many media CEOs, including Vox Media’s, he just signed a deal allowing OpenAI to use The Atlantic’s vast archives as training data, but he also has a rich background in tech. Before he was the CEO of The Atlantic, Nick was the editor-in-chief of Wired, where he set his sights on AI reporting well before anyone else.

I was also really interested in asking Nick about the general sense that the AI companies are getting vastly more than they’re giving with these sorts of deals — yes, they’re paying some money, but I’ve heard from so many of you that the money might now be the point — that there’s something else going on here – that maybe allowing creativity to get commodified this way will come with a price tag so big money can never pay it back. If there is anyone who could get into it with me on that question, it’s Nick.

Links: 

• Vox Media and The Atlantic sign content deals with OpenAI | The Verge
• Journalists “deeply troubled” by OpenAI’s content deals with Vox, The Atlantic | Ars Technica
• What the RIAA lawsuits mean for AI and copyright | The Verge
• Perplexity plagiarized our story about how Perplexity Is a bullshit machine | Wired
• How to stop Perplexity and save the web from bad AI | Platformer
• The text file that runs the internet | The Verge
• OpenAI, WSJ owner News Corp strike content deal valued at over $250 Million | WSJ
• The media bosses fighting back against AI — and the ones cutting deals — WashPo
• The New York Times spent $1 million so far in its OpenAI lawsuit | The Verge
• AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Canva got its start more than a decade ago as a different form of disruptive tech for creatives. It’s a web-based platform that makes design tools cheaper and accessible for individuals, schools, and businesses from tiny to enterprise. Melanie has big goals to grow the company — and try to do good in the process.

Links: 

• Canva tackled digital design — and now the office suite is next | The Verge
• Canva Inks Deals With Warner Music Group, Merlin | Variety
• Canva founders join Bill Gates’ Giving Pledge to give away most of their fortune | Sydney Morning Herald
• Canva partnership tackling extreme poverty in Malawi one year on | GiveDirectly
• Canva’s Two-Step Plan: Celebrating 10 years of impact | Canva
• Adobe’s new terms of service aren’t the problem — it’s the trust | The Verge
• ‘The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to F its users.’ | The Verge
• Why Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen thinks AI is the future | The Verge
• Canva corporate 'Hamilton' cringe rap presentation goes viral | YouTube

Transcript: 

https://www.theverge.com/e/23955121

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s almost the Fourth of July, and that means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. This year, I’m talking with Big Green Egg CEO Dan Gertsacov, who has big plans for using very modern fan-based marketing techniques to expand the market for the company’s old-fashioned, fire-burning, aspirational product. 

Links: 

• Big Green Egg Appoints a New CEO | CookOut News
• Big Green Egg 50th Anniversary 1974-2024 | Big Green Egg
• Yep, Big Green Egg Just Made a Beer Keg | Gear Patrol
• AI could kill creative jobs that ‘shouldn’t have been there in the first place,’ OpenAI CTO says | Fortune
• Campfires, explained | Vox
• An ‘Epidemic’ of Loneliness Threatens Health of Americans | Scientific American 
• RIP: Here are 70 things millennials have killed | Mashable
• “Genius of the AND” | Jim Collins
• Keurig's attempt to 'DRM' its coffee cups totally backfired | The Verge
• A Look at the Danny Meyer Documentary The Restaurateur | Eater

Transcript: 

https://www.theverge.com/e/23952121

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we’re talking about politics and lobbying in America. It’s hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and billionaires didn’t touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didn’t really exist before the 1970s. Now, our political debates about everything from energy, finance, and healthcare are deeply intertwined with corporations and their money — and new big players in tech now spend tons of political money of their own.

To understand the structure of today’s political lobbying and how we go here, I brought Pulitzer Prize winner Brody Mullins on the show. Brody has a new book he co-wrote with his brother Luke Mullins called The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, which came out last month. It’s a definitive history of modern lobbying in America, told through the lens of some of the industry’s most unsavory characters and the influence they’ve exerted on DC politics across decades. 

Links:

• If Donald Trump Wins, Paul Manafort Will Be Waiting in the Wings | NYT
• Meta had its biggest lobbying quarter ever | The Verge
• Apple quietly bankrolled a lobbying group for app developers | The Verge
• The Many Reinventions of a Legendary Washington Influence Peddler | Politico 
• The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington | The Guardian
• Big Tech Has a New Favorite Lobbyist: You | WSJ
• SOPA bill shelved after global protests from Google, Wikipedia and others | WashPo
• The Russia Inquiry Ended a Democratic Lobbyist’s Career. He Wants It Back. | NYT
• The Swamp Builders | WashPo
• The Rise and Fall of a K Street Renegade | WSJ

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix. I caught up with Greg while he was at the Cannes Lions festival in France, which is basically the world’s biggest gathering of advertisers and marketers. It’s an increasingly important place for Greg to be, as Netflix’s new ad tier has nearly doubled in six months to more than 40 million subscribers and feels increasingly pivotal to the future of the company. 

On top of that, Netflix is updating its famous culture memo, and I wanted to chat with Greg about the changes he’s making to that document, and how he’s thinking about maintaining that culture as Netflix grows into things like advertising and gaming.

Links: 

• Netflix Culture Memo | Netflix
• Netflix Culture Memo (2009) | Netflix
• Streaming is cable now | The Verge
• Netflix’s ad tier hits 40 million users | The Verge
• Netflix is different now — and there’s no going back | The Verge 
• Netflix just fired the organizer of the trans employee walkout | The Verge
• Netflix doesn’t want to hear it anymore | The Verge
• It’s hard to believe Samsung’s new, matte The Frame is actually a TV | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23946561

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve got a special episode of the show today – I was traveling last week, so Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and our new senior AI reporter Kylie Robison are filling in for me, with a very different kind of episode about AI. We talk a lot about AI in a broad sense on Decoder — it comes up in basically every single interview I do these days. But we don’t spend a ton of time on the day-to-day happenings of the AI industry itself.

So we thought it would be a good idea to take a beat and have Alex and Kylie actually break down the modern AI boom as it exists today: The companies you need to know, the most important news of the last few months, and what it’s actually like to be fully immersed in this industry every single day.

Links: 

• Google defends AI search results after they told us to put glue on pizza | The Verge
• Apple is putting ChatGPT in Siri for free later this year | The Verge
• AI will make money sooner than you’d think, says Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez | Decoder
• Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut | The Verge
• 2024 is a year of reckoning for AI | The Verge
• OpenAI researcher who resigned over safety concerns joins Anthropic | The Verge
• Hugging Face is sharing $10M worth of compute to beat big AI companies | The Verge
• The AI drama is heating up | Command Line
• Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the internet | Command Line
• Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tubi is a free and very rapidly growing streaming TV platform — according to Nielsen, it had an average of a million viewers watching every minute in May 2024, beating out Disney Plus, Max, Peacock, and basically everything else, save Netflix and YouTube. All those streaming service price hikes are driving people to free options, and Tubi is right there to catch them.

CEO Anjali Sud joins Decoder to explain why she thinks Tubi's model "could be" profitable, and how Tubi competes not only against the premium streamers, but also against the big competitors for viewers' time: TikTok and Youtube.

Links: 

• As streaming becomes more expensive, Tubi cashes in on the value of free | Los Angeles Times
• Tubi’s new redesign wants to push you down the rabbit hole | The Verge
• Tubi Rabbit AI: ChatGPT can give you better movie recommendations | The Verge
• The future of streaming is free ad-supported TV and movies | The Verge
• It’s true: people like leaving their TVs on in the background | The Verge
• Stubios is the new name of Tubi’s fan-fueled studio program | The Verge
• Comcast has a Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV Plus bundle coming | The Verge
• A Disney, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is on the way | The Verge

Transcript: 

https://www.theverge.com/e/23942621

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Private equity is a simple concept — a PE firm uses some combination of money and debt to buy a company, then makes a profit — but the reality of what happens to the companies that get acquired is anything but. It's everywhere, and it's not going away. In this summer remix, we're talking with Brendan Ballou, author of Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, about how we got here and what happens next. 

Links: 

• Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys“R”Us — here’s why that matters | The Verge
• Private equity and mismanagement: Here's what really killed Red Lobster | Fast Company
• Sony and Apollo send letter expressing interest in $26 billion Paramount buyout | NBC News
• Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America | Brendan Ballou
• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco | Bryan Borrough & John Helyar
• Barnes & Noble is going back to its indie roots to compete with Amazon | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cohere is one of the buzziest AI startups around right now. It's not making consumer products; it's focused on the enterprise market and making AI products for big companies. And there's a huge tension there: up until recently, computers have been deterministic. If you give computers a certain input, you usually know exactly what output you’re going to get. There’s a logic to it. But if we all start talking to computers with human language and getting human language back, well, human language is messy. And that makes the entire process of knowing what to put in and what exactly we’re going to get out of our computers different than it ever has been before.

Links: 

• Attention is all you need
• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots
• Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing | The Verge
• AI isn’t close to becoming sentient | The Conversation
• These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney | The Verge
• ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work | The Verge
• Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on Bing’s quest to beat Google | The Verge
• Top AI researchers and CEOs warn against ‘risk of extinction’ | The Verge
• Google Zero is here — now what? | The Verge
• Cara grew from 40k to 650k in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch
• How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23937899

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The art of video game design is flourishing, but it feels like a really grim time to be in the business of making and distributing games. Huge global publishers and tiny indie studios alike are facing huge financial pressures, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon.

So where did this enormous pressure come from, if consumer interest is high and sales are great? Verge video game reporter Ash Parrish joins Decoder to explain.

Links: 

• Global games market expected to grow to $189bn in 2024 | GamesIndustry.biz
• Why the video game industry is seeing so many layoffs | Polygon
• The tech industry’s layoffs and hiring freezes: all of the news | The Verge
• Fortnite made more than $9 billion in revenue in its first two years | The Verge
• Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 Swings Past 10 Million Sold | IGN
• The future of Netflix games could look like reality TV | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan — and let me tell you, this conversation is nothing like what I expected. It turns out Eric wants Zoom to be much, much more than just a videoconferencing platform. Zoom wants to take on Microsoft and Google and now has a big investment in AI – and Eric’s visions for what that AI will do are pretty wild.

See, Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. You’ll hear him describe how he thinks one of the big benefits of AI at work will be letting us all create something he calls a “digital twin," essentially a deepfake of yourself that can go attend meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you. I’ll just warn you: I tried to ask a bunch of the usual Decoder questions during this conversation, but once we got to digital twins going to Zoom meetings for people, well, I had a lot of followup questions. 

Links: 

• Zoom gets its first major overhaul in 10 years, powered by generative AI | ZDNet
• An interview with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan | Stratechery / Ben Thompson
• Zoom is cutting about 150 jobs, or close to 2% of its workforce | CNBC
• Zoom meetings are about to get weirder thanks to the Vision Pro | The Verge
• Zoom Docs launches in 2024 with built-in AI collaboration features | The Verge
• Zoom rewrites its policies to make clear that your videos aren’t used to train AI tools | The Verge
• Zoom says its new AI tools aren’t stealing ownership of your content | The Verge
• Zoom adds “post-quantum” end-to-end encryption | Zoom

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23932774

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. I think of Decoder as a show for people trying to build things, and a lot of people have built their things on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone else’s platform is: What are you going to do when that platform changes the rules?

Links: 

• How Google is killing independent sites like ours | HouseFresh
• HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what? | HouseFresh
• Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites | Retro Dodo
• Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web | The Verge
• Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It? | The New York Times
• Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real |The Verge
• An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them | SparkToro
• Mountain Weekly News
• Telly Visions
• E-ride Hero
• That Fit Friend

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Joseph Cox, one of the best cybersecurity reporters around and a co-founder of the new media site 404 Media. Joseph has a new book coming out in June called Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically a caper, but with the FBI running a phone network. For real. 

Joseph walks us through the fascinating world of underground criminal phone networks, and how secure messaging, a tech product beloved by drug traffickers, evolved from the days of BlackBerry Messenger to Signal. Along the way, the FBI got involved with its very own startup, ANOM, as part of one of the most effective trojan horse operations in the history of cybersecurity. Joseph’s book is a great read, but it also touches on a lot of things we talk about a lot here on Decoder. So this conversation was a fun one. 

Links: 

• Dark Wire by Joseph Cox | Hachette Book Group
• How Vice became ‘a fucking clown show’ | The Verge
• Cyber Official Speaks Out, Reveals Mobile Network Attacks in US | 404 Media
• Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI | 404 Media
• How Secure Phones for Criminals Are Sold on Instagram | Motherboard
• A Peek Inside the Phone Company Secretly Used in an FBI Honeypot | Motherboard
• The FBI secretly launched an encrypted messaging system for criminals | The Verge
• Canadian police have had master key to BlackBerry's encryption since 2010 | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the big Google I/O developer conference. Google’s focus during the conference was on how it’s building AI into virtually all of its products. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it “Google Zero,” and I’ve been asking a lot of web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero. In a world where AI powers search with overviews and summaries, that’s a real possibility. What then happens to the web? 

I’ve talked to Sundar quite a bit over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I’ve ever seen him. I think you can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future — where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, more artistic — and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever, and that he’s wrestling with that tension.

Links: 

• Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the internet — Command Line
• Google I/O 2024: everything announced — The Verge
• Google is redesigning its search engine, and it’s AI all the way down — The Verge
• Project Astra is the future of AI at Google — The Verge
• Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? — The Verge
• YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians — The Verge
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge
• How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh
• Inside the First 'SEO Heist' of the AI Era — Business Insider
• Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft — Decoder

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23922415

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US government claiming the divest-or-ban law is unconstitutional — a case it needs to win in order to keep operating under Bytedance’s ownership. There’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law here: Some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of prior attempts to regulate speech and the internet, while the simple facts of what TikTok has already promised to do around the world contradict some its arguments. Verge editors Sarah Jeong and Alex Heath join me to explain what it all means.

Links: 

• TikTok and Bytedance v Merrick Garland (PDF)
• TikTok sues the US government over ban | The Verge
• Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to President Biden’s desk | The Verge
• The legal challenges that lie ahead for TikTok — in both the US and China | The Verge
• Why the TikTok ban won’t solve the US’s online privacy problems. | Decoder 
• Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law, starting the clock for ByteDance to divest it | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has been at the top of my list of people I’ve wanted to talk to for the show since we first launched — he’s led Adobe for nearly 17 years now, but he doesn’t do too many wide-ranging interviews. I’ve always thought Adobe was an underappreciated company — its tools sit at the center of nearly every major creative workflow you can think of — and with generative AI poised to change the very nature of creative software, it seemed particularly important to talk with Shantanu now.

Adobe sits right at the center of the whole web of tensions, especially as the company has evolved its business and business model over time. And now, AI really changes what it means to make and distribute creative work. Not many people are seeing revenue returns on it just yet and there are the fundamental philosophical challenges of adding AI to photo and video tools. What does it mean when a company like Adobe, which makes the tools so many people use to make their art, sees the creative process as a step in a marketing chain, instead of a goal in and of itself?

Links: 

• How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao 
• Adobe Launches Creative Cloud (2012)
• What was Photoshop like in 1994? 
• Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool turns vacation photos into nightmares - The Verge
• New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and others sue OpenAI and Microsoft - The Verge
• The FAIR Act: A New Right to Protect Artists in the Age of AI | Adobe Blog
• Adobe’s Firefly generative AI tools are now generally available - The Verge
• This Wacom AI debacle has certainly taken a turn. - The Verge

Transcript: 

https://www.theverge.com/e/23917997

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we’re going to talk about the smart home — one of the oldest, most important, and most challenging dreams in the history of the tech industry. The idea of your house responding to you and your family, and generally being as automated and as smart as your phone or your laptop, has inspired generations of technologists. But after decades of promises, it’s all still pretty messy. Because the big problem with the smart home has been blindingly obvious for a very long time: interoperability. 

Yet there are some promising developments out there that might make it a little better. To help sort it all out, I invited Verge smart home reviewer Jen Tuohy, who is one of the most influential reporters on the smart home beat today. Jen and I break down how Matter, the open source standard, is trying to fix these issues, but there is still a lot of work to do. 

Links: 

• Matter is now racing ahead, but the platforms are holding it back — The Verge
• 2023 in the smart home: Matter’s broken promises — The Verge
• Smart home hubs: what they are and why you need one — The Verge
• My smart kitchen: the good, the bad, and the future — The Verge
• How bad business broke the smart home — The Verge
• The smart home is finally getting out of your phone and into your home — The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, whom I first interviewed on the show back in 2021. Those were heady days — especially for upstart EV companies like Polestar, which all seemed poised to capture what felt like infinite demand for electric cars. Now, in 2024, the market looks a lot different, and so does Polestar, which is no longer majority-owned by Volvo. Instead, Volvo is now a more independent sister company, and both Volvo and Polestar fall under Chinese parent company Geely. 

You know I love a structure shuffle, so Thomas and I really got into it: what does it mean for Volvo to have stepped back, and how much can Polestar take from Geely’s various platforms while still remaining distinct from the other brands in the portfolio? We also talked about the upcoming Polestar 3 SUV and Polestar 4 crossover, and I asked Thomas what he thinks of the Cybertruck.

Links: 

• Can Polestar design a new kind of car company? — Decoder
• The Polestar 3 isn’t out yet, and it’s already getting a big price cut — The Verge
• The Polestar 4 gets an official price ahead of its debut — The Verge
• Polestar makes the rear window obsolete with its new crossover coupe — The Verge
• Volvo and Polestar drift a little farther apart — The Verge
• Polestar gets a nearly $1 billion lifeline — The Verge
• Car-tech breakup fever is heating up — The Verge
• Polestar is working on its own smartphone to sync with its EVs — The Verge
• Polestar’s electric future looks high-performing, and promising — The Verge
• Electric car maker Polestar to cut around 450 jobs globally — Reuters

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23912151

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I are going to try and figure out Tesla. I said try — I did not say succeed. But we’re going to try. That’s because Tesla has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks, in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes.

If you’ve been following the company, you know that that gap between what the business is and how its valued has been getting bigger and bigger for years now – and lately, with Elon Musk saying he’s going all-in on autonomy and announcing a robotaxi event in August, it seems like we’re getting closer to a make or break moment, especially as competition in the broader EV market heats up. 

Links:

• Tesla reaches deals in China on self-driving cars — NYT
• Elon Musk goes ‘absolutely hard core’ in another round of Tesla layoffs — The Verge
• Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to dozens of deaths — The Verge
• Elon Musk says Tesla will reveal its robotaxi on August 8th — The Verge
• A cheaper Tesla is back on the menu — The Verge
• Tesla’s profits sink as the company struggles with cooling demand — The Verge
• Tesla lays off ‘more than 10 percent’ of its workforce, loses top executives — The Verge
• Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal — The Verge
• Elon Musk says it’s “time to reorganize” Tesla — The Verge
• Elon Musk lost Democrats on Tesla when he needed them most — WSJ

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A lot has changed since the last time Ola was on Decoder. Back then, he said Mercedes would have an all-EV lineup by 2030 — a promise a whole lot of car companies, including Mercedes, have now had to soften or walk back. But he doesn't see that as a setback at all, and he and Mercedes are both still committed to phasing out gas in the long run.

We also spent some time talking about what's happening both on the outside of cars — Mercedes' classic look and its EV look aren't necessarily quite in the same place — and on the inside of them, as infotainment becomes a huge point of competition and design.

Links: 

• How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future - The Verge
• Mercedes-Benz opens its first 400kW EV charging station in the US - The Verge
• Mercedes-Benz is the first German automaker to adopt Tesla’s EV charging connector - The Verge
• Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball - The Verge
• The Mercedes G-Wagen, the ultimate off-road status symbol, goes electric - The Verge
• Mercedes workers file federal charges with NLRB to stop union busting - The Alabama Political Reporter
• The MBUX Hyperscreen - Mercedes-Benz USA

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23904592

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we’re talking about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of Congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.

This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next. 

Links: 

• Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law — The Verge
• TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform — The Verge
• Anyone want to buy TikTok? — Vergecast
• Congress takes on TikTok, privacy, and AI — Vergecast
• Tiktok vows to fight 'unconstitutional' US ban — BBC
• ‘Thunder Run’: Behind lawmakers’ secretive push to pass the TikTok bill — NYT
• On TikTok, resignation and frustration after potential ban of app — NYT
• Lawmakers unveil new bipartisan digital privacy bill after years of impasse — The Verge
• A real privacy law? House lawmakers are optimistic this time — The Verge
• Congress is trying to stop discriminatory algorithms again — The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming-focused voice and chat app. You might think Discord is just something Slack for gamers, but over time, it has become much more important than that. For a growing mix of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandom, and other niche communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as internet culture is happening on Discord.

In many ways Discord represents a significant shift away from what we now consider traditional social platforms. As you’ll hear Jason describe it, Discord is a place where you talk and hangout with your friends over shared common interests, whether that’s video games, the AI bot Midjourney, or maybe your favorite anime series. It is a very different kind of interface for the internet, but that comes with serious challenges, especially around child safety and moderation. 

Links: 

• Discord opens up to games and apps embedded in its chat app — The Verge
• Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers — The Verge
• Inside Discord’s reform movement for banned users — The Verge
• Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft — WSJ
• Discord cuts 17% of workers in latest tech layoffs — NYT
• Discord to start showing ads for gamers to boost revenue — WSJ
• Discord says it intentionally does not encrypt user messages — CNN
• How Discord became a social hub for young people — NYT
• ‘Problematic pockets’: How Discord became a home for extremists — WashPo
• Discord CEO Jason Citron on AI, Midjourney — Bloomberg

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23898955

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we're talking about Disney, the massive activist investor revolt it just fought off, and what happens next in the world of streaming. Because what happens to Disney really tells us a lot about what's happening in the entire world of entertainment. Earlier this month, Disney survived an attempted board takeover from businessman Nelson Peltz. While investors ultimately sided with Disney and CEO Bob Iger, the boardroom showdown made something very clear: Disney needs to figure out streaming and get its creative direction back on track. 

To help me figure all this out, I brought on my friend Julia Alexander, who is VP of Strategy at Parrot Analytics, a Puck News contributor, and most importantly, a former Verge reporter. She's a leading expert on all things Disney, and I always learn something important about the state of the entertainment business when I talk to her. 

Links: 

• The Story of Disney+ — Puck News
• ​​Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander — Decoder
• Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so — Decoder
• Disney Fends Off Activist Investor for Second Time in 2 Years — NYT
• For Disney, streaming losses and TV’s decline are a one-two punch — NYT
• Disney’s ABC, ESPN weakness adds pressure to make streaming profitable — WSJ
• Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus — The Verge
• The Disney Plus-Hulu merger is way more than a streaming bundle — The Verge
• Disney’s laying off 7,000 as streaming boom comes to an end — The Verge
• The last few years really scared Disney — Screen Rant

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At the absolute most basic, Dropbox is cloud storage for your stuff — but that puts it at the nexus of a huge number of today’s biggest challenges in tech. As the company that helps you organize your stuff in the cloud itself goes all remote, how do we even deal with the concept of “your stuff?”

Today I’m talking with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston about those big picture ideas — and why he thinks generative AI really will be transformative for everyone eventually, even if it isn’t yet now.

Links: 

• Dropbox AI and Dash make it easier to find your files from all over the web | The Verge
• Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM forever | The Verge
• No, Dropbox's cafeteria didn't get a Michelin star | VentureBeat
• It's official: San Francisco's office vacancy rate just set a record | San Francisco Examiner
• Jeff Bezos: This is the 'smartest thing we ever did' at Amazon | CNBC
• Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI | The Verge
• Congress bans staff use of Microsoft's AI Copilot | Axios

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23892647

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we’re talking about Vice, the media company: Where it came from, what it did, and, ultimately, why it collapsed into a much smaller, sadder version of itself. 

This is a lousy time for digital media, and it’s hard to make a profit from putting words on the internet right now. So when Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto went to go report on what happened, she and I both assumed Vice had been done in by the brutal economics of digital advertising on the web. But the Vice story is more than that — in the word of one executive that talked to Liz, it was a “fucking clown show.” 

Links:

• How Vice became 'a fucking clown show' — The Verge
• Vice is abandoning Vice.com and laying off hundreds — The Verge
• Vice, decayed digital colossus, files for bankruptcy — NYT
• Vice Is Basically Dead — New York Magazine
• Shane Smith and the Final Collapse of Vice News — The Hollywood Reporter
• At Vice, cutting-edge media and allegations of old-school sexual harassment — NYT
• HBO cancels ‘Vice News Tonight,’ severing relationship with Vice Media — CNN
• Shane Smith has a secret multimillion-dollar Vice deal — New York Magazine

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cloudflare is an infrastructure provider basically protecting more than 20% of the entire web from bad actors. When everything is going well, you don't even have to know it exists. It's one of the only defenses — sometimes the only defense — standing between websites and the people who want to take them down.

Protecting free speech on the internet around the world, across war zones and hundreds of different kinds of government, is no easy feat. That puts the company, and CEO Matthew Prince, right at the heart of some of Decoder's biggest challenges and themes. 

Links: 

• A Cloudflare outage broke large swathes of the internet | The Verge
• Why security company Cloudflare is protecting U.S. election sites for free | Fast Company
• The Daily Stormer just lost the most important company defending it | The Verge (2017)
• Cloudflare to revoke 8chan’s service, opening the fringe website up for DDoS attacks | The Verge (2019)
• Cloudflare blocks Kiwi Farms due to an ‘immediate threat to human life’ | The Verge
• Why Cloudflare Let an Extremist Stronghold Burn | Wired
• Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince interview on Ukraine cybersecurity | Semafor
• 3 ways the ‘splinternet’ is damaging society | MIT Sloan

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23885440

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. This is David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge and co-host of The Vergecast, subbing in for Nilay, who’s out on vacation. Regular Decoder programming returns next week. In the meantime, we have an exciting episode for you today all about video game emulation, which, as it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated than it seems. 

Gaming emulation made headlines recently because one of the most widely used programs for emulating the Nintendo Switch, a platform called Yuzu, was effectively sued out of existence. There’s a whole lot going on here, from the history of game emulation to the copyright precedents of emulators to how the threat of game piracy still looms large in the industry. To break down this topic, I brought Verge Senior Editor and resident emulation expert Sean Hollister on the show. Let’s get into it. 

Links:

• Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu — The Verge
• Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit — The Verge
• Steve Jobs announcing a PlayStation emulator for the Mac — YouTube
• Fans freak out as Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaks two weeks early — Kotaku
• Tears of the Kingdom Was Pirated 1 Million Times, Nintendo Claims — Kotaku
• The solid legal theory behind Nintendo’s new emulator takedown effort — Ars Technica
• How Nintendo’s destruction of Yuzu is rocking the emulator world — The Verge
• How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch-emulator Yuzu? — Ars Technica

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a pretty rough patch in the company’s history. In 2021, Intuit acquired the company, and the very next year, co-founder Ben Chestnut stepped down after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over.

This is a pretty huge culture change, especially as Mailchimp became more integrated with Intuit. It was also a big challenge for a new leader who came in from the outside. You’ll hear us talk about that transition a lot. Rania and I also got into the weeds of making decisions, which is very Decoder. And, of course, we had to talk about generative AI, which is a big part of the Mailchimp road map. This was a really fun conversation with some honestly scary ideas in it — and it’s all about email.

Links:

• Mailchimp employees have complained about inequality for years — The Verge
• Mailchimp Employees Are Fuming Over $12 Billion Deal — Business Insider
• Did this email cost Mailchimp's billionaire CEO his job? — Platformer
• Mailchimp is shutting down TinyLetter — The Verge
• TinyLetter, in memoriam — The Verge
• Did Mailchimp censor J.D. Vance? — Mother Jones
• Hackers breached Mailchimp to phish cryptocurrency wallets — The Verge
• Boring, mundane businesses have an exhilarating, viral life on TikTok — The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23879556

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone it’s Nilay – I’m on vacation this week, so the Decoder team is taking a short break. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes. To tide you over until Monday, we have a bonus episode from our friends at Vox Media and Eater’s Gastropod about an incredible patent battle in the world of pizza. 

I’m serious: One of the biggest fights in the pizza industry took place in US court in the ‘90s — an intellectual property dispute about stuffed crust pizza between Pizza Hut and patent holder Anthony “The Big Cheese” Mongiello. 

So much of what we talk about on Decoder comes down to IP lawsuits like copyright or patent disputes, and how judges decide those cases and where the law ends up can steer the course of history. And that’s true whether we’re talking about a line of code, the distribution method of an MP3, or, yes, even stuffed crust pizza. 

Links: 

• Can You Patent a Pizza? — Gastropod
• Ivana and Donald Trump Pizza Hut Commercial — YouTube
• The Next Big Thing in Pizza? Try 'Stuffed Crust' — NYT
• Who Created the Stuffed Crust Pizza? It's Complicated. — Eater
• Method of making a pizza — Google Patents

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X.

Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future.

Links: 

• Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform — The Verge
• Bluesky built a decentralized protocol for Twitter — and is working on an app that uses it — The Verge
• The fediverse, explained — The Verge
• Bluesky showed everyone’s ass — The Verge
• Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge
• The ‘queer.af’ Mastodon instance disappeared because of the Taliban — The Verge
• Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests — Forbes
• Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk — TechCrunch
• Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media — TechCrunch
• Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech — Mike Masnick

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23872913

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Both the EU and US have spent the past decade looking at Big Tech and saying, "someone should do something!" In the US, lawmakers are still basically shouting that. But in the EU, regulators did something.

The Digital Markets Act was proposed in 2020, signed into law in 2022, and went into effect this month. It's already having an effect on some of the biggest companies in tech, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In theory it's a landmark law that will change the way these companies compete, and how their products operate, for years to come. How did we get here, what does the law actually say, and will it work half as well in practice as it does on paper? Verge reporter Jon Porter comes on Decoder to help me break it down. 

Links: 

• The EU's new competition rules are going live — here's how tech giants are responding | The Verge
• Apple hit with a nearly $2 billion fine following Spotify complaint | The Verge
• Experts fear the Digital Markets Act won’t address tech monopolies | The Verge
• Dirty tricks or small wins: developers are skeptical of Apple's App Store rules | The Verge
• Google Search, WhatsApp, and TikTok on list of 22 services targeted by EU’s tough new DMA | The Verge
• The EU’s Digital Services Act is now in effect: here’s what that means | The Verge
• 
  

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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We’ve got a fun one today — I talked to Figma CEO Dylan Field in front of a live audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And we got into it – we talked about everything from design, to software distribution, to the future of the web, and, of course, AI. 

Figma is an fascinating company – the Figma design tool is used by designers at basically every company you can think of. And importantly, it runs on the web. It became such a big deal that Adobe tried to buy it out in 2022 for $20 billion dollars, a deal that only just recently fell through because of regulatory concerns. 

So Dylan and I talked a lot about where Figma is now as an independent company, how Figma is structured, where it’s going, and how Dylan’s decisionmaking has changed since the last time he was on the show in 2022.

Links:

• Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, with CEO Dylan Field — Decoder
• Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma — The Verge
• Adobe’s Dana Rao on AI, copyright, and the failed Figma deal — Decoder
• Figma’s CEO on life after the company’s failed sale to Adobe — Command Line
• Amazon restricts self-publishing due to AI concerns — The Guardian
• Wix’s new AI chatbot builds websites in seconds based on prompts — The Verge
• Apple is finally allowing full versions of Chrome and Firefox on the iPhone — The Verge
• What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Environmental Art Movement. — Built In

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23866201

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve been listening to Decoder or the Vergecast for a while, you know that I am obsessed with Google Search, the web, and how both of those things might change in the age of AI. But to really understand how something might change, you have to step back and understand what it is right now. 

So today I’m talking with Verge platforms reporter Mia Sato about Google Search, the industries it’s created, and more importantly, how relentless search engine optimization, or SEO, has utterly changed the web in its image. Mia and I really dug into this to explain why search results are so terrible now, what Google is trying to do about it, and why this is such an important issue for the future of the internet.

Links: 

• How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh
• How Google perfected the web — The Verge
• The people who ruined the internet — The Verge
• A storefront for robots — The Verge
• The end of the Googleverse — The Verge
• The unsettling scourge of obituary spam — The Verge
• What happens when Google Search doesn’t have the answers? — The Verge
• The AI takeover of Google Search starts now — The Verge
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge
• Google is starting to squash more spam and AI in search results — The Verge
• Ethics Statement — The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which that culture spreads all around the world. 

If you’ve been listening to Decoder, this is all going to sound very familiar. The core thesis of Kyle’s book — that algorithmic recommendations make everything feel the same — hits at an idea that we’ve talked about countless times on the show: that how content is distributed shapes what content is made. So I was really excited to sit down with Kyle and dig into Filterworld and his thoughts on how this happened and what we might be able to do about it.

Links: 

• Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture — Kyle Chayka
• Welcome to AirSpace — The Verge
• The Stanley water bottle craze, explained — Vox
• TikTok and the vibes revival — The New Yorker
• Why the internet isn’t fun anymore — The New Yorker
• The age of algorithmic anxiety — The New Yorker
• Lo-fi beats to quarantine to are booming on YouTube — The Verge
• Taylor Swift has encouraged her fans' numerology habit yet again — AV Club
• How fandom built the internet as we know it, with Kaitlyn Tiffany — Decoder

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23858379

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our Thursday episodes are all about big topics in the news, and this week we’re wrapping up our short series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. In our last couple episodes, we talked a lot about some of the biggest, most complicated legal and policy questions surrounding the modern AI industry, including copyright lawsuits and deepfake legislation. But we wanted to end on a more personal note: How is this technology making people feel, and in particular how is it affecting how people communicate and connect?

Verge reporter Miya David has covered AI chatbots — specifically AI romance bots — quite a bit, so we invited her onto the show to talk about how generative AI is finding its way into dating. We not only discussed how this technology is affecting dating apps and human relationships, but also how the boom in AI chatbot sophistication is laying the groundwork for a generation of people who might form meaningful relationships with so-called AI companions.

Links: 

• Speak, Memory — The Verge
• A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled — NYT
• Google suspends engineer who claims its AI is sentient — The Verge
• The law of AI girlfriends — The Verge
• Replika’s new AI therapy app tries to bring you to a zen island — The Verge
• Replika’s new AI app is like Tinder but with sexy chatbots — Gizmodo
• Don’t date robots; their privacy policies are terrible — The Verge
• AI is shaking up online dating with chatbots that are ‘flirty but not too flirty’ — CNBC
• Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots — Nature
• Virtual valentine: People are turning to AI in search of emotional connections — CBS

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23856679

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this special episode of Decoder, science educator and YouTuber Hank Green is guest hosting. And the guest? It’s Nilay Patel, who sat down with Hank to discuss building The Verge, the state of media, and the future of the web. Also: whether the fediverse is worth investing in, and how social platforms’ control of distribution has shaped the internet.

In the words of Hank: “Nilay has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he’s going to revolutionize the media through blog posts. He keeps saying it, but what the hell does he mean? While I was busy building my business on other people’s platforms, Nilay has built something very rare in the year 2024: a website that publishes content and isn’t behind a paywall yet still makes money. How does he do it? How does he make decisions? How is The Verge structured? The tables have turned.”

Links:

• Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok — Decoder
• Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next — Decoder
• Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine — The Verge
• Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers — Futurism
• The fediverse, explained — The Verge
• Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23851875

The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live.

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and this week we’re continuing our mini-series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. Last week, we took a look at the wave of copyright lawsuits that might eventually grind this whole industry to a halt. Those are basically a coin flip — and the outcomes are off in the distance, as those cases wind their way through the legal system. 

A bigger problem right now is that AI systems are really good at making just believable enough fake images and audio — and with tools like OpenAI’s new Sora, maybe video soon, too. And of course, it’s once again a presidential election year here in the US. So today, Verge policy editor Adi Robertson joins the show to discuss how AI might supercharge disinformation and lies in an election that’s already as contentious as any in our lifetimes — and what might be done about it.

Links: 

• How the Mueller report indicts social networks
• Twitter permanently bans Trump
• Meta allows Trump back on Facebook and Instagram
• No Fakes Act wants to protect actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas
• White House calls for legislation to stop Taylor Swift AI fakes
• Watermarks aren’t the silver bullet for AI misinformation
• AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google
• Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet
• 
  

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll, a streaming service focused entirely on anime — and really, the biggest anime service still going. Rahul has a long history with anime: he spent more than seven years at Funimation, a company that started in the 90s to distribute Dragon Ball Z to US audiences, before getting the top job at Crunchyroll.

Anime might seem like niche content, but it’s not nearly as niche as you might think – our colleagues over at Polygon just ran a huge survey of anime viewers and found that 42% of Gen Z and 25% of millennials watch anime regularly. And Crunchyroll is growing with that audience — like most entertainment providers, the service absolutely exploded during the pandemic, going from 5 million paying subscribers in 2021 to more than 13 million as of last month. 

But interestingly Rahul says Crunchyroll’s growth isn’t being driven by more and more people watching anime, but more and more anime fans — especially those watching pirated content — choosing to pay for it.

Links: 

• Anime is huge, and we finally have numbers to prove it — Polygon
• Funimation is shutting down — and taking your digital library with it — The Verge
• Sony completes acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T — The Verge
• Funimation’s anime library is moving over to Crunchyroll — The Verge
• Crunchyroll now has more than 13 Million subscribers — Cord Cutters News
• Crunchyroll's CEO Colin Decker leaves company; Rahul Purini becomes new president — Anime News Network
• PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks — The Verge
• Sony’s Crunchyroll launches free 24-hour streaming channel — Variety
• Crunchyroll is adding mobile games to its subscription — The Verge
• How Is Funimation producing so many simuldubs? — Anime News Network

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23845221

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Decoder team is off this week. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes; we’re really excited about what’s on the schedule here. 

In the meantime, I thought you all might enjoy a conversation I had with Kara Swisher, the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman about the Apple Vision Pro. All of us have been covering Apple for a very long time, and we had a lot of fun swapping impressions, talking strategy, and sharing what we liked, and didn’t like, about Apple’s $3,500 headset. 

Links: 

• Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not — The Verge
• The shine comes off the Vision Pro — The Verge
• Everything we know about Apple’s Vision Pro — The Verge
• Why some of Apple’s biggest fans are returning their Vision Pros — Bloomberg
• Apple’s Vision Pro Is an iPad killer, but not anytime soon — Bloomberg
• I worked, cooked and even skied with the new Apple Vision Pro — WSJ
• Vision Pro review: 24 hours in Apple’s mixed-reality headset — WSJ

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our new Thursday episodes are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and for the next few weeks we’re going to stay focused on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and StabilityAI.

So for this episode, we’re going to talk about those cases, and the main defense the AI companies are relying on: an idea called fair use. To help explain this mess, I talked with Sarah Jeong. Sarah is a former lawyer and a features editor here at The Verge, and she is also one of my very favorite people to talk to about copyright. I promise you we didn’t get totally off the rails nerding out about it, but we went a little off the rails. The first thing we had to figure out was: How big a deal are these AI copyright suits?

Links: 

• The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement --- The Verge
• The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next — The Verge
• How copyright lawsuits could kill OpenAI — Vox
• How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao --- The Verge
• Generative AI Has a visual plagiarism problem - IEEE Spectrum
• George Carlin estate sues creators of AI-generated comedy special — THR
• AI-Generated Taylor Swift porn went viral on Twitter. Here's how it got there — 404 Media
• AI copyright lawsuit hinges on the legal concept of ‘fair use’ — The Washington Post
• Intellectual property experts discuss fair use in the age of AI — Harvard Law School
• OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material — Ars Technica

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. Alongside FTC chair Lina Khan, Jonathan is one of the most prominent figures in the big shift happening in competition and antitrust in the United States. This is a fun episode: we taped this conversation live on stage at the Digital Content Next conference in Charleston, South Carolina a few days ago, so you’ll hear the audience, which was a group of fancy media company executives. 

You’ll also hear me joke about Google a few times; fancy media execs are very interested in the cases the DOJ has brought against Google for monopolizing search and advertising tech — and Jonathan was very good at not commenting about pending litigation. But he did have a lot to say about the state of tech regulation, he and Khan’s track record so far, and why he thinks the concepts they’re pushing forward are more accessible than they’ve ever been.

Links: 

• The top Biden lawyer with his sights on Apple and Google — Politico
• Judge blocks a merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — NYT
• FTC’s Khan and DOJ’s Kanter beat back deals at fastest clip in decades — Bloomberg
• Google will face another antitrust trial September 9th, this time over ad tech — The Verge
• In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing — The Verge
• Google Search, Chrome, and Android are all changing thanks to EU antitrust law — The Verge
• Aggregation Theory — Stratechery
• Adobe explains why it abandoned the Figma deal — The Verge
• How the EU’s DMA is changing Big Tech — The Verge
• Epic Games CEO calls out Apple’s DMA rules as ‘malicious compliance’ — TechCrunch

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23831914

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’re very excited for today’s episode, because from now on we’ll be delivering you two Decoders every week. On Monday’s we’ll have our classic interviews with CEOs and other high-profile guests. But our new shorter Thursday episode – like today’s – will explain big topics in the news with Verge reporters, experts, and other friends of the show. 

The big idea we’re going to jump into today does in fact have a lot of problems: electric vehicle adoption in the US. We invited Verge Transportation Editor Andy Hawkins, who’s been covering the EV transition for years, to walk us through what’s happening. 

Late last year, Andy wrote a fantastic article called, “The EV Transition trips over its own cord.” It was all about the kind of paradox of the EV market right now: The momentum for electric cars in America feels like it’s started to hit serious snags, even though more people than ever before are going fully electric. The stakes are high, and there’s a lot going on. Let’s get into it. 

Links: 

• The EV transition trips over its own cord — The Verge
• We’re down to just a handful of EVs that qualify for the full US tax credit — The Verge
• Electric cars were having issues. Then things got political — WSJ
• Tesla is becoming a partisan brand, says survey — Eletrek
• 16 Republican governors urge Biden EPA to roll back proposed electric vehicle standards — USA Today
• Slow rollout of national charging system could hinder EV adoption — NYT
• Want to stare into the Republican soul in 2023? — Slate
• Biden vetoes Republican measure to block electric vehicle charging stations — NYT
• The Biden administration is pumping more money into EV charging infrastructure — The Verge
• GM should just bring back the Chevy Volt — The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast. Casey is also a former editor here at The Verge and was my co-host at the Code Conference last year. Most importantly, Casey and I are also very close friends, so this episode is a little looser than usual. 

I wanted to talk to Casey for a few reasons. One, the media industry overall is falling apart, with huge layoffs at almost every media organization you can think of happening weekly, but small newsletters seem to be a bright spot. So I wanted to talk about how Platformer started, how Casey got it to where it is, and how much farther he thinks it can go. And then, I wanted to talk about Substack. It’s the newsletter platform Paltformer used to call its home, but content moderation problems — including its decision to allow Nazis to monetize on the platform — have pushed away a number of its customers, including Platformer. 

This episode goes deep, but it’s fun — Casey is just one of my favorite people, and he is not shy about saying what he thinks.

Links: 

• Can Substack CEO Chris Best build a new model for journalism? — The Verge
• Substack launches its Twitter-like Notes — The Verge
• Substack Has a Nazi Problem — The Atlantic
• Substack says it will remove Nazi publications from the platform --- Platformer
• Substack keeps the Nazis, loses Platformer — The Verge 
• Why Platformer is leaving Substack — Platformer
• The Messenger to close after less than a year — The New York Times
• Do countries with better-funded public media also have healthier democracies? — Nieman Lab
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge
• The Biden deepfake robocall Is only the beginning — WIRED

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23823565

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Senator Brian Schatz, of Hawaii. We joke that Decoder is ultimately a show about org charts, but there’s a lot of truth to it. We talked about the separate offices he has to balance against each other, and the concessions he has to make to work within the Senate structure.

We also talked a lot about two of the biggest issues in tech regulation today. One is Europe, which is doing a lot of regulation while the US does almost none. How does a senator think about the U.S. all but abdicating that space? The other is one of the few places the US is trying to take action right now: children’s online safety. Schatz is involved with two pieces of child safety legislation, the Kids Online Safety Act and the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, that could fundamentally reshape online life for teens and children across the country. But the big stumbling block for passing any laws about content moderation is, of course, the First Amendment.

Links: 

• Strict Scrutiny — LII / Legal Information Institute
• The Uniquely American Future of US Authoritarianism — WIRED
• How the EU’s DMA is changing Big Tech: all of the news and updates — The Verge
• AI Labeling Act of 2023 (S. 2691) — GovTrack.us
• Mark Zuckerberg testimony: senators seem really confused about Facebook — Vox
• Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis — Senate Judiciary Committee
• AI tools will make it easy to create fake porn of just about anybody — The Verge
• They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam — The Washington Post.
• Protecting Kids on Social Media Act (S, 1291) — GovTrack.us
• Kids Online Safety Act (S. 1409) — GovTrack.us
• Kids Online Safety Shouldn’t Require Massive Online Censorship and Surveillance — EFF
• TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform — The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23818699

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California. He’s been in Congress for eight years now, representing California’s 17th District, which is arguably the highest-tech district in the entire country. You’ll hear him say a couple of times that there’s $10 trillion of tech market value in his district, and that’s not an exaggeration: Apple, Intel, and Nvidia are all headquartered in his district, along with important new AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. 

I wanted to know how Khanna thinks about representing those companies but also the regular people in his district; the last time I spoke to him, in 2018, he reminded me that he’s got plenty of teachers and firefighters to represent as well. But the politics of tech have changed a lot in these past few years — and things are only going to get both more complicated and more tense as Trump and Biden head into what will obviously be a contentious and bitter presidential election.

Links: 

• Democrats must not repeat the mistakes of globalization
• California bill to ban driverless autonomous trucks goes to Newsom's desk
• In labor snub, California governor vetoes bill that would have limited self-driving trucks
• A lawyer used ChatGPT and now has to answer for its ‘bogus’ citations
• Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet
• Music streaming platforms must pay artists more, says EU
• Sideloading and other changes are coming to iOS in the EU soon
• Clock running out on antitrust bill targeting big tech
• Silicon Valley’s Rep. Ro Khanna talks Congress’ plans to regulate Big Tech
• Trump pushing Microsoft to buy TikTok was ‘strangest thing I’ve ever worked on,’ says Satya Nadella

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23810838

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I'm talking to Dana Rao, who is General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer at Adobe. Now, if you're a longtime Decoder listener, you know that I have always been fascinated with Adobe, which I think the tech press largely undercovers. If you're interested in how creativity happens, you're kind of necessarily interested in what Adobe's up to. And it is fascinating to consider how Dana's job as Adobe's top lawyer is really at the center of the company's future. 

The copyright issues with generative AI are so unknown and unfolding so fast that they will necessarily shape what kind of products Adobe can even make in the future, and what people can make with those products. The company also just tried and failed to buy the popular upstart design company Figma, a potentially $20 billion deal that was shut down over antitrust concerns in the European Union. So Dana and I had a lot to talk about.

Links: 

• Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma
• Adobe explains why it abandoned the Figma deal
• Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, with CEO Dylan Field
• Figma’s CEO laments demise of $20 billion deal with Adobe
• Adobe proposes anti-impersonation law
• Adobe’s Dana Rao doesn’t want you to get duped by A
• The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft
• Adobe’s Photoshop on the web launch includes its popular desktop AI tools

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23791239

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2023 will go down as the year that Elon Musk killed Twitter. First he did it in a big way, by buying the company, firing most of the employees, and destabilizing the platform; then he did it in a small, but important, symbolic way, by renaming the company X and trying to make a full break with what came before. So now that the story of the company named Twitter is officially over, it felt important to stop and ask: What was Twitter, anyway, and why were so many powerful people obsessed with it for so long?

In this special episode, I sat down with Marty Baron, former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Zoe Schiffer, managing editor of Platform and author of Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. We discussed how two of Twitter’s most dedicated power users – Donald Trump and Elon Musk — were addicted to the platform, defined it, changed it, broke it, and then put it to rest.

Links: 

The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge

Extremely softcore

Inside Elon Musk's “extremely hardcore” Twitter

How Twitter broke the news

Trump vs. Twitter: The president takes on social media moderation

Martin Baron recounts leading The Washington Post during the Trump era

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, which makes software to optimize shipping everything from huge containers to ecommerce deliveries. It’s a fascinating company; we had Ryan on to explain it last year.

Right around the first time we spoke, Ryan handed off the CEO role to 20-year Amazon veteran Dave Clark. Then, barely a year later, Dave got fired, and Ryan returned after CEO. I always joke that Decoder is a show about org charts… so why did Ryan make and then unmake the biggest org chart decision there is? 

Links: 

Can software simplify the supply chain? Ryan Petersen thinks so - The Verge

Amazon consumer chief Dave Clark to join Flexport as its new CEO

Flexport CEO Dave Clark resigns from logistics startup after one year in the role

Flexport founder publicly slams his handpicked successor for hiring spree, rescinds offers

Ousted Flexport CEO Dave Clark strikes back

The real story behind a tech founder's 'tweetstorm that saves Christmas'

Panama Canal has gotten so dry and backed up after brutal drought that shippers are paying up to $4m to jump the queue

When Shipping Containers Sink in the Drink | The New Yorker

Transcript:

 https://www.theverge.com/e/23770977

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The US Digital Service has a fascinating structure: it comprises nearly 250 people, all of whom serve two-year stints developing apps, improving websites, and streamlining government services. You could call USDS the product and design consultancy for the rest of the government.

The Obama administration launched the USDS in 2014, after the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov and the tech sprint that saved it. USDS administrator Mina Hsiang explains to Decoder how it all works, and what she hopes it can do next.

Links: 

Here’s Why Healthcare.gov Broke Down (2013)

Obamacare's 'tech surge' adds manpower to an already-bloated project (2013)

Decoder: Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet

Jeff Bezos Confirmed the "Question Mark Method"

A comprehensive list of 2023 tech layoffs

Tech to Gov

U.S. Digital Corps

Presidential Innovation Fellows

AI.gov

United States Digital Service

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23761681

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

IBM made some announcements this week about its plans for the next ten years of quantum computing: there are new chips, new computers, and new APIs. Quantum computers could in theory entirely revolutionize the way we think of computers… if, that is, someone can build one that’s actually useful.

Jerry Chow, director of quantum systems at IBM, explains to Decoder just how close the field is to actual utility.  

Links: 

What is a Qubit? | Microsoft Azure

IBM Quantum Summit 2023

The Wired Guide to Quantum Computing

IBM Makes Quantum Computing Available on IBM Cloud to Accelerate Innovation (2016)

Multiple Patterning - Semiconductor Engineering

IBM Quantum Roadmap (2023)

That viral LK-99 ‘superconductor’ isn’t a superconductor after all - The Verge

NIST to Standardize Encryption Algorithms That Can Resist Attack by Quantum Computers

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23752312

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I’m talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. It’s a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, and Wix’s business today is less about web publishing, and more about providing software to help business owners run their entire companies. It’s fascinating, and Avishai has built a fascinating structure inside of Wix to make all that happen.  

Wix is also an Israeli company. Avishai joined from the company’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. And I’ll just tell you right up front that we talked about Israel’s war with Hamas and its impact on the company. And that this conversation was not always comfortable. But the main theme of our conversation was, of course, the future of the web, especially a web that seems destined to be overrun by cheap AI-generated SEO spam.

Links: 

• Doom runs on Excel
• Wix will let you build an entire website using only AI prompts
• Wix.com Launches Wix ADI and Delivers the Future of website creation
• YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians
• The people who ruined the internet
• The restaurant nearest Google
• OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
• Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena on why anyone makes a website in 2023
• What will changing Section 230 mean for the internet?

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23742026

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What actually happened at OpenAI in the last three days? Decoder host and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Verge editors Alex Heath and David Pierce to break it down and try to work out what's next.

Further reading:

• Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI
• OpenAI’s new CEO is Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear
• OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO
• Emmett Shear named new CEO of OpenAI by board
• Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
• Hundreds of OpenAI employees threaten to resign and join Microsoft
• Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

We’re doing a survey on how people use The Verge (and what they’d want from a Verge subscription). If you’re interested in helping us out, you can fill out the survey right here: http://theverge.com/survey

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Liam James, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. It was edited by Andru Marino. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Jim Rowan, the CEO of Volvo Cars. Now, Jim’s only been at Volvo for a short time. He took over in 2022 after a decades-long career in the consumer electronics industry. Before Volvo, his two longest stints were at BlackBerry, whose QNX software is used in tons of cars, and then at Dyson, which once tried and failed to make an electric car. Jim and I talked a lot about how that unique experience has influenced how he thinks about the transformational changes happening in the world of cars.

For Volvo, the stakes are high. The company has pledged to be all-electric by the end of the decade, and Jim is also making some very different bets on software and revenue than the rest of the car industry. Jim’s view is that automakers are undergoing three major shifts all at once: electrification, autonomy, and direct-to-consumer sales. With Volvo, Jim is trying to steer the ship through these changes and come out an EV-only carmaker on the other end.

Links:

• Volvo plans to sell only electric cars by 2030
• Volvo’s EX90 is a powerful computer that also happens to be an impeccably designed EV
• Can Polestar design a new kind of car company?
• The EV transition trips over its own cord
• Volvo’s upcoming EVs join the Tesla Supercharger bandwagon
• Future Volvo cars to run on Volvo operating system
• Audi and Volvo will use Android as the operating system in upcoming cars
• Volvo’s first EV will run native Android
• The rest of the auto industry still loves CarPlay and Android Auto
• The future of cars is a subscription nightmare
• Everybody hates GM’s decision to kill Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for its EVs

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23722862

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve got a good one today. I’m talking to former President Barack Obama about AI, social networks, and how to think about democracy as both of those things collide. 

I sat down with Obama last week at his offices in Washington, DC, just hours after President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order about AI. You’ll hear Obama say he’s been talking to the Biden administration and leaders across the tech industry about AI and how best to regulate it. My idea here was to talk to Obama the constitutional law professor more than Obama the politician. So this one got wonky fast. 

You’ll also hear him say that he joined our show because he wanted to reach you, the Decoder audience, and get you all thinking about these problems. One of Obama’s worries is that the government needs insight and expertise to properly regulate AI, and you’ll hear him make a pitch for why people with that expertise should take a tour of duty in the government to make sure we get these things right.

Links: 

• Biden releases AI executive order directing agencies to develop safety guidelines
• Clarence Thomas really wants Congress to regulate Twitter moderation
• Google CEO Sundar Pichai compares impact of AI to electricity and fire
• Sam Altman sells superintelligent sunshine as protestors call for AGI pause
• The Skokie case: How I came to represent the free speech rights of Nazis
• Disinformation is a threat to our democracy
• World leaders are gathering at the U.K.'s AI Summit. Doom is on the agenda.
• George R.R. Martin and other authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
• A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled
• Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23712912

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I'm talking with Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, a newer record label that I think looks a lot like the future of the music industry. As Golnar explains, Reservoir thinks of individual songs as assets, and after acquiring them, the company sets about monetizing those assets in various ways. This is a copyright-based business in an age where copyright is under a lot of pressure — from TikTok, generative AI, and all of the now-familiar threats to the music business.

If you're a Decoder listener, you know that I love thinking about the music industry. Whatever technology does to music, it does to everything else five years later. So paying attention to music is the best way I know to get ahead of the curve. I also just love music. Golnar is herself a musician. She obviously cares about music a lot, and she's clearly given a lot of thought to what happens next. So this was a great conversation. 

Links:

• Drake’s AI clone is here — and Drake might not be able to stop him
• Hipgnosis made mega deals for song catalogs. Its future Is unclear.
• Reservoir acquires iconic Tommy Boy Music for $100 million
• Ed Sheeran wins copyright case over Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’
• Spotify is reportedly making major changes to its royalty model
• Hipgnosis shareholders vote against continuation of UK-listed music investment trust
• AI can actually help protect creativity and copyrights
• Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright
• No Fakes Act wants to protect actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas
• ‘Glocalisation’ of music streaming within and across Europe

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23702539

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to internet policy legend Lawrence Lessig. He's been teaching law for more than 30 years, and is a defining expert on free speech and the internet — and something of a hero of mine, whose works I've been reading since college.

You’ll hear us agree that the internet at this moment in time is absolutely flooded with disinformation, misinformation, and other really toxic stuff that’s harmful to us as individuals and, frankly, to our future as a functioning democracy. But you’ll also hear us disagree a fair amount about what to do about it. The First Amendment, AI, copyright law — there's a lot to unpack here.

Links: 

https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/

https://www.protocol.com/facebook-papers

https://www.tiktok.com/@aocinthehouse/video/7214318917135830318?lang=en

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/sensitive-claims-bias-facebook-relaxed-misinformation-rules-conservative-pages-n1236182

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/repetition-lie-truth-propaganda/

https://www.theverge.com/23883027/alvarez-stolen-valor-first-amendment-kosseff-liar-crowded-theater

https://fortune.com/2023/05/30/sam-altman-ai-risk-of-extinction-pandemics-nuclear-warfare/

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2019-20/september-october/into-fandomverse/

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23693274

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology that’s ever existed. As Kashmir reports, you simply plug a photo of someone into Clearview’s app, and it will find every photo of that person that’s ever been posted on the internet. It’s breathtaking and scary.

Kashmir was the journalist who broke the first story about Clearview’s existence, starting with a bombshell investigation report that blew the doors open on the company’s clandestine operations. Over the past few years, she’s been relentlessly reporting on Clearview’s growth, the privacy implications of facial recognition technology, and all of the cautionary tales that inevitably popped up, from wrongful arrests to billionaires using the technology for personal vendettas. The book is fantastic. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’re going to love it, and I highly recommend it. 

Links: 

• The secretive company that may end privacy as we know it
• What we learned about Clearview AI and its secret ‘co-founder’
• Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests
• hiQ and LinkedIn reach proposed settlement in landmark scraping case
• My chilling run-in with a secretive facial-recognition app
• Clearview’s facial recognition app Is identifying child victims of abuse
• ‘Thousands of dollars for something I didn’t do’
• How we store and search 30 billion faces
• Clearview AI agrees to permanent ban on selling facial recognition to private companies
• Clearview fined again in France for failing to comply with privacy orders
• Privacy law prevents Illinoisans from using Google app’s selfie art feature
• Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition to ban its owner’s enemies

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23683175

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we’re bringing you the last of our live-on-stage interviews from the 2023 Code Conference. Verge deputy editor Alex Heath sat down to chat with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. 

Roblox definitely started out as a kid thing, but the company has big plans to change all that, and Alex got to find out a bit about how that’s going. Roblox is determined to be a platform, even more than a product — something users can develop games and experiences on. And of course, David and Alex spoke about AI. David sees a lot of opportunity for generative AI to help content creators on the Roblox platform in the not-so-distant future. 

Links: 

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfYz8weQm4M
• https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/21/roblox-cuts-30-on-talent-acquisition-team-as-hiring-slows/
• https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/8/23864858/roblox-ceo-prediction-adults-dating-experiences-rdc-2023
• https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23889307/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-wearables-connect
• https://www.theverge.com/23775268/roblox-ceo-david-baszucki-gaming-metaverse-robux-virtual-reality
• https://mashable.com/article/karlie-kloss-roblox-klossette
• https://www.theverge.com/23734209/parsons-roblox-design-class-metaverse-fashion

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23677085

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Amanda Rose Smith.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve got another interview from the Code Conference today. My friend and co-host, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, and I had a chance to talk with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. Rivian is a newer company — RJ started it in 2009, and it took more than 10 years to start shipping cars to consumers. But its first vehicle, the R1T pickup, made a big splash when it arrived in 2021, and the company has more back orders for both the R1T and its second vehicle, the R1S SUV, than it can handle. For now.

We asked RJ about that production ramp and whether Rivian can meet demand, and whether it’s just early adopters buying EVs or if they’ve finally gone mainstream. The conversation also touched on Rivian’s deal with Amazon and the auto industry’s push toward subscription features. And, of course, I had to ask Scaringe about the Cybertruck. How could I resist?!

Links: 

• BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month
• BMW drops plan to charge a monthly fee for heated seats
• U.A.W. expands strikes at automakers: Here’s what to know.
• Rivian boosts EV production target as supply problems ease
• Ford F-150 Lightning gets $10K price cut as ramping supply meets demand
• First look at Cybertruck’s comically large windshield wiper in action
• Amazon says it has ‘over a thousand’ Rivian electric vans making deliveries in the US
• Rivian to adopt Tesla's charging standard in EVs and chargers
• Rivian electric pickup caught fire while charging at Electrify America station

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23672708

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, when I was co-hosting the Code Conference, I got to talk with Getty Images CEO Craig Peters. The generative AI boom is a direct threat to Getty in many ways. For example, the company is suing Stability AI for training the Stable Diffusion model on Getty content — sometimes clearly including AI-generated copies of the Getty watermark — without permission.

Getty's answer? Its own proprietary, in-house AI tool, trained — with permission — on its own content, using a model where the original creators can get paid. Getty's put some pretty strict guardrails around it for now, but, as even Craig told us, there's still a lot of work to do.

Links: 

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/21/23364696/getty-images-ai-ban-generated-artwork-illustration-copyright

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images-stable-diffusion

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23884679/getty-ai-generative-image-platform-launch

https://www.theverge.com/23900198/microsoft-kevin-scott-ai-art-bing-google-nvidia-decoder-interview

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-internet-law-politicians-love-to-hate-explained/

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-sides-against-andy-warhol-foundation-in-copyright-infringement-cas

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/26/23808184/big-ai-really-wants-to-convince-us-that-theyre-cautious

https://journal.everypixel.com/ai-image-statistics

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/22/1177590231/fake-viral-images-of-an-explosion-at-the-pentagon-were-probably-created-by-ai

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23667741

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Amanda Rose Smith.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I co-hosted the Code Conference last week, and today’s episode is one of my favorite conversations from the show: Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott. If you caught Kevin on Decoder a few months ago, you know that he and I love talking about technology together. I really appreciate that he thinks about the relationship between technology and culture as much as we do at The Verge, and it was great to add the energy from the live Code audience to that dynamic.

Kevin and I talked about how things are going with Bing and Microsoft’s AI efforts, as well the company’s relationship with Nvidia and whether it's planning to develop its own AI chips. I also asked Kevin some pretty philosophical questions about AI: Why would you write a song or a book when AI is out there making custom content for other people? Well, it’s because Kevin thinks the AI is still “terrible” at it for now, as Kevin found out firsthand. But he also thinks that creating is just what people do, and AI will help more people become more creative.

Links: 

• Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott thinks Sydney might make a comeback
• Hands-on with the new Bing: Microsoft’s step beyond ChatGPT
• Microsoft Bing hits 100 million active users in bid to grab share from Google
• How Microsoft is trying to lessen Its addiction to OpenAI as AI costs soar
• AMD CEO Lisa Su on the AI revolution and competing with Nvidia
• Microsoft's tiny Phi-1 language model shows how important data quality is for AI training
• Microsoft says listing the Ottawa Food Bank as a tourist destination wasn’t the result of ‘unsupervised AI’

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23664239

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We spent a lot of time here on Decoder talking about electric vehicles and the future of cars and we’re usually talking about passenger vehicles or maybe cargo vans. But there’s another huge industry that can also reap the benefits of electrified transportation: agriculture. 

I co-hosted the Code Conference this week where I had the opportunity to hangout onstage with Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa. Honestly, this was one of my favorite conversations of the entire event. 

We are utterly reliant on farming as a species, and farming is utterly reliant on tractors. If we don’t have tractors, we don’t have food. But electrifying farms is hard, and Praveen explained how he and Monarch are trying to tackle that challenge. The ambition is to compete in an open way with closed platforms like John Deere, and Praveen said his goal for the Monarch platform is to be the Android of agriculture. 

Links: 

• Electric robot tractors powered by Nvidia AI chips are here
• John Deere turned tractors into computers — what’s next?
• John Deere commits to letting farmers repair their own tractors (kind of)
• Monarch Tractors to be manufactured by Foxconn
• Foxconn begins rolling first Monarch electric tractors off assembly lines in Lordstown
• A sneak peek into Monarch Tractor's vision-based AI technology
• CNH Industrial, Monarch Tractor agree electrification technologies deal

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23659941

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we’re bringing you something a little different. The Code Conference was this week, and we had a great time talking live onstage with all of our guests. We’ll be sharing a lot of these conversations here in the coming days, and the first one we’re sharing is my chat with Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. 

Lisa and I spoke for half an hour, and we covered an incredible number of topics, especially about AI and the chip supply chain. The balance of supply and demand is overall in a pretty good place right now, Lisa told us, with the notable exception of these high-end GPUs powering all of the large AI models that everyone’s running. The hottest GPU in the game is Nvidia’s H100 chip. But AMD is working to compete with a new chip Lisa told us about called the MI300 that should be as fast as the H100. You’ll also hear Lisa talk about what companies are doing to increase manufacturing capacity. 

Finally, Lisa answered questions from the amazing Code audience and talked a lot about how much AMD is using AI inside the company right now. It’s more than you think, although Lisa did say AI is not going to be designing chips all by itself anytime soon. 

Okay, Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD. Here we go. 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23658688

Links: 

• AI startup Lamini bets future on AMD's Instinct GPUs
• Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act
• Pat Gelsinger came back to turn Intel around — here’s how it’s going
• Huawei’s chip breakthrough poses new threat to Apple in China — and questions for Washington
• AMD expands AI product lineup with GPU-only Instinct MI300X
• Microsoft is reportedly helping AMD expand into AI chips
• US curbs AI chip exports from Nvidia and AMD to some Middle East countries
• Apple on the iPhone 15 Pro: 'It's Going to be the Best Game Console'

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we have a special episode for you. The Code Conference wrapped up this week, and the finale included a rare interview from my Code co-host and CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin with X CEO Linda Yaccarino. To say the sit-down with Elon Musk’s No. 2 was confrontational would be an understatement. 

Yaccarino appeared both unprepared to answer tough questions and very combative, especially when asked about comments from former trust and safety head Yoel Roth, who’s become an outspoken critic of the direction of the company since Elon took over. Roth spoke onstage at Code with Kara Swisher just an hour before, where he warned Yaccarino of the risks of the job and spoke about the extreme harassment he’s faced since leaving the company. 

Yaccarino also gave us some updated stats on X user metrics and claimed the company would turn a profit in 2024. And of course, there were some very terse exchanges concerning whether Elon really plans to start charging a subscription fee to use the platform, if he seriously plans to sue the Anti-Defamation League, and the company’s recent cuts to its election integrity team. It’s a jaw-dropping interview, and you really have to listen to the whole thing.

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta's apps, the Quest 3, and other news from the company's Connect conference, which kicked off today. 

After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. "I think we've done a lot of good things," he said. "But for the next wave of my life and for the company — but also outside of the company with what I'm doing at CZI [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] and some of my personal projects — I define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with." For Zuckerberg, "awesome things" means figuring out how to combine his company's AR, VR, and AI ambitions into new products. 

This rare interview with the Meta CEO also includes details on his ongoing feud with Elon Musk and the quest to beat X/Twitter using Threads, his perspective on open source, and his vision for decentralized social media. Okay, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here we go.

Links:

• Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match
• The three reasons Twitter didn’t sell to Facebook
• Threads app usage plummets despite initial promise as refuge from Twitter
• Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss
• You can now verify your Threads profile on Mastodon
• In show of force, Silicon Valley titans pledge ‘getting this right’ With AI
• Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere
• A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled
• Custom AI chatbots are quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom
• Meta’s Smart Glasses can take calls, play music, and livestream from your face
• Meta’s $499.99 Quest 3 headset is all about mixed reality and video games
• The Meta Quest 3 is sharper, more powerful, and still trying to make mixed reality happen
• Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TechCrunch is one of the most important trade publications in the world of tech and startups, and its annual Disrupt conference is where dozens of major companies have launched… and some have failed.

Matt has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch for essentially a decade now, and he and I have been both friends and competitors the entire time. We’ve competed for scoops, traded criticisms, and asked each other for advice in running our publications and managing our teams.

So when Matt announced last month that he’s stepping down from his role at TechCrunch it felt important to have him come on for what you might call an exit interview — a look back at the past decade running a media outlet at the center of the tech ecosystem, with all of the chaos that’s entailed.

Links: 

Why We Sold TechCrunch To AOL, And Where We Go From Here | TechCrunch (2010)

TechCrunch founder leaves AOL in a cloud of acrimony | CNN Money (2011)

SB Nation Sacks AOL in Raid of Former Engadget Team for Competing New Tech Site, As AOL Zeroes in on New EiC | All Things D (2011)

Why Every Company Needs A 'No Bozos' Policy | Forbes (2012)

Artificial Intelligence Nonprofit OpenAI Launches With Backing From Elon Musk And Sam Altman | TechCrunch

Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Nick Statt and Kate Cox. It was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, from longtime space reporter and Verge alum Loren Grush, is out today.

It’s been 40 years since Sally Ride became the first American woman in space — but she was far from the last. In the early 1980s six women — Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid — would get a chance to fly a mission on one of the space shuttles… including, unfortunately, the ill-fated 1986 Challenger launch.

The story of the six may be history, but it’s far from ancient, and there’s a lot going on here that ties directly to today. And of course, what’s an astronaut story without some high-flying hijinks in it? Listen to the end for Loren’s favorite.

Links:

Nichelle Nichols - NASA Recruitment Film (1977)

Top Black Woman Is Ousted By NASA | The New York Times (1973)

The Space Truck | The Washington Post (1981)

NASA Artemis

Five former SpaceX employees speak out about harassment at the company | The Verge

Why did Blue Origin leave so many female space reporters out of its big reveal? | The Verge

‘We better watch out’: NASA boss sounds alarm on Chinese moon ambitions | Politico

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule | The New Yorker

US Takes First Step Toward Regulating Commercial Human Spaceflight | Bloomberg

Apply to attend the Code Conference

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okta is a big company, a Wall Street SaaS darling. For most of us, it's the thing we have to log into 50 times a week just to get any work done. But from Okta's point of view, Jameeka Green Aaron told us, it's an identity company.

I spoke with Jameeka about what "identity" really means — in the digital space, in your real life, and at work — in 2023, and how an identity-based approach might be more or less secure than other approaches. I’m also gearing up to host Code in September (apply to attend here), and I’m thinking a lot about AI — very much a challenge for the future of security, even in a biometric-based era.

Links:

Apple IDs now support passkeys — if you’re on the iOS 17 or macOS Sonoma betas

How to use a passkey to sign in to your Google account

Windows 11 tests letting you sign in to websites with a fingerprint or face

Apple, Google, and Microsoft will soon implement passwordless sign-in on all major platforms

Microsoft called out for ‘blatantly negligent’ cybersecurity practices

Okta Faces Long Road Back

At Okta, CTO and CISO collaborate by design

Apply to attend the Code Conference

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Perkins Miller is the CEO of Fandom, which both hosts thousands of wikis for everything from Disney to Grand Theft Auto and also runs several publications. Millions of people contribute millions of pieces of content to the platform, and Fandom surrounds all that content with ads and uses all that data to generate insights about how fans think about their favorite games, TV shows, and movies.

While you might enjoy the content, a lot of people have complaints — especially about the sheer number of ads. We talked about what it means to host user-generated content in 2023; content moderation; and the general state of media, especially games media, which is pretty rocky right now. I’m also gearing up to host the Code Conference in September (apply to attend here), and I’ve been thinking a lot about AI, search, and the web — all very much big challenges on the horizon for Fandom.

Links:

Layoffs Hit GameSpot, Giant Bomb Just Months After Fandom Buys Them - Kotaku

How Fandom's first-party data, FanDNA, is expanding to improve recommendations for advertisers and audiences - Digiday

The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of 'model collapse' as AI trains on AI-generated content - VentureBeat

How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history - The Verge

‘Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I. - The New York Times

Someone keeps accusing fanfiction authors of writing their fic with AI, and nobody knows why - The Verge

Massive Zelda Wiki Reclaims Independence Six Months Before Tears of the Kingdom - Kotaku

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site - PC Gamer

Trials and Tribble-ations (episode) - Memory Alpha

Apply to attend the Code Conference

Transcript:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters, and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We have a little surprise in the feed today: An episode of "Land of the Giants," which is all about Tesla this season. Former Verge transportation reporter Tamara Warren and former Jalopnik EIC Patrick George, who are both deeply sourced in the world of cars, host, and every episode has reporting and insight about Tesla that really hasn’t been shared before. It was ahead of the EV competition in basically every way for a long time. But the question Tamara and Patrick want to answer is: Is Tesla still winning by default? And where is the competition pulling ahead now that every carmaker is doing EVs? I joined them in this episode to discuss how modern cars, especially EVs, are being totally rethought as rolling computers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AWS is quite a story. It started as an experiment almost 20 years ago with Amazon trying to sell its excess server capacity. And people really doubted it. Why was the online bookstore trying to sell cloud services? But now, AWS is the largest cloud services provider in the world, and it’s the most profitable segment of Amazon, generating more than $22 billion in sales last quarter alone. By some estimates, AWS powers roughly one-third of the entire global internet. And on the rare occasion an AWS cluster goes down, an unfathomable number of platforms, websites, and services feel it, and so do hundreds of millions of users.

Adam Selipsky was there almost from the start: he joined in 2005 and became CEO of AWS in 2019 when former AWS CEO Andy Jassy took over for Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon. Even with big competitors such as Microsoft and Google gaining ground, he estimates that only 10 percent of his potential customers overall have made the jump to the cloud. 

That leaves lots of room to grow, and I wanted to know where he thinks that growth can come from — and importantly, what will keep AWS competitive as the word “cloud” starts to mean everything and nothing.

AWS is going big on AI, but it has some challenges. Adam and I got into all of it and into the weeds of what it means to be an AI provider at scale. It’s uncharted territory.

Links:

Big Three Dominate the Global Cloud Market

Amazon’s server outage broke fast food apps like McDonald’s and Taco Bell

Amazon names former exec Adam Selipsky as the new head of AWS

AWS is ready to power AI agents that can handle busywork instead of just chatting

Nvidia reveals H100 GPU for AI and teases ‘world’s fastest AI supercomputer’

Amazon plans to rework Alexa in the age of ChatGPT

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/23824200/ai-cloud-amazon-aws-adam-selipsky

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

ActivityPub is back in the news, thanks to Meta’s Threads launch and Elon’s continued immolation of Twitter — now X. That makes this the perfect time to dig into the Decoder archives to hear what Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko thinks about the future of social media. Mastodon got a head start as the most well-known of the rising decentralized social networks, but that’s changing fast. Bluesky, on a competing protocol, is picking up steam and Threads promises to decentralize in the future, using the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon. That’s a big deal, with big potential.

Verge Editor-at-Large David Pierce has been covering all this very closely. Before we jump into the interview with Rochko, I spoke with David to help update everyone on what ActivityPub even is, and what it could mean for the future of social media.

Links:

More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter - The Verge 

A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone - The Verge

Elon Musk - The Verge

Benevolent dictator for life - Wikipedia

Mastodon Social

Eugen Rochko (@[email protected])   

Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? - The Verge   

Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse - The Verge

We tried to run a social media site and it was awful | Financial Times

Denial-of-service attack - Wikipedia  

Can ActivityPub save the internet? - The Verge 

Five reasons Threads could still go the distance - The Verge

What's next for Threads - The Verge

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23422689 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I’m talking to Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, the ubiquitous web hosting and design company. If you’re a podcast listener, you’ve heard a Squarespace ad. 

I was excited to talk to Anthony because it really feels like we’re going through a reset moment on the internet, and I wanted to hear how he’s thinking about the web and what websites are even for in 2023.

If you’re a Vergecast listener, you know I’ve been saying it feels a lot like 2011 out there. The big platforms like Facebook and TikTok are very focused on entertainment content. Twitter is going through… let’s call them changes. People are trying out new platforms like Instagram Threads and rethinking their relationships with old standbys like Reddit. And the introduction of AI means that search engines like Google, which was really the last great source of traffic for web pages, just doesn’t seem that reliable anymore as it begins to answer more questions directly. It’s uncertain, and exciting: a lot of things we took for granted just a couple years ago are up for grabs, and I think that might be a good thing.

I love talking to people who’ve been building on the web for this long, and Anthony was no exception – we had fun with this one. Also I think this is the most we have ever talked about pressure washers on Decoder. 

Links:

Google sunsets Domains business and shovels it off to Squarespace - The Verge

How Did Squarespace Know Podcasts Would Get This Big? - The New York Times

Watch Squarespace CEO on Leveraging AI Into Website Building - Bloomberg

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23559195

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Jackie McDermott and Raghu Manavalan, and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters, and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the newly created division of Google responsible for AI efforts across the company. Google DeepMind is the result of an internal merger: Google acquired Demis’ DeepMind startup in 2014 and ran it as a separate company inside its parent company, Alphabet, while Google itself had an AI team called Google Brain. 

Google has been showing off AI demos for years now, but with the explosion of ChatGPT and a renewed threat from Microsoft in search, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai made the decision to bring DeepMind into Google itself earlier this year to create… Google DeepMind.

What’s interesting is that Google Brain and DeepMind were not necessarily compatible or even focused on the same things: DeepMind was famous for applying AI to things like games and protein-folding simulations. The AI that beat world champions at Go, the ancient board game? That was DeepMind’s AlphaGo. Meanwhile, Google Brain was more focused on what’s come to be the familiar generative AI toolset: large language models for chatbots, and editing features in Google Photos. This was a culture clash and a big structure decision with the goal of being more competitive and faster to market with AI products.

And the competition isn’t just OpenAI and Microsoft — you might have seen a memo from a Google engineer floating around the web recently claiming that Google has no competitive moat in AI because open-source models running on commodity hardware are rapidly evolving and catching up to the tools run by the giants. Demis confirmed that the memo was real but said it was part of Google’s debate culture, and he disagreed with it because he has other ideas about where Google’s competitive edge might come into play.

We also talked about AI risk and artificial general intelligence. Demis is not shy that his goal is building an AGI, and we talked through what risks and regulations should be in place and on what timeline. Demis recently signed onto a 22-word statement about AI risk with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and others that simply reads, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” That’s pretty chill, but is that the real risk right now? Or is it just a distraction from other more tangible problems like AI replacing labor in various creative industries? We also talked about the new kinds of labor AI is creating — armies of low-paid taskers classifying data in countries like Kenya and India in order to train AI systems. I wanted to know if Demis thought these jobs were here to stay or just a temporary side effect of the AI boom.

This one really hits all the Decoder high points: there’s the big idea of AI, a lot of problems that come with it, an infinite array of complicated decisions to be made, and of course, a gigantic org chart decision in the middle of it all. Demis and I got pretty in the weeds, and I still don’t think we covered it all, so we’ll have to have him back soon.

Links:

Inside the AI Factory

Inside Google’s AI culture clash - The Verge

A leaked Google memo raises the alarm about open-source A.I. | Fortune

The End of Search As You Know It

Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft - The Verge

DeepMind reportedly lost a yearslong bid to win more independence from Google - The Verge

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23542786

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Jackie McDermott and Raghu Manavalan, and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters, and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Roblox has 66 million daily users, and people spent 14 billion collective hours on Roblox in just Q1 of 2023. But its CEO David Baszucki still wants to see the company grow. 

One idea? Aging up the kinds of experiences that are allowed on its platform. Roblox recently introduced 17+ experiences. It wants to add new AI world-building capabilities. It’s even partnering with advertisers to roll out more immersive ad experiences.

It’s been years since the number of adults gaming outnumbered kids – it seems like that’s driving a lot of growth for everyone, including Roblox. But these virtual world games seem like they all want to expand to be much more than just for kids, and much more than just for games.

If you think about it, Roblox is already like a metaverse. Schools are using it for classes, companies are starting to advertise there, and people are just hanging out as avatars. 

It’s already big, but the hope is to get much, much bigger.

Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge, got the chance to chat with David up at Roblox headquarters in San Mateo, California. Their conversation covered a lot: why now’s the time for Roblox to grow up, the classic Decoder questions about structure and decision-making, and sadly, why infinite Robux isn’t a thing. Apologies to all the eight year olds out there.

Okay, Roblox CEO David Baszucki. Here we go.

Links:

Roblox will allow exclusive experiences for people 17 and over

Roblox, explained - The Verge

Fortnite and Roblox are dueling for the future of user-built games - The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Raghu Manavalan and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve spent more than two minutes somewhere on social media, you have probably come across Gary Vaynerchuk. For years I have wondered, is this just a character? Or is there a real Gary Vaynerchuk somewhere behind “GaryVee,” the social media entrepreneur and internet brand?

Gary got his start working at his family’s liquor store, which he turned into an online wine shop. That’s where he started in social media, hosting a long-running YouTube show called “Wine Library TV.” He parlayed that into the gigantic GaryVee brand, which at its core, is about entrepreneurship. Gary co-founded the restaurant reservation platform Resy, which he sold to American Express in 2019, and Empathy Wines which he sold in 2020. 

The Vaynerchuk empire remains vast, and it’s structured in complicated ways. There’s holding company VaynerX, which contains the ad agency VaynerMedia. There’s another company called Gallery Media which owns lifestyle websites. Gary even co-founded a sports agency – VaynerSports, with pro athletes like the NFL’s Kirk Cousins and Sauce Gardner on the roster, MLB shortstop Bo Bichette, and a variety of combat athletes.

On top of all that, there’s a serious upheaval going on in digital media. The era of the social web is coming to a major moment of change, with new platforms like TikTok in the mix and old standbys like Twitter and Reddit going through complicated and controversial resets. New platforms bring new personalities and influencers, who are native to those platforms and maybe better at capturing the audience there.

It’s one thing when you’re the first GaryVee. But staying GaryVee, in a time of change, and pitching brands and companies that his approach to social media will stay relevant, is an ongoing challenge.

We got to chat with Gary at his Hudson Yards office in Manhattan and I will tell you, he did not hold back with his answers.

Links:

A trip to the GaryVee convention, where everyone is part of crypto’s 1 percent - The Verge

How Gary Vaynerchuk Became an NFT Guru

Gary Vaynerchuk expects NFTs to expand beyond digital collectibles long term | TechCrunch

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23530741

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Jackie McDermott and Raghu Manavalan. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs – mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. Then, the company can be sold or taken public again for a hefty profit. But don’t worry—if it doesn’t work out, the PE firms are extracting fees at every step of the process so they get paid no matter what happens.

In another world, these PE deals are just boring financing strategies or maybe the backbone of the occasional juicy corporate takeover story. In Decoder world, PE is everywhere. Since the modern PE industry kicked off in the 1980’s, it’s grown virtually unchecked, and as author Brendan Ballou explains, that’s had seriously negative consequences for all kinds of markets and consumers. Private equity affects everything from the modern nursing home industry, to the Solarwinds hack, one of the biggest hacks in U.S. history.

Brendan Ballou is the author of Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America. Brendan is also a federal prosecutor and he served as Special Counsel for Private Equity in the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, so he’s uniquely suited to writing a book like this. Although he will be the first to tell you, the book does not reflect the views of the DOJ.

This is a wonky episode, but it’s essential.

Links:

Plunder by Brendan Ballou 

How Private Equity Buried Payless - The New York Times 

Barnes & Noble is going back to its indie roots to compete with Amazon - Decoder, The Verge

How arson led to a culture reboot at Traeger, with CEO Jeremy Andrus - Decoder, The Verge

Opinion | Private Equity Is Gutting America — and Getting Away With It - The New York Times

Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift, and antitrust – explained - The Verge

What is chokepoint capitalism, with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Jackie McDermott and Raghu Manavalan, and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters, and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jennifer Witz is the CEO of SiriusXM. You probably know the company as the satellite radio brand in virtually every new car, but it also owns Pandora, a huge podcast network that includes Team Coco and 99% Invisible, a content operation with huge stars like Howard Stern, and has broadcast deals with every major sports league.

SiriusXM is effectively the dominant market leader for built-in premium audio in cars, in a time when competition is increasing. As the infotainment system in cars gets ever more complex and computer-like, the Sirius experience has to keep up. On top of that, the state of car software is a mess. GM announced it won’t support Apple CarPlay in new EVs. Other companies are using various versions of Android. Tesla has its own platform. And Sirius has to support all of it with applications that compete with Big Tech companies, all while continuing to integrate the satellite hardware into the cars themselves — on top of launching satellites on SpaceX rockets.

Links:

After layoffs, SiriusXM looks to star-studded podcasts

What Is SiriusXM with 360L? A Breakdown of the New Audio Platform 

SiriusXM CEO Calls Audio Ad Sales Market “Tough”