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Submit ReviewTravis Katz is the CEO of BrightDrop, a subsidiary of GM that makes electrified delivery vans with an eye toward rebooting all of how delivery works. BrightDrop has pretty big partnerships already, with names like FedEx, Verizon, and Walmart committed to its Zevo 600 van, and it’s got big ideas for making the steps from the van to your door more efficient as well with something called e-carts.
Katz says there’s a huge demand for delivery especially as online shopping keeps getting bigger, but the transportation network is at capacity, and you can’t just keep throwing more trucks and drivers on the road, or making city streets wider. His plan is to redesign the entire system to make it more efficient. So I wanted to know how he’s attacking that problem and making it manageable, all while getting buy-in from customers that won’t really accept delays or increased costs.
BrightDrop is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors, so I also wanted to know how that works, what he gets from being part of the big company, and which parts slow him down. Lots of classic Decoder stuff in this one.
Links:
GM’s electric delivery van just set a world record — with me riding shotgun - The Verge
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23451134
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 with help from Hadley Robinson 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
It is fair to say that Substack has had a dramatic week and a half or so, and I talked to their CEO Chris Best about it. The company announced a new feature called Substack Notes, which looks quite a bit like Twitter — Substack authors can post short bits of text to share links and kick off discussions, and people can reply to them, like the posts, the whole thing. Like I said, Twitter.
Twitter, under the direction of Elon Musk, did not like the prospect of this competition, and for several days last week, Twitter was taking aggressive actions against Substack. At one point you couldn’t even like tweets with Substack links in them. At another point, clicking on a Substack link resulted in a warning message about the platform being unsafe. And finally, Twitter redirected all searches for the word Substack to “newsletter.” Musk claimed Substack was somehow downloading the Twitter database to bootstrap Substack Notes, which, well, I’m still not sure what that means, but I at least asked Chris what he thought that meant and whether he was doing it.
It’s tempting to think of Substack like a rival platform to Twitter, but until the arrival of Substack Notes, it was much more like enterprise software. With Substack Notes, the company is in direct competition with social networks like Twitter. It’s shipping a consumer product that’s designed to be used by Substack readers. It is no longer just a software vendor; it’s a consumer product company. And that carries with it another set of content moderation concerns, that, after talking to Chris, I’m just not sure Substack is ready for. Like, I really don’t know. You’ll just have to listen to his answers — or really, non-answers — for yourself.
This is a wild one. I’m still processing it. Let me know what you think. Okay, Chris Best, CEO of Substack. Here we go.
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23445916
Links:
Can Substack CEO Chris Best build a new model for journalism? - The Verge
Now live for all: Substack Notes
Welcome to the new Verge (re Quick Posts)
Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? - The Verge
Twitter’s newsletter tool is shutting down in less than a month - The Verge
Elon Musk on Twitter: "@BretWeinstein 1. Substack links were never blocked..."
Can we regulate social media without breaking the First Amendment? - The Verge
How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg - The Verge
Newsletter platform Substack raises $65 mln in Andreessen Horowitz-led funding round | Reuters
venture-capital.html">Substack Drops Fund-Raising Efforts as Market Sours - The New York Times
Substack Notes, Twitter Blocks Substack, Substack Versus Writers
How much money do we think Substack lost last year? - The Verge
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras found himself playing an important role during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
Brex is what you might call a neobank — not a traditional bank but rather a financial services provider that helps companies manage how they spend money, corporate cards, travel expenses and the rest. In the middle of the SVB collapse, Brex was more than just a spending management company. It was also a safe place to park money.
Brex saw billions of deposits in a very short period of time, giving Dubugras a bird's-eye view of what was happening — and what was happening was not great for the banking system, especially in Silicon Valley. (Our own Liz Lopatto has been covering this in depth.)
I wanted to hear Dubugras' perspective on SVB both as a fintech CEO and a founder himself, whether he thought the crisis was rational or just a panic caused by group texts and easy-to-use mobile banking interfaces, what he thinks will happen to the startup ecosystem next, and how much of an opportunity all this was for Brex.
Dubugras is a young CEO. He just turned 27. He really surprised me with his depth here, and he will probably surprise some of you as well.
Okay, Henrique Dubugras, CEO of Brex. Here we go.
Links:
The tech industry moved fast and broke its most prestigious bank
Robinhood Users Say The Trading App Won’t Cash In Their Profitable Bets Against Silicon Valley Bank
What Is A Neobank? – Forbes Advisor
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23433504
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
Chris Cocks is the CEO of Hasbro, a company that just turned 100 this year. Hasbro is a huge company, making everything from Transformers to Lincoln Logs to My Little Pony and Monopoly. It also makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, which are massive and growing businesses. Chris was the head of that division, called Wizards of the Coast, before he became the CEO of Hasbro overall last year. Since then, he’s started the process of restructuring the company, which is pure Decoder bait.
He’s also dealt with some crises: He’s fended off an activist investor that wanted him to spin Wizards of the Coast out into a new company. The Magic community was upset that too many card sets were being released, including rare collector cards that could suddenly be bought by anybody who had enough money. Then, an attempt to change the open gaming license for Dungeons & Dragons led to a fan backlash, and Hasbro walked the entire plan back. We talked about these challenges, how he handled them, and what it means for toys and games to have such passionate fandoms. It really changes how Hasbro operates.
He’s also selling off part of eOne, the company’s TV and film production company — we get into why and how he decided to do that.
Chris is a lifelong gamer — you’ll hear him talk about that history several times. And he’s also keenly aware that toys and games have become an adults’ market as much as a kids’ one, and that changes the company’s business strategy. This is really a remarkable conversation: toys are a big, complex business.
Links:
Chris Cocks Is Hasbro’s Gamer in Chief
Chris Cocks Statement at Hasbro Investor Day
Hasbro strongly refutes claims it is ‘destroying’ Magic: The Gathering
Dungeons & Dragons finally addresses its new Open Gaming License
Hasbro CEO on D&D fiasco: ‘We misfired’ on the OGL but have ‘since course corrected’
the-gathering-hasbro.html">Magic: The Gathering Becomes a Billion-Dollar Brand for Toymaker Hasbro
Hasbro Puts Newly Acquired TV Brand Entertainment One (eOne) Back Up For Sale
Transcript:
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it 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
Today I’m talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and it’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls, you join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server, or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave, and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email and you’ll get it – if you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.
Now if you are like me, you hear the words open-source and decentralized, and then the word CEO, and you think – wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends – you’re going to hear Eugen and I say the phrase benevolent dictator for life in dead seriousness, because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.
Of course, we also talk about money, and structure – Mastodon doesn’t make a lot of money, and Eugen is figuring out how to build a structure that scale past just a handful of people — but keep that in mind, actually. This tiny mostly volunteer labor of love might very well be the future of social networking, and, if you believe the hype about ActivityPub, might have some part in the future of the web. That’s pretty exciting, even if things are seem a little messy in the moment.
Links:
More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter
A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone
Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social)
Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle?
Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse
We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
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
Meredith Kopit Levien is the CEO of The New York Times, which is perhaps the most famous journalism organization in the world, and certainly one of America’s most complicated companies.
The Times is 172 years old, and has only recently become a force on the internet. It’s hard to remember, but back in 2014 and ‘15, people thought the Times was doomed — that it would be replaced by BuzzFeed and Vice and Vox. Instead, the company has undergone a radical and sometimes painful public transformation, and emerged as something closer to Netflix or Spotify – a subscription business with a huge investment in product and engineering.
Meredith has led a lot of that change, and in particular, she’s led the charge in turning a Times subscription into much more than paying for news – NYT Cooking and Games are hit apps, and of course she bought Wordle last year in a bit of a coup.
We talked about that structure, how Meredith intends to appeal to a broader audience with all those products when the country is basically divided in half politically and one half doesn’t care for the Times at all, and about platforms and growth. And like all media organizations, the Times has a complex relationship with Google, so we talked about that, too.
Links:
Our Strategy | The New York Times Company
NYT CEO outlines plans to reach 15 million subscribers by 2027
Why the New York Times is buying the Athletic
Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play
The Economics at the Heart of the Times Union Standoff
'Unstoppable innovator': The meteoric rise of Meredith Kopit Levien, the next New York Times CEO
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23416720
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Amanda Rose Smith
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
This special episode dives deep on Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023, because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts. Here we go.
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23409098
Credits:
Thanks so much to everyone who talked to us and shared their valuable insights for this episode including Dean Budnik, Florian Ederer, Russ Tannen, and Sandeep Vaheesan. And special thanks to Makena Kelly and Jake Kastrenakes.
This episode was written and reported by Jackie McDermott and Owen Grove. It was produced by Jackie McDermott, Owen Grove, and Creighton DeSimone with help from Jasmine Lewis. It was edited by Callie Wright.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In this installment of our Centennial Series on companies that are over 100 years old, we are talking to Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. The last few decades have thrown some hurdles in Barnes & Noble’s way, however. Far from being the monster that inspired the plot of the movie You’ve Got Mail, it’s had to face down a new Goliath called Amazon and the general decline of big-box retail stores. After years of closures and declining revenues, Barnes & Noble was bought out by activist investors in 2019, who installed Daunt as CEO, and he’s managed to turn things around by doing two main things.
First, he has decentralized operations of the stores, letting each store act like a local bookshop and giving his booksellers more control over what titles they sell and display. He immediately ended a system that allowed publishers to pay for special placement in bookstores, which he said corrupted the entire system in service of short-term profits. Second, he’s using Barnes & Noble’s scale to build a purchasing and distribution pipeline that serves as the rest of the book industry’s competitor to Amazon.
We get into all of it — the culture wars, J.K. Rowling, book ban bills in states across the country, and how Barnes & Noble went from being the bully on the block to competing with Amazon.
Links
advisers-hedge-fund-buys-barnes-amp-noble-james-daunt-ceo-waterstones.html">Hedge Fund Buys Barnes & Noble
barnes-and-noble-james-daunt.html">Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble? - The New York Times
How Barnes & Noble transformed its brand from corporate bully to lovable neighborhood bookstore
Barnes & Noble to expand, marking a new chapter for private equity
#BookTok: Is TikTok changing the publishing industry?
How book lovers on TikTok are changing the publishing industry
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23406145
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.
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
Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.”
With the title of co-president and chief product and technology officer, Söderström is responsible for not only how Spotify looks and feels but also all the AI work happening behind the scenes to power its increasingly important recommendations. According to Söderström, it turns out that improving those recommendations is actually at the heart of the big redesign. “I think companies that don’t have an efficient user interface for a machine learning world are not going to be able to leverage machine learning,” he told Alex Heath on the newest episode of Decoder.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
Spotify is laying off 6 percent of its global workforce, CEO announces
Spotify’s new design turns your music and podcasts into a TikTok feed
Functional versus Unit Organizations
pizza-teams.html">Two-Pizza Teams
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23402123
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
Intro:
Steve Bandrowczak, the CEO of Xerox, an iconic company that got started all the way back in 1906 as a manufacturer of photo paper and is, of course, best known for pioneering the copy machine. Here in 2023, Xerox has moved well beyond paper. It now works with companies large and small to provide IT services: it optimizes workflows, manages data, automates parts of businesses, and yes, still fixes the printers.
Steve insists there’s still a lot in the world to print, and selling and servicing printers continues to be where Xerox begins its relationships with most customers. And fixing printers is getting high tech: Steve is excited about his new AR app that walks you through getting the copy machine working again so you don’t have to wait for a technician to come fix it.
We also talked about the future of Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, whether Xerox wants more consolidation, and we even spitball some ideas about how to get Gen Z excited about printers.
Links:
visentin-xerox-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare">John Visentin, Xerox C.E.O., Dies at 59
Xerox Ousts CEO In Deal With Icahn
Carl Icahn Makes Case for Xerox-HP Union
Xerox abandons $35 billion hostile bid for HP
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23394156
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.
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
Pali Bhat joined Reddit from Google about a year ago — he’s actually Reddit’s first-ever chief product officer, which is pretty surprising considering that Reddit is a series of product experiences: the reading experience, the writing experience, and importantly, the moderation experience. One thing we always say on Decoder is that the real product of any social network is content moderation, and Reddit is maybe the best example of that: every subreddit is shaped by volunteer moderators who use the tools Reddit builds for them. So Pali has a big job bringing all these products together and making them better, all while trying to grow Reddit as a platform.
This was a really deep conversation, and it touched on a lot of big Decoder themes. I think you’re going to like it. Okay, Pali Bhat, the chief product officer of Reddit. Here we go.
Links:
Reddit’s new features include a TikTok-style video feed
Reddit is bringing back r/Place, its April Fools’ Day art experiment
How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg
Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why
AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyone
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23390325
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
We taped this episode live at Hot Pod Summit. That’s our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It’s called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. Hot Pod Summit is where we bring that community of creators, trendsetters and decision-makers together to explore the latest developments in podcasting, audiobooks, and more. It was a packed house and a great time.
We ended the day by recording our first-ever live Decoder with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group. Conal oversees podcasting at a giant radio company, and his group accounts for a quarter of iHeart’s revenue, which was $1 billion last quarter alone. His team makes some of the biggest podcasts around, with huge talent like Will Ferrell, Shonda Rhimes, and Charlamagne tha God, who you’ll hear Conal talk about quite a lot.
Conal and iHeart Digital earned that success by doing some unconventional things. Whereas other big podcasting players like Spotify and Apple have tried to boost revenue through subscriptions or platform exclusivity, Conal shunned those approaches and said he’s going for big audience reach, made possible in part by his ability to run ads and even shows on iHeart’s huge network of traditional radio stations.
But that maverick approach has included some controversial steps as well. Last year, Verge alumni and Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman reported that iHeart worked with a firm called Jun Group to essentially buy podcast downloads through video games. To many in the industry, that seemed pretty disingenuous. So of course I asked Conal about that and lots more. He was a great guest, super game to answer the questions, especially in front of a live audience.
Links:
iHeartMedia Buys Stuff Media for $55 Million - WSJ
Podcasters Are Buying Millions of Listeners Through Mobile-Game Ads
Cost Per Thousand (CPM) Definition and Its Role in Marketing
Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for Joe Rogan’s podcast - The Verge
Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it? - Decoder, The Verge
Decoder with Nilay Patel (@decoderpod) Official | TikTok
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23381445
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
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems.
Today, I'm talking to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, the Pocket newsreader, and a bunch of other interesting internet tools.
Now as you all know, Decoder is secretly a podcast about org charts – maybe not so secretly, and Mozilla’s structure is really interesting. Mozilla itself is a nonprofit foundation, but it contains within it something called the Mozilla Corporation, which actually makes Firefox and the rest. Mitchell is the chairwoman of the foundation, and the CEO of the corporation. And the Mozilla Corporation, which they charmingly call MoCo, can make a profit - or it can least be taxed, which is an important distinction you’ll hear Mitchell talk about.
I bring this up because Mozilla has been around since 1994 in a variety of structures and business models – it started as a company called Netscape, and Mitchell was one of the first employees in the legal department. Netscape’s product was Netscape Navigator, the first commercial web browser, which of course changed the consumer internet and scared Microsoft so much it did a bunch of anticompetitive things that led to the famous antitrust case. In the meantime, Netscape got sold to AOL, and along the way Mitchell led the somewhat renegade Mozilla Project inside the company which eventually lead to Mozilla the non-profit foundation that eventually launched Firefox. It’s a lot!
But now Mitchell is trying to live up to Mozilla’s nonprofit ideals of protecting the open internet while still trying to compete and cooperate with tech giants like Apple and Google. And these are complicated relationships: Google still accounts for a huge percentage of Mozilla’s revenue – it pays hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine in Firefox. And Apple restricts what browser engines can run on the iPhone – Firefox Focus on the iPhone is still running Apple’s webkit engine, something that regulators, particularly in Europe want to change.
On top of all that, some big foundational pieces of the web are changing: Microsoft is aggressively rolling out its chatGPT-powered Bing search engine in an effort to displace Google and get people to switch to the Edge browser, and Twitter’s implosion means that Mitchell sees Mastodon as one of Mozilla’s next big opportunities.
So how does Mozilla get through this period of change while staying true to itself? And will anyone actually switch browsers again? Turns out – it might be easier to get people to switch on phones, than on desktops. That’s Mozilla’s belief, anyway.
Links:
The State of Mozilla: 2021 — 2022 Annual Report
The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton
Firefox drops Google as default search engine, signs five-year deal with Yahoo
Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why
Microsoft announces new Bing and Edge browser powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI
A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23362385
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
I’m coming to you from Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, where just a few hours ago, Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. There’s also a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window that can help you browse and understand web pages.
The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity. They demo’d it making a travel itinerary, posting to LinkedIn, and rewriting code to work in a different programming language.
After the presentation, I was able to get some time with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella has been very bullish on AI. He’s previously talked about AI as the next major computing platform. I wanted to talk about this next step in AI, the partnership with OpenAI, and why he thought now was the best time to go after Google search.
This is a short interview, but it’s a good one. Okay, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Here we go.
Watch this interview as a video
Microsoft announces new Bing and Edge browser powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI
All the news from Microsoft’s February AI event
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23354035
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today's episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Jackie McDermott, Vjeran Pavic and Becca Farsace 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
HBO started as an experiment. It was a way to get people to switch from getting TV over broadcast antennas to cable by offering events you’d otherwise need tickets to see: boxing, plays, movies. That’s where the name Home Box Office comes from.
But it grew from there in surprising ways: HBO was a major innovator in satellite distribution, in working with cable operators around the country, and of course in programming. The company’s taste and style has influenced and shaped culture for a generation now. And importantly, HBO did it without any real data: the cable companies owned all the subscribers, so HBO made decisions through instinct and experience.
The amazing thing about HBO is that it has stayed true to itself through an absolutely tumultuous set of ownership changes and strategy shifts. If you’re a Decoder listener you know about the chaos of AT&T and HBO Max and the sale to Discovery to create Warner Brothers Discovery, but it’s so much twistier than that.
I talked through all of those twists with Felix Gillette and John Koblin, authors of the terrific book It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO. Felix and John also peeled back the curtain on your favorite HBO shows from Sex and the City to Game of Thrones.
Before we get into the episode, I have to do our usual set of disclosures: I’m a Netflix executive producer. We made a Netflix show called The Future Of. You should watch it. I’m hopelessly biased in favor of the show we made. Also, Vox Media has a minority investment from Comcast. They don’t like me very much. And I worked at AOL Time Warner. I quit to start The Verge.
Ok that’s that. Let’s get into the interview—it’s a good one.
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23352141
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
A few weeks ago, President Biden was in the Netherlands, where he asked the Dutch government to restrict export from a company called ASML to China. ASML is the only company in the world that makes a specific machine needed to make the most advanced chips. Apple couldn’t make iPhone chips without this one machine from the Netherlands’ biggest company. ASML doesn’t just shape the Dutch economy—it shapes the entire world economy. How did that happen?
Chris Miller, Tufts professor and author of Chip War: The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology walked me through a lot of this, along with some deep dives into geopolitics and the absolutely fascinating chip manufacturing process. This one has everything: foreign policy, high powered lasers, hotshot executives, monopolies, the fundamental limits of physics, and, of course, Texas. Here we go.
Links:
US issues sweeping restrictions on chip sales to China
Japan and the Netherlands join US with tough chip controls on China
Pat Gelsinger came back to turn Intel around — here’s how it’s going
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23342471
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
I have this theory that music is usually about five years ahead of the rest of media in terms of its relationship to tech—whether that’s new formats based on new tech, like vinyl to CDs; new business models like streaming; or simply being disrupted by new kinds of artists who use new forms of promotion like TikTok in unexpected ways. I’ve always thought that if you can wrap your head around what’s happening to the music industry, you can pretty much see the future of TV or movies or the news or whatever it is, because the music industry just moves that fast.
I was talking about this with my friend Charlie Harding, the co-host of Switched on Pop, and he said that he thinks the upcoming Taylor Swift Eras Tour is itself the end of an era in music — that the age of cheap streaming services is coming to an inevitable conclusion, and that something has to change in order for industry to sustain itself in the future.
So, in this episode, Charlie and I walk through a brief history of the music business—which, despite its ever-changing business models, is permanently trying to find something to sell you for $20 whether that’s the music itself, all-access streaming, merch, and even NFTs—using Taylor Swift as a case study. We map her big moves against the business of music over time to try to see if this really is the end of an era. And maybe more importantly, to try and figure out if the music industry can sustain and support artists who are not Taylor Swift, because streaming, all by itself, definitely cannot.
Links:
Charlie’s first appearance on Decoder: Good 4 who? How music copyright has gone too far - The Verge
Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime - The Verge
Spotify launching in the US at 8AM tomorrow, open to all pre-registered users - The Verge
Metallica sued Napster 15 years ago today - The Verge
Taylor Swift calls Apple Music free trial 'shocking, disappointing' in open letter - The Verge
Taylor Swift versus Ticketmaster: the latest on the tour that may break up a giant - The Verge
The DOJ has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster's owner
How fandom built the internet as we know it, with Kaitlyn Tiffany - The Verge
Steve Aoki on the blockchain, the metaverse, and the business of music - The Verge
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23322720
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Hadley Robinson, 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. Our Sr. Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Last year I spoke with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s a book about artists and technology and platforms, and how different kinds of distribution and creations tools create chokepoints for different companies to capture value that might otherwise go to artists and creators.. In other words, it’s a lot of Decoder stuff.
As we were prepping this episode, the Decoder team realized it previews a lot of things we’re going to talk about in 2023: antitrust law. Ticketmaster. Spotify and the future of the music industry. Amazon and the book industry. And, of course, being a creator trying to make a living on all these platforms.
This episode is longer than normal, but it was a really great conversation and I'm glad we are sharing it with you.
Links:
What is Mixer, Ninja’s new exclusive streaming home?
This was Sony Music's contract with Spotify
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23311918
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
Tomer Cohen is the chief product officer at LinkedIn, and actually, I talked to Tomer twice. Here’s a little secret about Decoder: we do the interviews, and then often, the guest and I just keep chatting for a while. So after my first interview with Tomer, we were hanging out, talking about the perpetual battles between engineers, product managers, and designers. And he said something that completely jumped out at me:
“We might be wrong, but we’re not fucking confused.”
This isn’t a totally new line — it’s been floating around for a while, you can Google it — but you know I love an f-bomb, and honestly, it’s one of the most simple and clarifying things a manager can say, especially when managing across large teams. So I asked Tomer to come back and really dig in on that idea.
On top of that, we’ve been talking a lot about running social networks lately, and LinkedIn is a fascinating social network because it doesn’t have the same engagement-based success metrics as other social platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Tomer doesn’t care about time spent on LinkedIn; the platform is designed to be successful when people get new jobs. That means his ideas for features and user experiences are just really different.
Links:
Employment Situation Summary (Jobs Report)
December Workforce Report 2022 (LinkedIn)
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24304519/vision_to_values.png">Vision to values flowchart
ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream — and things are only going to get weirder
LinkedIn buys California-based SaaS learning platform
How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23281360
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
We have to talk about Twitter, right? Elon Musk bought it. He’s making all these changes, and he’s realizing that content moderation decisions are quite complicated, especially when the stakes are high.
But talking about Twitter in a vacuum seems wrong. There are lots of other social networks and community-based products, and they all have basically the same problems: some technical (you have to run the service), some political (you have to comply with various laws and platform regulations around the world), and some social (you have to get millions of users to post for free while making sure what they post is good stuff and not bad stuff).
So, we’re doing something a little different this week. First, I’m talking to Matt Mullenweg, who is the CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress, the blog hosting platform, and Tumblr, the social network, which he purchased from Verizon in 2019. Then, Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and I are going to break down a bunch of what Matt told me and apply it to Twitter to see what we can learn.
Okay, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr, followed by Alex Heath. Here we go.
Links:
How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird
Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner
Kanye West suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika
‘Martin Scorsese’s lost film’ Goncharov (1973), explained
Yahoo acquires Tumblr in $1.1 billion cash deal, promises 'not to screw it up'
Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner
twitter-elon-musk.html">Welcome to Tumblr. Now Go Away.
Work With Us / Twitter – Automattic
Tumblr will sell you two useless blue check marks for $8
Elon Musk is laying off even more Twitter workers
Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn't Work in 2022
How America turned against the First Amendment
First Amendment - Freedom of Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, and Petition | Constitution Center
America’s Favorite Flimsy Pretext for Limiting Free Speech
Elon Musk says Tim Cook told him Apple ‘never considered’ removing Twitter - The Verge
The Twitter Files - Matt Taibbi
Elon Musk’s promised Twitter exposé on the Hunter Biden story is a flop that doxxed multiple people
Twitter Blue is back, letting you buy a blue checkmark again
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23270126
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, we need to talk about Bob. Two Bobs, actually: Bob Iger, the former and now current CEO of Disney, and Bob Chapek, the man Iger handpicked as his replacement, who flamed out and was fired by the board, and then, on November 20th, was replaced by Bob Iger. Bobs, man.
The heart of this whole thing is total Decoder bait. It’s a story about how to structure a company like Disney. Then you add in the complexity of the shift to streaming, the future of TV and movies generally, and the gigantic reputation of a character like Bob Iger, who many people think could plausibly run for president. There’s just a lot going on here.
Whenever I need to talk Disney, media, and Bobs, I call one person: Julia Alexander, director of strategy at Parrot Analytics and a former reporter at The Verge. Julia pays a lot of attention to the streaming giants, she’s sourced inside all the companies battling for our attention, and she has a lot to say about the Bobs.
Links:
Bob Iger steps back in as Disney CEO, replacing Bob Chapek
Disney+ launch lineup: Every movie and TV show available to stream on day one - The Verge
Bob Iger steps down as Disney CEO, replaced by Bob Chapek - The Verge
Disney streaming chief Kevin Mayer resigns to become TikTok CEO - The Verge
Disney Plus surpasses 100 million subscribers - The Verge
Meta announces huge job cuts affecting 11,000 employees - The Verge
Netflix's $6.99 per month ad tier is now live
Disney’s major reorganization is good news for anyone who loves Disney Plus - The Verge
Functional Structure: Advantages and Disadvantages | Indeed.com
Pros and Cons of Implementing a Divisional Structure | Indeed.com
Disney Shows the Limits of Streaming - WSJ
Disney Erases Almost All Its Pandemic Gains After Earnings Miss
‘Strange World’: Beautiful to look at, but not much below the surface - The Washington Post
Watch The Future Of | Netflix Official Site
Kevin Mayer quits as TikTok CEO due to ongoing political turmoil - The Verge
Kevin Mayer Says His Firm Is In Deal Mode After Buying Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine
WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar announces exit as Discovery deal nears close - The Verge
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23259187
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
Bose is one of the most recognizable audio brands in the world: it was famous for the Wave radio in the 80s, it invented noise cancellation, you can see its logo on NFL sidelines every Sunday, and of course there are the popular consumer products like the QuietComfort headphones that reviewers like Chris Welch here at The Verge rate as some of the best in the game. Bose is in tons of cars as well: audio systems in GM, Honda, Hyundai, Porsche, and more are developed and tuned by Bose.
Bose was founded in 1964 by Dr. Amar Bose, who donated a majority of the shares of the company to MIT, where he was a professor. That means to this day, Bose is a private company with no pressure to go public. However, Bose still has to compete against big tech in talent, products, and compatibility.
So today I’m talking to Bose CEO Lila Snyder about Bose’s dependence on platform vendors like Apple and Google, how she thinks about standards like Bluetooth, and where she thinks she can compete and win against AirPods and other products that get preferential treatment on phones.
Links:
Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II review: noise cancellation domination
amar-bose-used-research-to-build-better-speakers.html">How Amar Bose used research to build better speakers
Bose names its first female CEO as wait continues for new products
Amar Bose ’51 makes stock donation to MIT
Meta announces huge job cuts affecting 11,000 employees
Amazon mass layoffs will reportedly ax 10,000 people this week
Elon Musk demands Twitter employees commit to ‘extremely hardcore’ culture or leave
The iPhone 7 has no headphone jack
Bluetooth Special Interest Group
Qualcomm Partners with Meta and Bose
Bose gets into hearing aid business with new FDA-cleared SoundControl hearing aids
Over-the-counter hearing aids could blur the line with headphones
New Bose-Lexie Hearing Aid to Enter the Over-the-Counter Market
Lexie Partners with Bose to Offer Lexie B1 Powered by Bose Hearing Aids
Bose Frames Tempo review: the specs to beat
Bose discontinues its niche Sport Open Earbuds
BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month
Seven CEOs and one secretary of transportation on the future of cars
Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23246668
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
Chris Licht faces an uphill battle at CNN. He got the CEO gig in the midst of a prickly merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery and right after the shocking exit of beloved long-time boss, Jeff Zucker. In his first six months, he’s shut down CNN+, ousted Brian Stelter, and shuffled anchors around, including Don Lemon and Jake Tapper. This week, the network chief held an internal town hall meeting where he faced a staff of thousands and discussed upcoming layoffs. Shortly afterwards, he sat down with Kara — who grilled him, of course.
She asks Licht whether he has any real actual power or if he’s simply executing orders from Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav — who is in search of cuts, as the company stares down the barrel at $50 billion in debt — and billionaire board member, John Malone, who has said he’d like to see more “centrist” programming from CNN. They discuss Licht’s vision for the newsroom, his plan to build trust with journalists who fear losing jobs, and how CNN will cover Donald Trump during the 2024 election.
Before the interview, Kara and Nayeema discuss the challenges facing journalism in an era of disinformation. Stay tuned for Kara’s closing rant on “citizen journalism” and Elon’s latest broadside against the press.
You can find Kara and Nayeema on Twitter @karaswisher and @nayeema.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, is in charge of Xbox and all the game studios that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Phil came to talk to us hours before the European Commission announced an in-depth investigation into Microsoft’s proposed 68.7 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which makes the enormous Call of Duty series, as well as Candy Crush on phones.
So I had the chance to ask Phil: Will he make the concessions that regulators want in order to close this deal? And is the deal really just about Call of Duty, or something else? Is Microsoft committed to keep Call of Duty available on Playstation?
Phil’s a candid guy. He’s been on Decoder before. I always enjoy talking to him, and this was a fun one.
Links:
Microsoft’s Phil Spencer on the new Xbox launch - The Verge
Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion - The Verge
Why Microsoft bought Bethesda for $7.5 billion
Microsoft announces big, multistudio push to create more Xbox exclusives
Bethesda’s Starfield and Redfall have been delayed to 2023
Tech antitrust pioneer Lina Khan will officially lead the FTC
Sony says Microsoft’s Call of Duty offer was ‘inadequate on many levels’
Microsoft: Xbox game streaming console is ‘years away'
This is Microsoft’s Xbox game streaming device
Google is shutting down Stadia in January 2023 - The Verge
Razer’s Edge is one sharp-looking cloud gaming Android handheld
Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld review: terminally online
Steam Deck review: it’s not ready
Tech Leaders Discuss the Metaverse’s Future | WSJ Tech Live 2022
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the business of Windows
Microsoft partners with Meta to bring Teams, Office, Windows, and Xbox to VR
EU opens ‘in-depth investigation’ into Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23223230
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
Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which makes a very popular design tool that allows designers and their collaborators to all work together right in a web browser. You know how multiple people can edit together in Google Docs? Figma is that for design work. We just redesigned The Verge; we used Figma extensively throughout that process.
So for years, people have been waiting on the inevitable Figma vs. Adobe standoff since Figma was such a clear upstart competitor to Photoshop and Illustrator and the rest. Well, buckle up because in September, Adobe announced that it was buying Figma for $20 billion. Figma is going to remain independent inside Adobe, but you know, it’s a little weird.
So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he’s doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn’t do as an independent company.
Dylan’s also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the “fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked about making VR Figma for the metaverse and AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or the kind of AI that can fully think for itself. This episode takes a turn. I think you’re going to like it.
Okay, Dylan Field, CEO of Figma. Here we go.
Links:
Adobe to acquire Figma in a deal worth $20 billion
A New Collaboration with Adobe
Designers worry Adobe won't let Figma flourish
How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell - Decoder
Dylan Field on Twitter: "Our goal is to be Figma not Adobe"
College Dropout Turns Thiel Fellowship Into a $2 Billion Figma Fortune
Generative adversarial network (GAN) - Wikipedia
Is VR the next frontier in fitness? - Decoder
Artificial general intelligence - Wikipedia
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23209862
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 Jackson Bierfeldt.
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 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently short a commissioner, and the Biden Administration and Senate Democrats just can't seem to get that seat filled despite having nominated an amazingly qualified person. Her name is Gigi Sohn. The inability to get Gigi confirmed at the FCC has left the commission deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans. That means the commission in charge of regulating all telecom in the United States, including how you get your internet service, is unable to get much done. The Biden administration can't accomplish some of its biggest policy priorities like rural broadband and restoring net neutrality. President Biden first nominated Gigi Sohn to the FCC over a year ago, but the full Senate vote to confirm her just hasn't happened. We’ve been digging into the story for a few months now, trying to figure out what's going on here, and we found a simple but really frustrating answer…
Links:
Gigi Sohn Author Profile - The Verge
Comcast trying to “torpedo” Biden FCC pick Gigi Sohn, advocacy group says
The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees
Attempted acquisition of Tribune Media by Sinclair Broadcast Group
The Vergecast: Net neutrality was repealed a year ago. Gigi Sohn explains what’s happened since
span.org/video/?516336-1/confirmation-hearing-fcc-commerce-department-nominees">Confirmation Hearing for FCC and Commerce Department Nominees
Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act
burn-pits.html">Biden Signs Bill to Help Veterans Exposed to Toxic Burn Pits
With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US brings climate goals within reach
Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation
Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation
Hyperpartisan Gigi Sohn Doesn’t Belong at the FCC
Tech antitrust pioneer Lina Khan will officially lead the FTC
span.org/video/?517735-1/confirmation-hearing-fcc-nominee">Confirmation Hearing For FCC Nominee
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on staying connected during a pandemic
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23201559
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was written and reported by Jackie McDermott.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright. Additional mixing by Andrew Marino.
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
I love covering the music industry, but over the past 10 years I’ve found that it’s one of the most challenging things to make accessible to a wide audience. See, my theory is that the music industry is like five years ahead of everything else when it comes to being disrupted by tech: whatever happens to the music industry because of technology eventually happens to everything else.
Today I'm talking to Steve Boom, the VP of Amazon Music. Amazon just announced that they are upgrading the music service that Prime members get as part of their subscription. Starting today, one of the benefits for Amazon Prime members is that you now get access to the entire Amazon Music catalog, about 100 million songs, to play in shuffle mode. That service used to only contain 2 million songs. And they are removing ads from a large selection of podcasts including the entire Wondery catalog.
I wanted to ask Steve: what’s it like to negotiate with the record labels for a service like this? What can streaming services do to make artists more money? And where do podcasts fit into the overall strategy? Amazon and Spotify both spend a lot of money buying podcast studios. Is it paying off?
Links:
Amazon buys Wondery, setting itself up to compete against Spotify for podcast domination
Why it makes sense for Amazon to buy Twitch
Amazon Launches Audio App Amp Combining Music and Live Conversation
The days of cheap music streaming may be numbered
Why did Jack Dorsey’s Square buy Tidal, Jay-Z’s failed music service?
Amazon Music rolls out a lossless streaming tier that Spotify and Apple can’t match
How Amazon runs Alexa, with Dave Limp
Apple’s new podcast charts show Amazon at the top
Spotify gets serious about podcasts with two acquisitions
Vox Media acquires Cafe Studios, Preet Bharara’s podcast-first company
Vox Media Acquires Criminal Productions, Leading Narrative Podcast Studio
Apple’s New App Store Rules a Big Boon for Netflix, Hulu & Co.
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23197384
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Steve Cagle is the CEO of Clearwater Compliance, which is a cybersecurity firm focused on the healthcare industry. Basically, they lock down hospital computer systems, which contain a huge amount of personal data, and are so mission critical that ransomware attackers know that hospitals are more likely to just pay up. If the cryptocurrency explosion has accomplished anything, it’s making ransomware attacks easier and more lucrative for bad guys.
Steve told me there’s so much personal information in a hospital system that a single patient’s record can sell for a huge premium over somthing like a credit card number. And we talked about amount of regulation needed to secure that data and that some insurance providers require hospitals to have a minimum level of security, or they won't be covered. It's a fascinating one.
Links:
Cyberattack delays patient care at major US hospital chain
Average Healthcare Data Breach Costs Surpass $10M, IBM Finds
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23175031
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. Research by Liz Lian and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today I'm talking to Prashanth Chandrasekar the CEO of Stack Overflow – a highly specialized kind of social network, with a really unique business model. If you don't know Stack Overflow is a major part of the modern software development landscape: it’s where developers come together, ask questions, and get answers about how to build software, including actual code they can use in their own projects. It’s basically a huge question and answer forum. More than 100 million people visit Stack Overflow every single month. The company also sells Stack Overflow as an internal forum tool that big companies can use for their own teams: Microsoft, Google, Logitech—you name it, they’re using Stack Overflow to coordinate conversations between their engineers.
The platform has a long reputation of elitism; Prashanth himself is a developer and he told me his own first experience on Stack Overflow was a negative one. In fact, he took over as CEO about three years ago, after a pretty serious moderation controversy that saw several longtime Stack Overflow moderators quit. I wanted to talk to Prashanth about how it works, how the company makes money, and how to grow such a specialized user base while still being welcoming to new people.
Links:
as-a-service-saas.asp">Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Stack Overflow Sold to Tech Giant Prosus for $1.8 Billion
Big Tech's hiring freeze unlocks rich talent pool for U.S. startups
Stack Overflow raises $85M in Series E funding to further accelerate SaaS business
Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it?
Stack Overflow Has a New Code of Conduct: You Must 'Be Nice'
Code of Conduct - Stack Overflow
Eight great sites that offer online classes
The other side of Stack Overflow content moderation
Everything you need to know about Section 230
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23185361
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Meredith Whittaker is the president of Signal, the popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication. You might recognize Meredith’s name from 2018 when she was an AI researcher at Google and one of the organizers of the Google walkout. Now she’s at Signal, which is a little different than the usual tech company: it’s operated by a nonprofit foundation and prides itself on collecting as little data as possible.
But messaging apps are a complicated business. Governments around the world really dislike encrypted messaging and often push companies to put in backdoors for surveillance and law enforcement because criminals use encrypted messaging for all sorts of deeply evil things. But there’s no half step to breaking encryption, so companies like Signal often find themselves in the difficult position of refusing to help governments. You might recall that Apple has often refused to help the government break into iPhones, for example. I wanted to know how that tradeoff plays out at Signal’s much smaller and more idealistic scale.
This is a good one, with lots of Decoder themes in the mix. We have to start doing checklists or something. Okay, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal. Here we go.
Links:
Yes, even Signal is doing stories now
Here’s why Apple’s new child safety features are so controversial
Signal is ‘starting to phase out SMS support’ from its Android app
A very brief history of every Google messaging app
RCS: What it is and why you might want it
WhatsApp is now entirely end-to-end encrypted
Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23173757
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath for an in-depth conversation about the company’s new high-end, mixed reality headset, the $1,499 Quest Pro, and why he isn’t backing down from building the metaverse. Zuckerberg and Heath also talked about the future of social media, why he enjoys “being doubted,” and the growing concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
Links:
The Meta Quest Pro is a cutting-edge headset looking for an audience
Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to the Meta Quest
Apple’s mixed reality headset will reportedly come with an M2 chip
We finally got our hands and eyes on the PlayStation VR2
Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion
Mark Zuckerberg took on China in a speech defending free expression
Elon Musk is buying Twitter, probably?
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23161228
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Vjeran Pavic, and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today I'm talking to Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel. I’ve been excited to have this conversation for a very long time – ever since Pat took over as CEO a little over a year and a half ago. After all. Intel is a very important company with a huge series of challenges in front of it. It’s still the largest chip manufacturer by revenue, and makes more chips than any other company in the United States. In fact there are basically only three major chip manufacturers: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, which is in Taiwan, Samsung, based in South Korea. And Intel, here in the United States.
The Intel Pat took over was struggling, and was losing ground to in a variety of markets. But in the past year and a half, Pat’s restructured the company, turned over almost all of its leadership positions, opened a new line of business that would compete with TSMC and make chips for other companies including Intel’s competitors, and generally tried to reset Intel’s famous engineering culture around engineering.
Glossary:
IFS - Intel Foundry Service.
Raptor Lake - codename for intel's Gen 13 processors that were just the day before we had our conversation.
Sapphire Rapids - the codename for Intel's 4th generation Xeon server processors.
20A and 18A - 20A is a rebranding of what was intel's 5nm process scheduled to debut in 2024 and 18A is a rebranding of Intels 5nm+ node due out in 2025.
Packaging - integrated circuit packaging is the last step of semiconductor fabrication. It's where a block of semiconductor material is put into a case. The case, is known as a "package" and that is what allows you put a circuit on a board.
Wafers - When a processor is made they make processors you make hundreds of them at once on a giant wafer.
EUV - is Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. It's the most advanced way to make chips.
ASML - Is the company that makes the machines that lets you make chips. They are the only company that makes EUV machines.
RibbonFET - A new transistor technology that Intel developed.
ISV - Independent Software Vendors.
PDK - Process Design Kit is a set of files that have data and algorithms that explain the manufacturing parameters for a given silicon process.
EDA tools - stands for Electronic Design Automation tools. Basically software tools that are used to design and validate the semiconductor manufacturing process.
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore - the founders of Intel.
Andy Grove - employee #3 who went on to become one of their most successful CEOs.
Links:
Intel is replacing its CEO in February
Intel has to be better than ‘lifestyle company’ Apple at making CPUs, says new CEO
Apple is switching Macs to its own processors starting later this year
Apple MacBook Air with M1 review: new chip, no problem
What we know about Intel’s $20 billion bet on Ohio
Intel is building a new €17 billion semiconductor manufacturing hub in Germany
Intel delays ceremony for Ohio factory over lack of government funding
Intel needs 7,000 workers to build its $20 billion chip plant in Ohio
Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act
President Joe Biden speaks after groundbreaking for Intel’s $20 billion semiconductor plant
Intel’s top Arc A770 GPU is priced at $329, available October 12th
Intel’s 13th Gen processors arrive October 20th with $589 flagship Core i9-13900K
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23149693
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
One of the more interesting quirks of the modern tech world is that there’s a really important company at the center of it all that doesn’t make anything. But its work is in your phone, in your TV, your car and maybe even your laptop. I’m talking about ARM, a chip design company that’s been through quite a lot these past few years, and I'm talking to Arm CEO Rene Haas.
Arm designs the instruction sets for modern chips: Qualcomm’s chips are Arm chips. Apple’s chips are Arm chips. Samsung’s chips are Arm chips. It’s the heart of modern computing. Arm licenses the instruction set to those companies, who then go off and actually make chips with all sorts of customizations. Basically every smartphone runs an Arm processor, Apple’s Macs now run arm processors, and everything from cars to coffee machines are showing up with more and more arm processors in them.
We want to know what you think about Decoder. Take our listener survey!
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23137412
Links:
The Vergecast: The HDMI Holiday Spec-tacular on Apple Podcasts
Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act
Intel needs 7,000 workers to build its $20 billion chip plant in Ohio - The Verge
What comes after the smartphone, with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon - The Verge
Why the global chip shortage is making it so hard to buy a PS5
Nvidia’s huge Arm deal has just been scrapped
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Ryan Petersen, is the CEO of Flexport, ac ompany that builds software that integrates all the different shipping vendor systems you might run into as you try to get a product from a factory in China to a consumer in Idaho: rail, sea, truck. We’ve talked about the supply chain and inventory management on Decoder with a lot of our guests — the chip shortage seems to affect every company, and sorting out how to get products made and delivered on time is a pretty universal problem. But we haven’t really talked about how products get from one place to another around the world.
So I wanted to talk to Ryan, figure out what Flexport’s role in all this is, what his bigger supply chain solutions would be, and why he’s leaving his job as CEO to be executive chairman and handing the reins to Dave Clark, who used to work at Amazon.
Links:
Dave Clark to Join Flexport As Our New CEO
Flexport Wants to Be Uber of the Oceans
At Google, Eric Schmidt Wrote the Book on Adult Supervision
The real story behind a tech founder’s ‘tweetstorm that saves Christmas’
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23126062
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. 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 Mark Bergen, a reporter at Bloomberg and the author of a new book about YouTube called. Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination.
YouTube has always been fascinating to me because it’s such a black box: everyone feels like they know how the platform works, but very few people have a real understanding of the internal politics and tradeoffs that actually drive YouTube’s decision. Mark’s book is one of the best of its kind I’ve read: not only does he take you inside the company, but he connects the decisions made inside YouTube to the creators who use the platform and the effects it has on them.
This was a fun one – keep in mind that for as little as we might know about YouTube, we might know even less about TikTok, which is driving all sorts of platforms, even YouTube, into competing with it.
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23113078
Links:
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This episode was originally published on May 3rd, 2022.
Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and eventually left Google. He now runs an investment company called Future Shape.
Links:
Inside the Nest: iPod creator Tony Fadell wants to reinvent the thermostat
Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work
Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO
Fire drill: can Tony Fadell and Nest build a better smoke detector?
Google purchases Nest for $3.2 billion
Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company
Nest is rejoining Google to better compete with Amazon and Apple
Apple Music Event 2005 - Motorola Rokr E1 / iTunes Phone
Activision Blizzard hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit
Nest buying video-monitoring startup Dropcam for $555 million
What matters about Matter, the new smart home standard
Directory:
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel
Pat Gelsinger, current CEO of Intel
Sundar Pichai, current CEO of Alphabet
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company
Jeff Williams, COO of Apple
Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder
Jeff Robbin, VP of consumer applications at Apple
Steve Hoteling, former CEO gesture recognition company Finger Works
Jon Rubinstein, senior VP of the iPod division at Apple
Steve Sakomen, hardware engineer and executive at Apple
Avie Tavanian, chief software technology officer at Apple
Scott Forstall, senior VP of iOS software, Apple
Jony Ive, chief design officer, Apple
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22817673
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
We’ve got a special episode of Decoder today – an interview between Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and Meta’s Tom Alison, the head of Facebook. Alex is the co-host of the newest season of Vox Media’s podcast Land of the Giants. This season is about Facebook and Meta. The season finale comes out tomorrow.
Alex has been reporting for Land of the Giants for many months, and along the way he interviewed Tom. Facebook has a lot of challenges, but it seems like the biggest problem is TikTok: Facebook's problem is that it spent years – you spent years – building out a social graph that, it turns out, is less interesting than just being shown content that the company thinks you might like. Alison has been at Facebook for more than a decade and previously ran engineering for the News Feed, so he knows more than almost anyone about the history of feeds and where they are going.
Links:
Facebook is changing its algorithm to take on TikTok, leaked memo reveals
Facebook is revamping its home feed to feel more like TikTok
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23092319
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
One thing that strikes me, in all these episodes of Decoder, is how little any of us really pay attention to the advertising industry, and how deeply connected it is to almost other every modern business. After all you can start a company and invent a great product, but you still need to market it: you need to tell people about it, and eventually convince them to buy it. And so you take out an add on a platform and, well, the platform companies we all depend on mostly run on ads. Google’s entire consumer business is ads. Meta’s entire business is ads. And when we talk to creators, they’re even more tied to ads: their distribution platforms like TikTok and YouTube are all ad-supported, and a huge portion of their revenue is ads.
This week I’m talking to Neal Arthur, the CEO of Weiden and Kennedy, one of the few independent major ad agencies in the world, and maybe the coolest one? It’s got a rep. Weiden is the agency that came up with Just Do It for Nike and Bud Light Legends for Bud Light. They’ve done campaigns for Coke, Miller, Microsoft, ESPN – you name it. Coming off our conversation last week with Katie Welch about building a brand from the ground up using influencer marketing and potentially never hiring an ad agency, I wanted to get a view from the other side: how does a big ad agency work? Where does their money come from? So many of the big agencies are merging into what are called holding companies – why is Wieden still independent?
Links:
Bud Light puts creative account up for review after years with Wieden+Kennedy
Mover Over Millennials -- Here Comes Gen Z
How Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty Goes Viral, With CMO Katie Welch
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23081723
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott. It was edited by Callie Wright. And researched by Liz Lian.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Katie Welch is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rare Beauty — the beauty products company founded by superstar musician and actress Selena Gomez. Rare Beauty sells its products online and in Sephora retail stores, and importantly, Katie does almost no traditional marketing: Rare Beauty is a true internet brand, that depends on social media strategy, influencer marketing, and community to drive sales. Specifically, the enormous community around Selena Gomez, who, again, is an international superstar with a fandom of her own.
This kind of marketing is essentially new. Famous people making their own products and companies and using their online reach to launch and grow those businesses is a combination of art and commerce that is 10 – 15 years old at most, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty is only five years old, but it’s redefined the industry and helped make her a billionaire. Some of the first big successes came from the Kardashian-Jenners including Kylie Cosmetics, founded in 2015, as well as Kim Kardashian’s Skims, founded in 2019.
I’ve been really curious about how these businesses work, how they reach their audiences and customers, how CMOs like Katie measure success, whether being the marketing executive for an super online celebrity-driven business feels different than being a traditional marketing person, and whether the ever-present risk of weird things happening online make her plan differently.
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23071490
Links:
Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok
Apple’s app tracking transparency feature isn’t an instant privacy button
Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion
Updating The Verge’s background policy
1.png">Marketing Funnels
Instagram walks back TikTok-style changes — Adam Mosseri explains why
to-sell-in-sephora-makeup-brands-first-retail-partner.html">Makeup company Glossier to sell its products at Sephora as new CEO pushes to expand reach
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In 2019, the Trump administration brokered a deal allowing TMobile to buy Sprint as long as it helped Dish Network stand up a new 5G network to keep the number of national wireless carriers at 4 and preserve competition in the mobile market. Now, in 2022, Dish’s network is slowly getting off the ground. And it’s built on a new kind of wireless technology called Open Radio Access Network, or O-RAN. Dish’s network is only the third O-RAN network in the entire world, and if O-RAN works, it will radically change how the entire wireless industry operates.
I have wanted to know more about O-RAN for a long time. So today, I’m talking to Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten Mobile is a new wireless carrier in Japan, it just launched in 2020 – it’s also the world’s first Open RAN network, and Tareq basically pushed this whole concept into existence. I really wanted to know if ORAN is going to work, and how Tareq managed to make it happen in such a traditional industry. So we got into it – like, really into it.
Links:
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"
Rakuten Group to Acquire Mobile Industry Innovator Altiostar
xcZq.html">Massive MIMO
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23061797
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. 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 Hank Green. Hank doesn’t need much introduction. In fact, he invited himself on Decoder to talk about YouTube's partner program, which shares ad revenue between YouTube and the people making videos. The split is 55/45 in favor of creators. But other platforms don't have this. There is no revenue share on Instagram. There is no revenue share on Twitter. There’s no revenue on Twitter at all, really. And importantly there is no revenue share on TikTok: instead there’s something called a creator fund, which shares fixed pool of money, about a billion dollars, among all the creators on the platform. That means as more and more creators join TikTok, everyone gets paid. You might understand this concept as: basic division.
This episode is long, and it’s weedsy. Honestly, it’s pretty deep in our feelings about participating in the internet culture economy, and the relationship between huge platform companies and the communities that build on them. But it’s a good one, and it’s not really something any of us talk about enough.
Links:
Decoder interview with YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan
Viacom Has Officially Acquired VidCon, A Global Online Video Convention Series
Patreon Acquires Subbable, Aligning the YouTube Stars
The Kardashians hate the new Instagram
Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast, “TikTok vs YouTube with Hank Green”
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23051537
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. 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 talking to Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway.
Rent the Runway is a a pretty simple idea: it’s a clothing rental and subscription business for women which launched in 2008. The basic idea is pretty simple: you can rent clothes one by one, and Subscribers pay a certain monthly amount for a certain number of pieces that they can swap out anywhere from 1 to 4 times a month depending on the tier of their membership. Rent the Runway also lets customers buy secondhand clothing either after they rent it or just outright.
But Rent the Runway has had a pretty intense path from its founding in 2008 to going public in 2021: the onset of the pandemic in 2020 cratered the business as 60 percent of customers canceled or paused their subscriptions, and Jennifer was forced to make drastic cuts to survive. But she says that now things are swinging back, as more and more people are spending their dollars going out, traveling, and generally shifting their spending from things to experiences. There’s a post Covid wedding boom going on: Rent the Runway is right there for people.
Jenn and I talked about that swing in the business, but we spent most of this conversation talking about running a company that basically does really high-risk logistics: sourcing clothes, sending them to people, getting them back, cleaning them, and sending them out again. Spotify and Netflix run subscription businesses where the products never wear out or get dirty; Jenn has to deal with red win stains at scale. In fact, Rent the Runway runs one of the country’s biggest dry cleaning operations, which I find to be completely fascinating: what does dry cleaning innovation actually look like, and how does it hit the bottom line?
My favorite episodes of Decoder are the ones where simple ideas – renting clothes – turn out to be incredible complicated to execute. This is one of those.
Links:
Apple defends upcoming privacy changes as ‘standing up for our users’
the-runway-ipo.html">Rent the Runway, a secondhand fashion site, makes its trading debut.
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23041884
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
All right, let’s talk about the metaverse.
You probably can’t stop hearing about it. It’s in startup pitches, in earnings reports, some companies are creating metaverse divisions, and Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta to signal that he’s shifting the entire company to focus on the metaverse.
The problem, very simply, is that no one knows what the metaverse is, what it’s supposed to do, or why anyone should care about it.
Luckily, we have some help. Today, I’m talking to Matthew Ball, who is the author of the new book called The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. Matthew was the global head of strategy at Amazon Studios. In 2018, he left Amazon to become an analyst and started writing about the metaverse on his blog. He’s been writing about this since way before the hype exploded, and his book aims to be the best resource for understanding the metaverse, which he sees as the next phase of the internet. It’s not just something that you access through a VR headset, though that’s part of it. It’s how you’ll interact with everything. That sort of change is where new companies have opportunities to unseat the old guard.
This episode gets very in the weeds, but it really helped me understand the decisions some companies have made around building digital worlds and the technical challenges and business challenges that are slowing it down — or might even stop it. And, of course, I asked whether any of this is a good idea in the first place because, well, I’m not so sure. But there’s a lot here, so listen, and then you tell me.
Links:
Mark Zuckerberg on why Facebook is rebranding to Meta
Microsoft, Meta, and others are founding a metaverse open standards group
Android emoji will actually look human this year
Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard: the latest news on the acquisition
Microsoft HoloLens boss Alex Kipman is out after misconduct allegations
European Parliament Think Tank memorandum—Metaverse: Opportunities, risks and policy implications
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23033211
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This week, we're sharing the first episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption. Long before Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and made an unprecedented pivot into the metaverse, he invented a feature that turned Facebook into a social network behemoth. The News Feed, which put your friends’ status updates onto your homepage, changed the way we interact online. It was a strong statement of Zuckerberg’s values: that connecting, and sharing, at scale would be de-facto good for the world. It was also his first public controversy. Follow Land of the Giants to get new episodes every Wednesday.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Happy Fourth of July to our listeners in the States. Decoder is only a year old, but we’ve decided a Decoder tradition is that every summer, we’re going to do an episode about the outdoor grill industry, which is gigantic and growing.
Last year, I talked to Roger Dahle, the CEO of Blackstone Products, a griddle company that blew up on TikTok and actually went public a few months after we talked.
This year, I’m talking to Jeremy Andrus, the CEO of Traeger, which makes beloved wood pellet smokers with all sorts of features — the high-end models even have cloud connectivity so you can control them from your phone. Traeger also recently went public; the company says it will book between $800–850 million in revenue this year.
The Traeger story is fascinating: the company was around for 27 years and not growing very much when Jeremy bought it with the help of a private equity firm and became the CEO. He had no background in cooking; he had previously been CEO of Skullcandy, the headphone brand. His early run as CEO of Traeger was a bit of a nightmare, culminating in an arson of a truck at one of Traeger’s warehouses. Jeremy responded by cleaning house, replacing most of the team, and moving the company from Oregon to Utah.
Since then, Traeger has grown its revenue by 10 times and hopes to close in on a billion dollars in revenue soon. But, it has all the challenges that come along with shipping big, heavy hardware products through the supply chain crisis, looming recession, and changing consumer behavior as one version of the pandemic seems to be ending and people are spending their money on travel instead of home goods. Jeremy was game to talk about all of that; we really got into it.
Links:
How Traeger's CEO Cleaned Up a Toxic Culture
Jeremy Andrus Found Success With Skullcandy. Now He Hopes To Do It Again With Traeger Grills.
grills-wireless-meat-thermometer-meater-acquisition-183944452.html">Traeger buys wireless thermometer company Meater
Jeremy Andrus Found Success With Skullcandy. Now He Hopes To Do It Again With Traeger Grills.
Traeger's stock opens 22% above IPO price, to value the grill market at $2.6 billion
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22953717
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
I’m old enough to remember what it was like to fly before 9/11 — there were no TSA lines, there was no PreCheck, and there certainly wasn’t any requirement to take off your shoes. In fact, there wasn’t any TSA at all.
But 9/11 radically changed the way we move through an airport. The formation of the new Department of Homeland Security and the new Transportation Security Administration led to much more rigorous and invasive security measures for travelers trying to catch their flight.
This year is the 20th anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, and I think it’s safe to say that nobody enjoys waiting in the airport security line. And in the post-9/11 world, things like PreCheck are the great innovation of the department.
At least according to Dan McCoy, who is the TSA’s chief innovation officer, who told me that PreCheck is “a hallmark government innovation program.”
But what do programs like PreCheck and the larger surveillance apparatus that theoretically keep us safe mean for the choices we make? What do we give up to get into the shorter security line, and how comfortable should we be about that?
This week, The Verge launches Homeland, our special series about the enormous influence of the Department of Homeland Security and how it has dramatically changed our country’s relationship with technology, surveillance, and immigration. So we have a special episode of Decoder with Dan McCoy to see where the TSA fits into that picture.
Links:
Read more stories from the Homeland series
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22945989
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius became CEO in 2019 but has been working for Mercedes since 1993 in almost every part of the company. During that period, Mercedes spent time getting a lot bigger; the company famously merged with Chrysler for a time, forming a giant called DaimlerChrysler. But, over the past few years, it’s actually been getting much smaller and more focused. The Chrysler deal was undone and, just recently, Ola spun off the truck division into its own public company called Daimler Truck, leaving Mercedes-Benz to stand alone as a premium car brand.
Car companies are either consolidating into giant conglomerates like Stellantis or shrinking and focusing like Mercedes. A lot of that is driven by the huge shift to electric vehicles and then, on top of that, to cars essentially becoming rolling computers. You’ll hear Ola refer to cars as “digital products” a lot — and to Mercedes itself as a tech company. (Actually, he says it’s a luxury and tech company.)
Mercedes now has two new EVs, the EQS and the EQE, both of which have massive infotainment screens running Mercedes’ proprietary MBUX system, which even has its own voice assistant called Hey Mercedes. I had to ask Ola about Apple’s recent announcement that the next version of CarPlay would be able to take over every display in the car, including the instrument cluster. Apple showed a Mercedes logo on a slide during that presentation — so, is Ola ready to hand over his UI to Cupertino?
Let’s find out. Ola Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz. Here we go.
Links:
Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX concept car traveled over 1,000 km on a single charge
Mercedes-Benz unveils sporty, ultra-long-range vision EQXX electric concept car
The six-figure Mercedes-Benz EQS gets a 350-mile range rating
Daimler AG to rebrand as Mercedes-Benz on Feb. 1
Big automakers are breaking themselves apart to compete with Silicon Valley
Mercedes-Benz reveals an electric G-Wagen concept for the future
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22936880
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Verge is all about how technology make us feel. Our screens and our systems aren’t inert, or neutral – they create emotions, sometimes the strongest emotions anyone actually feels in their day to day lives. I’ve been thinking about that a lot ever since I read a new book called Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet by Kaitlyn Tiffany, who was a culture reporter at The Verge several years ago. The thesis of her book is that online fandom, specifically the hardcore fans of the British boy band One Direction, created much of the online culture we live in today on social platforms. And her bigger thesis is that fandom overall is a cultural and political force that can’t be ignored; it shapes elections, it drives cultural conversation, it can bring joy to people who feel lonely, and it can result in dramatic harassment campaigns when fans turn on someone.
Links:
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22930314
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC. It’s one of the biggest events of the year for Apple, one of the most important companies in the world. In fact, Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and it posted $18 billion in net profits in its first quarter — the most quarterly profit of any public company in history.
So, as we go into another huge Apple event, I wanted to have Verge labor reporter Zoe Schiffer on to talk about something else that’s happening inside Apple: a brewing push by its retail employees to unionize, store by store, because they’re unhappy with their pay and working conditions. Zoe is really well-sourced; she has an inside look at this fight. So, she helps us explain how this all works and what it might mean.
Links:
Fired #AppleToo organizer files labor charge against the company
Apple’s frontline employees are struggling to survive
Apple hires anti-union lawyers in escalating union fight
This is what Apple retail employees in Atlanta are fighting for
First US Apple Store union election set for June 2nd in Atlanta
Apple accused of union busting in new labor board filing
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22917648
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Michael is president of the Blockchain Association of Ukraine and founder of the Kuna Exchange, which lets people buy cryptocurrency and swap between them. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government set up wallets on Kuna and other exchanges to accept donations to the war effort in crypto; in April, Bloomberg reported it had received over $60 million in crypto donations.
What’s more, earlier this year Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also signed a virtual assets bill into law, which will recognize cryptocurrency as an asset in Ukraine when the war is over. As president of the Blockchain Association, Michael lobbied for this law, which you’ll hear him talk about — especially in the context of how little faith he has in the banking system. He says several times that, even before the war, it couldn’t be trusted and that people were already using a combination of crypto and dollars for large transactions instead of Ukraine’s actual currency, which is called the hryvnia.
Links:
Ukraine Readies NFT Sales as Crypto Donations Top $60 Million
Ukraine's Zelenskyy Signs Virtual Assets Bill Into Law, Legalizing Crypto
Blockchain Association of Ukraine
Russian tycoon Tinkov sells stake in TCS Group to billionaire Potanin
The 2020 Global Crypto Adoption Index: Cryptocurrency is a Global Phenomenon
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22902506
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott. It was researched by Liz Lian and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
One of our recurring jokes at The Verge is that every YouTuber eventually makes a video where they talk about how mad they are at YouTube. Whether it’s demonetization or copyright strikes or just the algorithm changing, YouTubers have to contend with a big platform that has a lot of power over their business, and they often don’t have the leverage to push back.
On this episode of Decoder, I’m talking to Dave Wiskus, the CEO of two really interesting companies: one is called Standard, which is a management company for YouTubers, and the other is Nebula, an alternative paid streaming platform where creators can post videos, take a direct cut of the revenue, and generally fund work that might get lost on YouTube.
What really stood out to me here is that Dave is in the business of making things: this conversation was really grounded in the reality of the creator business as it exists today and how that real business can support real people. You’ll hear it when we talk about Web3 and NFTs a little bit — Dave just thinks that stuff is bullshit, and he says so because it’s not a business that exists now. That’s an important dynamic to think about — and one for more platforms to take seriously.
Links:
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22840704
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Google I/O was this week and Nilay Patel and David Pierce had a chance to sit down with Google CEO Sundar Pichai to talk about the event and the products that were announced. This interview was recorded for The Vergecast, another podcast from The Verge. You can listen to The Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts – or just click here.
We hope you enjoyed the interview. Decoder will be back again on Tuesday with an all new episode. See you then.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today Nilay Patel talking to Daniel Dines, the founder and CEO of UiPath, one of the biggest automation companies in the world. But not the automation you might think; UiPath sells software automation, or what consultants call “robotic process automation” so they can sound fancy and charge higher fees. UiPath and other software automation companies have a different approach to solving issues with your legacy software: just hire another computer to use software for you. Seriously: UiPath uses computer vision to literally look at what’s on a screen, and then uses a virtual mouse and keyboard to click around and do things in apps like Excel and Salesforce. The automations can be mundane, like generating lists of people to contact from public records, or intensely complicated: UiPath can actually monitor how different software is used throughout a company and suggest automations. Huge companies like Uber, Facebook, Spotify, and Google all use UIPath.
Links:
The robots are coming for your office
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22828061
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and eventually left Google. He now runs an investment company called Future Shape.
Links:
Inside the Nest: iPod creator Tony Fadell wants to reinvent the thermostat
Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work
Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO
Fire drill: can Tony Fadell and Nest build a better smoke detector?
Google purchases Nest for $3.2 billion
Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company
Nest is rejoining Google to better compete with Amazon and Apple
Apple Music Event 2005 - Motorola Rokr E1 / iTunes Phone
Activision Blizzard hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit
Nest buying video-monitoring startup Dropcam for $555 million
What matters about Matter, the new smart home standard
Directory:
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel
Pat Gelsinger, current CEO of Intel
Sundar Pichai, current CEO of Alphabet
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company
Jeff Williams, COO of Apple
Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder
Jeff Robbin, VP of consumer applications at Apple
Steve Hoteling, former CEO gesture recognition company Finger Works
Jon Rubinstein, senior VP of the iPod division at Apple
Steve Sakomen, hardware engineer and executive at Apple
Avie Tavanian, chief software technology officer at Apple
Scott Forstall, senior VP of iOS software, Apple
Jony Ive, chief design officer, Apple
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22817673
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Cindy Cohn is the executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. If you’re an internet user of a certain age like me, you know the EFF as the premiere civil liberties group for the internet. The EFF has fought pitched battles against things like government surveillance, digital rights management for music and movies, and government speech regulations that would violate the First Amendment. These fights were important, and shaped the internet as we know it today.
Links
Electronic Frontier Foundation
How to fix the Internet: Podcast by the EFF
How the EU is fighting tech giants with Margrethe Vestager
Apple pushes back on iPhone order, says FBI is seeking ‘dangerous power'
Here’s why Apple’s new child safety features are so controversial
Texas passes law that bans kicking people off social media based on ‘viewpoint’
Decoder interview with YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22805290
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Alan Yeung is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the former head of the Foxconn project in Wisconsin. If you don’t quite remember, the Foxconn project in Wisconsin was announced in 2017 as a massive deal to build the first “Generation 10.5” LCD factory in North America. It was also one of the first big moments in the Trump presidency, complete with President Trump holding a golden shovel at a lavish groundbreaking ceremony where he said the factory would be “the eighth wonder of the world.”
But it turned out that while Foxconn was putting on a great show, no LCD factory was actually getting built, even though Foxconn kept saying it was happening.
Links
We're nominated for a Webby! Vote for Decoder!
The award winning story from Josh Dzieza - The 8th wonder of the world
Wisconsin's $4.1 billion Foxconn factory boondoggle
Foxconn’s $100M deal with the University of Wisconsin has students worried
What a new governor means for Wisconsin’s controversial Foxconn factory
Foxconn and the village: the $10B factory deal that turned one small Wisconsin town upside down
No one seems to know what Foxconn is doing in Wisconsin
Foxconn is confusing the hell out of Wisconsin
With Foxconn chief’s Trump meeting, the Wisconsin project gets even more political
One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren’t empty — they still are
Foxconn’s delays might finally give Wisconsin the upper hand
One year after Trump’s Foxconn groundbreaking, there is almost nothing to show for it
Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report
Foxconn’s first announced product for its Wisconsin factory is an airport coffee robot
Foxconn releases and immediately cancels plans for a giant dome in Wisconsin
Foxconn's giant glass dome in Wisconsin is back, baby
Exclusive: documents show Foxconn refuses to renegotiate Wisconsin deal
Foxconn’s buildings in Wisconsin are still empty, one year later
Exclusive: Wisconsin denies Foxconn tax subsidies after contract negotiations fail
Exclusive: Wisconsin report confirms Foxconn's “LCD factory” isn't real
Foxconn tells Wisconsin it never promised to build an LCD factory
Intel selects Ohio for ‘largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet’
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22794506
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chris Dixon leads crypto investing at the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z. He’s responsible for leading funding rounds for Coinbase, which went public about a year ago, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, and Yuga Labs, which is behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club among others. He is also a prolific user of Twitter, where he posts lengthy threads about crypto and web3. He is at once one of the biggest investors in the space, and its biggest booster.
Links
Decoder is nominated for a Webby. Vote!
first-impressions.html">My first impressions of web3
A comprehensive breakdown of the Epic v. Apple ruling
Transcript
https://www.theverge.com/e/22784768
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Julia Alexander was the perfect guest to come on our show and talk about the state of the streaming industry – we’re a couple years into the huge shift to streaming entertainment in Hollywood, and it’s clear the streamers are here to stay. Apple just won the Oscar for Best Picture for a film it bought out of Sundance called Coda. Amazon now owns MGM. Netflix is investing in games and hinting at advertising for the first time. One idea that comes up on Decoder again and again is that how we distribute media has a huge influence on the media itself – and we talked about what kinds of movies and shows are getting made now that the streamers are here to stay.
Links:
ceo-chapek-iger-falling-out.html">‘Extremely awkward’: Bob Chapek and Bob Iger had a falling out, they rarely talk — and the rift looms over Disney’s future
Pixar staff speaks out against Disney moving its films to streaming only: ‘It’s hard to grasp’
HBO Max and Discovery Plus will merge into one app
Apple and Major League Baseball to offer “Friday Night Baseball”
Yankees will have 21 games only available on Amazon Prime
Prime Video unveils logo for 'Thursday Night Football'
CNN Plus launches with Reddit-like interactive Q&As
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22774600
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
For this episode, I’m talking to Steve Aoki. He is a superstar DJ, producer, record label owner, and prolific entrepreneur. Steve has been part of the music industry since 1996, so he’s been through a lot of these big tech transitions, and now he’s heavily invested in another, with Web3, the Aokiverse. It involves selling tokens and NFTs and, over time, is meant to be part of the metaverse. Because, of course.
Links
Travel Advice from Steve Aoki, Who Throws Cake at 2,500 People a Year
Transcript
https://www.theverge.com/e/22763374
Credits
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott. Additional research was done by Liz Lian and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Aparna Chennapragada is the chief product officer at Robinhood, the popular stock and crypto trading app. And we have some news to discuss: Robinhood is launching a new cash card today that allows people to spend money directly out of their Robinhood account and set up various plans to automatically invest by rounding up purchase amounts to the nearest dollar and putting the difference in various investments.
Links:
How r/wallstreetbets gamed the stock of GameStop
Google is reportedly removing Google Now Launcher from the Play Store
Robinhood buys Say Technologies for $140M to improve shareholder-company relations
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22753372
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Margrethe Vestager is one of the driving forces behind tech regulation worldwide. Appointed as the European Commission’s Commissioner of Competition in 2014 and an executive vice president in 2019, she’s pursued antitrust cases against Apple, Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Amazon among others. Now, with the EU on the verge of implementing a new antitrust law called the Digital Markets Act, Vestager is planning her next moves.
Links:
EU's Vestager says analysing metaverse ahead of possible regulatory action
The Digital Markets Act: ensuring fair and open digital markets
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22745302
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, which he co-founded, and Tumblr, the irrepressible social network it acquired from the wreckage of AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. Matt’s point of view is that the world is better off when the web is open and fun, and Automattic builds and acquires products that help that goal along.
Links:
Exclusive: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what’s next for Tumblr
Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner
Automattic, owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com, buys podcast app Pocket Casts
Why Apple’s new privacy feature is such a big deal
Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete
Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google - and how it won
After the porn ban, Tumblr users have ditched the platform as promised
The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America
Vox Media adds The Coral Project
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22741898
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott. Research was done by Liz Lian. It was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today I’m talking to Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi, a fascinating company that makes beloved tiny hackable computers that are extremely inexpensive. They’re also some of the only readily available computers that are designed to be tinkered with. They’re not heavily locked down, and using one requires learning how a computer actually works. And that’s the entire point: Eben told me the idea of the Raspberry Pi was to create a product that enticed kids into studying computer science at the University of Cambridge. They’ve more than achieved that goal. Seven million Raspberry Pi units were sold last year, and there’s talk of the company going public.
Links:
The business of finding a better job, with Career Karma CEO Ruben Harris
How Artificial Intelligence is Helping Japanese Cucumber Farmers
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22730196
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This week I sat down with Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, and Eddie Lazarus, his Chief Legal Officer. I wanted both Patrick and Eddie on the show to talk about when a company like Sonos makes the decision to head to the courts and increasingly, Congress. Sonos has long accused other tech giants of stealing its tech, but in 2019 it actually sued Google for patent infringement. Sonos recently won that lawsuit at the US International Trade Commission, which ruled that Google infringed all five patents Sonos brought to court. I wanted to understand how Patrick and Eddie decided to take the risk of a lawsuit here – Sonos claims Google actually infringes over 150 patents, so how did they pick.. Five.. to sue over?
Links:
Sonos sues Google for allegedly stealing smart speaker tech
Sonos CEO will testify to lawmakers after suing Google
Google countersues Sonos for patent infringement
Sonos sues Google for infringing five more wireless audio patents
A judge has ruled that Google infringed on Sonos’ patents
Sonos says Google is blocking it from offering more than one voice assistant at once
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22719377
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
I’m going to let you in on a Decoder secret: at the end of last year, I tasked our producers with finding better ways for us to cover crypto and Web 3.0 on Decoder. I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m fairly skeptical of crypto, but I want to come by that skepticism honestly—and on the flip side, I want to make sure to see its opportunities and benefits clearly. We’ve already done episodes on Bitcoin and DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, and we’re going to do more episodes as the year goes on.
Today I’m talking to Tonya Evans, a law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law. She teaches IP law, copyright, and blockchain. She also hosts the Tech Intersect podcast, where she covers how law and technology intersect. She has spent a lot of time thinking about crypto assets and how they interact with the law. Tonya’s point of view is that we shouldn’t just abandon many of the legal frameworks we have today—she just wants them to adapt to this new internet.
Links:
The counterfeit NFT problem is only getting worse
Instagram says sites need photographers’ permission to embed posts
BlockFi settlement with the SEC
A cringe rapper slash Forbes contributor allegedly found with billions in stolen Bitcoin
Constitution DAO Decoder episode
ribeiro-sues-fortnite-for-fresh-prince-carlton-dance.html">Alfonso Ribeiro Sues Fortnite Over Use of His Signature Fresh Prince Dance, The Carlton
The ‘Carlton dance’ couldn’t be copyrighted for a Fortnite lawsuit
Adi Robertson's reporting about Spice DAO
Tonya Evans' website, ProfTonyaEvans.com
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22708620
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bärí Williams is a legal and operations advisor to tech companies who focuses on AI and diversity. Her credentials are rock solid: Bärí was lead counsel at Facebook working on various projects, including internet connectivity efforts and diversifying the company’s supply chain. After that, Bärí went to work at StubHub, an AI startup studio called All Turtles, and a data and identity analytics company called Bandwagon Fan Club.
But now, she’s independent — a business of one, consulting on operations with a focus on diversity and AI. I was curious why she decided to leave being a tech executive behind and make that shift to diversity work. We talked about that, but our conversation actually started with sports news — NFL news.
Links:
Diversity wins: how inclusion matters
The 4 most explosive allegations from Brian Flores’ lawsuit against the NFL
California just made it a lot harder for companies to cover up harassment and abuse
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22697189
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Lauren Williams is the co-founder and CEO of Capital B, a new nonprofit media company dedicated to news for Black audiences. Capital B launched on January 31st, with both a national news site and a local newsroom dedicated to Atlanta – and they plan to expand to more cities over time.
Links:
Tired Of The Social Media Rat Race, Journalists Move To Writing Substack Newsletters
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22686070
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott with and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
It’s an interesting time to talk to someone in the business of helping people get new jobs — we’re still fully in the middle of the pandemic-driven Great Resignation, and a record 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November 2021, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. But that’s exactly what Career Karma and CEO Ruben Harris are doing.
Links:
november-2021-record-4point5-million-workers-quit-their-jobs.html">A record 4.5 million workers quit their jobs in November
1-billion-gambit-retraining-nearly-half-its-workforce.html">AT&T’s $1 billion gambit: Retraining nearly half its workforce for jobs of the future
Making uncommon knowledge common
The Great Resignation is accelerating
How an Excel TickToker manifested her way to making six figures a day
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22674665
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Jackie McDermott, and Liam James. It was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Regular listeners of Decoder know car CEOs love coming on the show. There is a lot of change in the car industry, a lot of big ideas about how to manage that change, and a lot of big problems to solve: the transition to electric vehicles, the fact that cars are basically turning into rolling smartphones, how to make self-driving work safely, and more. And, of course, we always end up talking about Tesla — because how can you not?
Links:
Listen to the full interviews here
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott with and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Links
Dieselgate coverage on The Verge
VW vows to build massive electric car charging network across US
Electrify America announces doubling of charging network with 1,800 stations and 10,000 chargers
Transcript
https://www.theverge.com/e/22652357
Credits
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott with and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Cristiano Amon is the president and CEO of Qualcomm, and he’s always been a relentless cheerleader for what mobile computing can do for people — especially if that mobile computing is powered by Qualcomm’s chips.
Links:
Apple supplier TSMC confirms it’s building an Arizona chip plant
Intel will make Qualcomm chips in new foundry deal
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip is here to power the Android flagships of 2022
Qualcomm’s next-gen CPU for PCs will take on Apple’s M-series chips in 2023
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22640552
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott with and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In this special, Thursday episode of Decoder, Andrew Hawkins spoke with secretary of transportation Pete Butigieg ahead of his speech at CES 2022.
2021 was an eventful year for Buttigieg, the youngest and arguably the most notable person to take on the role of transportation secretary in many years. Congress passed President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, which will provide billions of new funding for the creation of a national network of electric vehicle charging stations. The secretary and Andrew talked about that, about self driving vehicles, and of course, Tesla.
Links:
Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the future of transportation
Biden signs $1 trillion infrastructure package into law
The investigation into Tesla Autopilot’s emergency vehicle problem is getting bigger
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22633231
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andru Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Logitech is one of those ubiquitous companies — it’s been around since 1981, selling all kinds of important things that connect to computers of all shapes and sizes: mice, keyboards, cases, cameras, you name it. Nilay Patel spoke with Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell about how the company met increased demand during the pandemic, whether that changed his plans to shift to a services company, and how the supply chain issues around the world affect his business. They also talked about how he manages Logitech’s relationships with other tech giants like Apple and Amazon.
And we had to talk about the decision to kill the Harmony remote line.
Links:
Nilay's interview with Bracken Darrell from 2019
Everything you need to know about the global chip shortage
Why charging phones is such a complex business with Anker CEO Steven Yang
Logitech officially discontinues its Harmony remotes
How an excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day
Logitech is buying Streamlabs for $89 million
Logitech announces cheaper Magic Keyboard alternative for new iPad Pro
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22610722
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
So today I’m talking to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about one of the hardest problems at the intersection of tech and policy right now: the question of how to regulate social media platforms. Everyone seems to think we should do it – Democrats, Republicans – even Facebook is running ads saying it welcomes regulation. It’s weird. But while everyone might agree on the idea, no one agrees on the execution, and the biggest hurdle is the First Amendment..
Links:
Florida governor signs law to block ‘deplatforming’ of Florida politicians
Judge blocks Florida’s social media law
Texas passes law that bans kicking people off social media based on ‘viewpoint’
Federal court blocks Texas law banning ‘viewpoint discrimination’ on social media
Social media companies want to co-opt the First Amendment. Courts shouldn’t let them.
Miami Herald Publishing Company vs. Tornillo
Pacific Gas & Electric Company v. Public Utilities Commission of California
Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian Bisexual Group
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22602514
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andru Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
John Hanke is the CEO of Niantic, a company that makes the wildly popular Pokemon Go mobile game in partnership with Nintendo and the Pokémon company. Pokemon Go, and its predecessor Ingress, are now the largest and most successful augmented reality games in the industry, which means John has long been at the forefront of what we’ve all started calling the metaverse—digital worlds that interact with the real world. Lots of companies are chasing metaverse hype but John’s been at it for a while, and I wanted to talk about the reality instead of the hype. We also coin the phrase “marketplace of realities.” It’s a ride.
Links:
Microsoft is supplying 120,000 HoloLens-based headsets to the US Army
Snap’s first AR Spectacles are an ambitious, impractical start
Facebook just revealed its new name: Meta
There will never be another Pokémon Go
Pokémon Go is still incredibly relevant
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is shutting down next year
Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone is out now
The best thing to do in VR is work out
Pokémon Go creator Niantic is working on AR glasses with Qualcomm
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22596531
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott with research by Liz Lian and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andru Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Jonah Erlich is one of the core members of a group called ConstitutionDAO, a group that raised $47 Million to try to buy one of the original copies of the United States Constitution at an auction held by the high-end auction house Sotheby’s.
Links:
Crypto collective raises $27 million to bid for rare copy of US Constitution
ConstitutionDAO loses $43 million auction of rare US Constitution copy
ConstitutionDAO will shut down after losing bid for Constitution
Almost buying a copy of the Constitution is easy, but giving the money back is hard
Ice Bucket Challenge dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS
Iwata Asks: Just Being President Was A Waste!
Could ConstitutionDAO's PEOPLE token be the next meme coin?
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22584604
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott. We are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Kat Norton is a Microsoft Excel influencer. She has over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by the name Miss Excel, and she’s leveraged that into a software training business that is now generating up to six figures of revenue a day. That’s six figures a day. And she’s only been doing this since June 2020. Nilay Patel talks to her about how she built the business, how she uses energetics to go viral, and why her relationship with social media is so different than other creators and influencers,
Links:
excel.com">Excelerator Course
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22571899
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Andrew Marino. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky prides himself on thinking very differently than other CEOs, and his answers to the Decoder questions about how he structures and manages his company were almost always the opposite of what I’m used to hearing on the show. Airbnb is pretty much a single team, focused on a single product, and it all rolls up to Brian. That’s very different from most other big companies, which have lots of divisions and overlapping lines of authority.
And Airbnb’s relationship to cities is changing as tourism changes. Airbnb used to be the poster child for a tech company that showed up without permission and fought with regulators, but as the company has grown and the pandemic has changed things, it’s entered what is hopefully a more mature phase — it just came to a deal with New York City after ten years of argument. I asked Brian about that and about what it’s like to run a public company now — the transition from scrappy startup to public company engaged with regulators is a big one.
Of course, I also had to ask about cryptocurrency and the metaverse — does Brian think we’re all going to be visiting virtual NFT museums on vacations in the future? You have to listen and find out.
Okay, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, here we go.
Links:
Jony Ive is bringing his design talents to... Airbnb
Zillow reportedly needs to sell 7,000 houses after it bought too many
City of New York and Airbnb Reach Settlement Agreement
Airbnb hosts discriminate against black guests based on names, study suggests
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22547463
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Andrew Marino, our research was done by Liz Lian. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Nilay Patel talks to Steven Yang, the CEO and founder of Anker Innovations. The conversation covers the full stack of Decoder topics: taking bets on new tech like gallium nitride, building a direct-to-consumer business on Amazon, and the complexity of managing the Amazon relationship, regulatory issues, platform fees — you name it. And all from a company that started making phone chargers. Anker is endlessly fascinating.
Links:
Anker CEO Steven Yang is all in on USB-C
Amazon-Native Brand Anker Goes Public
EU proposes mandatory USB-C on all devices, including iPhones
Gallium nitride is the silicon of the future
Video: Is gallium nitride the silicon of the future?
Anker MagGo devices snap on for wireless iPhone charging in your car and home
Amazon confirms it removed RavPower, a popular phone battery and charger brand
Another Amazon-first gadget brand has suspiciously vanished: Choetech
Nebula Capsule II mini projector review: TV in a can
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22533880
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andrew Marino. We are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Welcome to a special Thursday edition of Decoder. You may have read on the site that Verge executive editor Dieter Bohn has been working on a documentary called Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone. It's about a company called Handspring and I think the Decoder audience will be really into this story so today we're interviewing Dieter. We talked about his documentary and he brought an exclusive clip that didn't make it into the film.
That documentary is streaming now on The Verge's new streaming apps that you can get on your TV or set top box. We have them for Android, for Amazon Fire TV, for Roku and Apple TV. We've been working on these for a long time. It's a little more complicated than you might think to make these apps, make them good, distribute them on everyone's app stores, some real Decoder pain points in there.
Links
Springboard trailer and how to get the streaming apps
Transcript
https://www.theverge.com/e/22526129
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Facebook announced a major corporate rebrand by changing its company name to Meta. The new name is meant to solidify the social media giant’s longterm bet on building the metaverse. On this episode of Decoder, vice president of Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth talked with The Verge’s Alex Heath about Facebook’s rebrand to Meta, how content moderation will work in the metaverse, and the hardware journey from virtual to mixed reality, and eventually, AR glasses.
Links:
Mark Zuckerberg on why Facebook is rebranding to Meta
Facebook is spending at least $10 billion this year on its metaverse division
Eight things we learned from the Facebook Papers
Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22517027
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Andrew Marino and we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Adobe is one of those companies that I don’t think we pay enough attention to — it’s been around since 1982, and the entire creative economy runs through its software. You don’t just edit a photo, you Photoshop it. We spend a lot of time on Decoder talking about the creator economy, but creators themselves spend all their time working in Adobe’s tools. On this episode, I’m talking to Scott Belsky, chief product officer at Adobe, about the new features coming to their products, many of which focus on collaboration, and about creativity broadly — who gets to be a creative, where they might work, and how they get paid.
Links:
Adobe brings a simplified Photoshop to the web
Adobe is adding a collaborative mood board to Creative Cloud
Soon you can use Photoshop to prepare your art as an NFT
The Furry Lisa, CryptoArt, & The New Economy Of Digital Creativity
basel-banana-eaten.html">A $120,000 Banana Is Peeled From an Art Exhibition and Eaten
Adobe and Twitter are designing a system for permanently attaching artists’ names to pictures
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andrew Marino and we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This week we are talking to Jeep CEO Christian Meunier – and there’s a lot to talk about. Jeep just announced its second hybrid electric vehicle in the US, the Grand Cherokee 4xe. It also announced a plan for its first electric car in 2023, and to have EVs across the line by 2025, which is very soon. And it’s now part of a huge global car company called Stellantis.
So I wanted to know: why start with hybrids, instead of jumping straight to EVs? What does it mean to be the CEO of a brand like Jeep inside of of a huge international company like Stellantis? How does the Jeep team make decisions about features and technology, and how much do they have to defer to a larger parent company? And what does it mean for Jeep, one of the most iconic American car brands, to be part of a huge global company now?
Christian and I talked about all of that, as well as how the chip shortage is affecting Jeep, what cars will look like in 2040, and Jeep’s use of the name “Cherokee” in 2021.
Yeah, this interview goes places.
Links:
The first plug-in hybrid Jeep Grand Cherokee is here
Tested: 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe Complicates a Simple Machine
2021 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon 4xe: A Hybrid That Comes Up Short
The electric Mustang Mach-E takes Ford in a whole new direction
Credits:
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andrew Marino. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
My guest today is Dave Limp, the senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon – or, more simply, the guy in charge of Alexa. Dave’s group at Amazon also includes the Kindle e-reader, the Ring and Blink security camera systems, the Eero wifi router, and a host of other products that connect to Amazon services.
We wanted to know what the business behind Alexa looks like — Amazon sells Echo products at basically break even, it runs the Alexa for all of them for free, and it employs thousands of engineers who work on it. How does that make money? How might it make money in the future? How should we think about Alexa competing with other smart assistants, and for what kinds of business? The answers were not what you’d expect.
Links:
Why the global chip shortage is making it so hard to buy a PS5
Amazon's new Ring Alarm Pro combines a security system with an Eero Router
Say Hello to Astro, Alexa on wheels
Amazon is now accepting your applications for its home surveillance drone
Amazon Glow is a video chat gadget with built-in games to keep kids engaged
Amazon’s new Echo Show 15 is meant to hang on your wall
Amazon’s new Kindle Paperwhite adds a bigger screen, longer battery life, and USB-C
Amazon starts making its own TVs with new Fire TV Omni and 4-Series
Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max review: the one to buy
How to connect Alexa to Spotify, Apple Music, and more
Amazon's race to create the disappearing computer
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/22483986
Credits:
This episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andru Marino. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In Land of the Giants: The Apple Revolution, Recode’s Peter Kafka explores the company that changed what a computer is — and then changed what a phone is. From its beginnings as a niche personal computer company, Apple became the preeminent maker of consumer tech products, a cultural trendsetter, and the most valuable company in the world. And along the way, it changed the way we live.
Listen to Land of the Giants on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Waymo is working on self-driving taxis. Which is a huge deal. Ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft have remade cities, allowed people to give up their cars, and generally connected the buttons you push on your phone to real things happening in the world more directly than almost any other app. Nilay Patel talked to Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, about expanding Waymo’s service to other cities, the hurdles in place, and how she thinks the company will make money over time. We also talked about the regulatory issues the industry faces as it tries to roll out self-driving more broadly, and whether things like Tesla’s “full self driving” are confusing the issue or helping it.
This was a really fun conversation made even better because we recorded it live, on stage at Code Conference.
Links:
Meet the self-driving brains working with Tesla and Ford https://www.theverge.com/22627847/argo-ai-bryan-salesky-decoder-interview-lyft-self-driving
Ford CEO Jim Farley on building the electric F-150 -- and reinventing Ford
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22444294/ford-f150-lightning-pickup-truck-jim-farley-interview
Waymo CEO John Krafcik steps down, replaced by two co-CEOs https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/2/22364317/waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-stepping-down-self-driving-cars-google-alphabet
Riding in Waymo One, the Google spin-off’s first self-driving taxi service https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18126103/waymo-one-self-driving-taxi-service-ride-safety-alphabet-cost-app
Waymo starts offering autonomous rides in San Francisco https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/24/22639226/waymo-san-francisco-rides-self-driving-service
Tesla opens ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta software to more customers https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/26/22693610/tesla-opens-full-self-driving-beta-software-more-customers
Waymo’s self-driving cars are now available on Lyft’s app in Phoenix https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18536003/waymo-lyft-self-driving-ride-hail-app-phoenix
Google is spinning off its self-driving car program into a new company called Waymo https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/13/13936782/google-self-driving-car-waymo-spin-off-company
Car companies will have to report automated vehicle crashes under new rules https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/29/22555666/nhtsa-autonomous-vehicle-crash-report-data
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22472717
Credits:
Host - Nilay Patel
Lead Producer - Creighton DeSimone
Associate Producer - Alexander Charles Adams
Sr Audio Director - Andrew Marino
Editor - Callie Wright
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Nilay Patel talks to John Carreyrou about his reporting on Theranos from his Wall Street Journal articles that broke the scandal in 2015 to his podcast covering the trial of Elizabeth Holmes today.
Links:
Bad Blood: The Final Chapter https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-blood-the-final-chapter/id1575738174
Theranos’ greatest invention was Elizabeth Holmes https://www.theverge.com/22656190/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-wire-fraud-trial-founder-myth
Elizabeth Holmes is on trial for fraud over her time at Theranos https://www.theverge.com/22684354/elizabeth-holmes-trial-wire-fraud-theranos
Apple Podcasts launches in-app subscriptions https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/20/22381980/apple-podcasts-app-subscriptions-new-design
Hot startup Theranos has struggled with its blood-test technology https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901
*Tesla’s Autopilot was engaged when Model 3 crashed into truck, report states https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/16/18627766/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-delray-florida-ntsb-model-3
Uber halts self-driving tests after pedestrian killed in Arizona https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17139518/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-crash-tempe-arizona
Elizabeth Holmes “was in charge” of Theranos, says Gen. Mattis https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/22/22689083/elizabeth-holmes-trial-james-mattis-testimony-theranos-fraud
Theranos reaches settlement with investor Partner Fund Management https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/01/theranos-reaches-settlement-with-investor-partner-fund-management/
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22461304
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andrew Marino. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
We talk a lot about the creator economy here on Decoder and one thing we’ve learned from all those conversations is that the creator economy is a market just like any other, with supply and demand, but that it’s also a market that is absolutely starved of information. So today I’m talking to Lindsey Lee Lugrin, the co-founder and CEO of a new platform called Fuck You Pay Me, which is an all-time great company name. FYPM is an app for creators to review and compare brand deals: what brands are paying, what it’s like to work with them, and whether people would work with them again. It’s kind of like Glassdoor or Yelp for influencers.
Links
The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro https://www.theverge.com/22637871/doug-demuro-car-reviews-youtube-decoder-interview
Advertising is complicated, but Melissa Grady is very good at it https://www.theverge.com/22174582/decoder-podcast-interview-cadillac-cmo-melissa-grady-advertising
YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and the future for creators https://www.theverge.com/22606296/youtube-shorts-fund-neal-mohan-decoder-interview
The App With the Unprintable Name That Wants to Give Power to Creators creators-app-pay.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/technology/fypm-creators-app-pay.html
Introduction to smart contracts
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/
The golden age of YouTube is over
Transcript
https://www.theverge.com/e/22448278
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This week on Decoder we are doing something a little different. We're talking with Charlie Harding, co-host of the podcast Switched on Pop a podcast about pop music, about the state of the music industry particularly as it relates to copyright. The conversation is framed around Olivia Rodrigo's debut album Sour and why she keeps handing out songwriting credits months after the album was released. This is kind of a hybrid between an episode of Decoder and an episode of Switched on Pop. We play a lot of music throughout the episode and in case you want to go back and listen to full songs we've made playlists for both Spotify and Apple Music.
Spotify - https://spoti.fi/3nuMTt7
Apple Music - https://apple.co/3986hUw
Links
Olivia Rodrigo Studied All the Right Moves
https://www.vulture.com/2021/05/olivia-rodrigo-sour-album-review
Why Taylor Swift is rerecording all her old songs https://www.vox.com/culture/22278732/taylor-swift-re-recording-fearless-love-story-master-rights-scooter-braun
Olivia Rodrigo Gives Taylor Swift Songwriting Credit on Second ‘Sour’ Song, ‘Deja Vu’ https://variety.com/2021/music/news/olivia-rodrigo-taylor-swift-songwriting-credit-deja-vu-1235015769/
Olivia Rodrigo Adds Paramore to Songwriting Credits on ‘Good 4 U’
https://variety.com/2021/music/news/olivia-rodrigo-paramore-good-4-u-misery-business-1235048791/
‘Blurred Lines’ Copyright Suit Against Robin Thicke, Pharrell Ends in $5M Judgment https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/robin-thicke-pharrell-williams-blurred-lines-copyright-suit-final-5-million-dollar-judgment-768508/
Katy Perry Wins Appeal in ‘Dark Horse’ Infringement Case https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/katy-perry-dark-horse-copyright-win-appeal-969009/
Led Zeppelin Wins Long ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Copyright Case to-heaven-led-zeppelin-lawsuit.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/arts/music/stairway-to-heaven-led-zeppelin-lawsuit.html
Isley Feels Vindicated In Bolton Case https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/78775/isley-feels-vindicated-in-bolton-case
Transcript - https://www.theverge.com/e/22436745
The Verge is turning 10 and we're throwing a party in New York City! Purchase tickets here - https://bit.ly/2YRI8iR
This episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andrew Marino. We were edited by Callie Wright. And our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Apple has had a lot going on lately: we did a whole episode about the controversial child protection photo scanning features, which have now been delayed. A law in South Korea might force the company to change how App Store payments work; the company settled a Japanese case about the App Store recently, as well as a class-action lawsuit in this country. The verdict in the Epic trial will arrive and there are renewed questions about Apple’s relationship with the Chinese government. And, of course, it’s September — the month when new iPhones usually come out.
But in the background, Verge senior reporter Zoë Schiffer has spent the past few months publishing story after story about unhappy Apple employees, who are starting to talk to the press more and more about what working at Apple is like, and how they’d like it to change. Nilay Patel talks to Zoë about the work she's been doing and what the future holds.
Links:
Here’s why Apple’s new child safety features are so controversial https://bit.ly/3n9E07W
Apple delays controversial child protection features after privacy outcry https://bit.ly/38QdWX2
Apple and Google must allow developers to use other payment systems, new Korean law declares https://bit.ly/3BQeXeb
Apple concedes to let apps like Netflix, Spotify, and Kindle link to the web to sign up https://bit.ly/3kT88Sg
Epic Games v. Apple: the fight for the future of the App Store https://bit.ly/3ySf873
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on competing with Microsoft, the future of work, and managing all those notifications https://bit.ly/2VqBZck
Apple employees circulate petition demanding investigation into “misogynistic” new hire https://bit.ly/3h4Sqm4
“Misogynistic” Apple hire is out hours after employees call for investigation https://bit.ly/3naaL5c
Apple asks staff to return to office three days a week starting in early September https://bit.ly/3yNcUWn
Apple employees push back against returning to the office in internal letter https://bit.ly/3BJYSXy
Apple delays mandatory return to office until January 2022, citing COVID-19 surge https://bit.ly/3l433H5
Apple places female engineering program manager on administrative leave after tweeting about sexism in the office https://bit.ly/3jNwuO0
Google fires prominent AI ethicist Timnit Gebru https://bit.ly/3toFXhZ
Apple Shareholders Show Their Support for Tim Cook https://nyti.ms/3tkAn01
Apple says all US employees now receive equal pay for equal work https://bit.ly/3zSbpYj
Apple keeps shutting down employee-run surveys on pay equity -- and labor lawyers say it’s illegal https://bit.ly/3BNa85E
Apple says it has pay equity, but an informal employee survey suggests otherwise https://bit.ly/3zSJYh0
Apple just banned a pay equity Slack channel but lets fun dogs channel lie https://bit.ly/3hbiyvB
Apple employees are organizing, now under the banner #AppleToo https://bit.ly/3hazJNP
Here’s what we know about the Google union so far https://bit.ly/2WWNfNK
Google employees push back after mishandled sexual harassment revelations https://bit.ly/3DUVv23
Apple cares about privacy, unless you work at Apple https://www.theverge.com/22648265/apple-employee-privacy-icloud-id
Black women say Pinterest created a den of discromination -- despite its image as the nicest company in tech https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/03/pinterest-race-bias-black-employees/
Apple ordered to pay California store workers for time spent waiting for bag searches https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/3/21419729/apple-california-pay-workers-class-action-bag-searches
Read the transcript here:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22423538
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Since the beginning of the pandemic, the demand for microchips has far exceeded supply, causing problems in every industry that relies on computers. And if you’re a Decoder listener, you know that that is every industry. Right now, major automakers have unfinished cars sitting in parking lots waiting for chips to be installed. Game consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X are impossible to find. And even things like microwaves and refrigerators are impacted, because they contain simple controller chips.
So we realized it was time to figure out what caused the chip shortage, why that happened, and how we are going to get out of it.
My guest today is Dr. Willy Shih. He’s the professor of management practices at Harvard Business School. He’s an expert on chips and semiconductors — he spent years working at companies like IBM and Silicon Graphics. And he’s also an expert in supply chains — how things go from raw materials to finished products in stores. Willy’s the guy that grocery stores and paper companies called in March 2020 when there was a run on toilet paper. If anyone’s going to explain this thing, it’s going to be Willy.
Links:
What toilet paper can teach us about supply chains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihd7XJMzdG4
The latest in the global semiconductor shortage https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/2/22363232/global-semiconductor-chip-shortage-pandemic-consoles-cpus-graphics-cards-cars
Ford to build some F-150 trucks without certain parts due to global chip shortage https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/ford-to-build-some-f-150-trucks-without-certain-parts-due-to-global-chip-shortage/
Situation regarding semiconductor plant fire and product supply https://www.akm.com/us/en/about-us/news/information/20210122-information/
Samsung forced to halt chip production in Austin due to power outages https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/17/22287054/samsung-chip-production-halted-austin-winter-storm-uri-power-blackouts
About that White House meeting to discuss the semiconductor supply chain https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2021/04/12/about-that-white-house-meeting-to-discuss-the-semiconductor-supply-chain/?sh=63b7f65b1641
Ford CEO Jim Farley on building the electric F-150 -- and reinventing Ford https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22444294/ford-f150-lightning-pickup-truck-jim-farley-interview
Senate approves billions for US semiconductor manufacturing https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22457293/semiconductor-chip-shortage-funding-frontier-china-competition-act
Intel invests $20 billion into new factories, will produce chips for other companies https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/23/22347250/intel-new-factories-arizona-20-billion-chips-outsourcing-foundry-services-manufacturing
Apple supplier TSMC confirms it’s building an Arizona chip plant https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/14/21259094/apple-tsmc-factory-chips-arizona-a-series
Biden-Harris Administration announces Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force to address short-term supply chain discontinuities https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/08/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-supply-chain-disruptions-task-force-to-address-short-term-supply-chain-discontinuities/
Water shortages loom over future semiconductor fabs in Arizona https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shortage-arizona-drought
Transcript
https://www.theverge.com/e/22412413
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Nilay Patel talks with Doug DeMuro, who reviews cars on YouTube for almost 10 years. Nilay and Doug talk about the economics of YouTube, how Doug feels about the platform, and about the new company he co-founded called Cars and Bids.
Read the transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/22401912
Decoder is produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams and Andrew Marino. We are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Today I'm talking to Bryan Salesky, the cofounder and CEO of Argo AI, a startup that's trying to build the tech stack for self-driving cars. Argo just launched a small fleet of robotaxis in Miami and Austin in partnership with Lyft. I wanted to talk to Bryan about his partnership with Lyft, but I also wanted to know if the pandemic accelerated any of his investment or development the way we have seen in other industries. After all, the proposition of having a taxi all to yourself is pretty enticing in the COVID era, and lots of people moving away from offices to work from home might love having a car that gets them to and from a central office a couple days a week.
Of course, I also had to ask about 5G. Is 5G enabling any of Argo's current self-driving technology? Does he see 5G as a benefit in the future? His answer might surprise you… unless you're a regular listener of this show. Then it won't surprise you one bit.
Read the transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/22391888
Decoder is produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams and Andrew Marino. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Nilay Patel is joined by Riana Pfefferkorn and Jennifer King to talk about Apple's new child safety features. Riana and Jen are both researchers at Stanford and between the two of them have expertise in encryption policies and consumer privacy issues.
Guest Bio:
Riana Pfefferkorn: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people/riana-pfefferkorn
Jennifer King: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people/jen-king
Links:
Apple reveals new efforts to fight child abuse imagery: https://www.theverge.com/e/22375762
WhatsApp lead and other tech experts fire back at Apple’s Child Safety plan: https://www.theverge.com/e/22377406
Apple pushes back against child abuse scanning concerns in new FAQ: https://www.theverge.com/e/22380422
Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-different-about-encryption-opens-backdoor-your-private-life
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22381595
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andrew Marino. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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On today’s episode I’m talking with Neal Mohan, the chief product officer at YouTube. And there’s a lot to talk about – YouTube is announcing a $100 million fund to begin paying creators who use YouTube Shorts, which is its competitor to TikTok. YouTube remains the default video hosting platform for the entire internet, in a way can feel almost invisible, like it’s a utility, like water, or electricity. And on top of all that, there are YouTubers – that particular kind of influencer at the center of the creator economy – the people who have turned YouTube not only into a career, but multimillion dollar businesses that extend into everything from merch drops to cheeseburger restaurants. When people talk about creators and the creator economy, they’re often just talking about YouTube.
YouTube as a whole continues to grow in massive ways – in Google’s last earnings report, YouTube reported 7b in advertising revenue alone, which means it’s a business that is now as big or bigger than Netflix. YouTube is big – just like this conversation.
Links:
YouTube creators can now get $10,000 per month for making Shorts - https://www.theverge.com/e/22370332
Google sets all-time records as search and YouTube profits soar - https://www.theverge.com/e/22360633
"Me at the Zoo" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
Instagram launches reels, it's attempt to keep you off TikTok - https://www.theverge.com/e/21118158
YouTube launches Capture, a video recording and enhancing app for iOS - https://www.theverge.com/e/3541449
Instagram says its algorithm won’t promote Reels that have a TikTok watermark - https://www.theverge.com/e/22038373
Patreon CEO Jack Conte on why creators can’t depend on platforms - https://www.theverge.com/e/22307696
YouTube may push users to more radical views over time, a new paper argues - https://www.theverge.com/e/20600060
Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube - https://www.pnas.org/content/118/32/e2101967118
Read the transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/22370337
Decoder is produced by Creighton DeSimone, Alexander Charles Adams and Andrew Marino. And we are edited by Callie Wright. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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This week Nilay Patel talks to Chuck Todd, the political director at NBC News and moderator of Meet The Press, the longest running television show in the country. Seriously: Meet the Press started in 1946, and Chuck is only the 12th moderator the show’s ever had. As streaming upends television, he’s expanding Meet The Press from a single weekly show where Chuck interviews politicians to an entire roster of formats. There’s Meet the Press, Meet The Press Daily on MSNBC, Meet the Press Reports on the Peacock streaming service, and, of course, a Meet the Press podcast. They discussed how streaming and direct distribution has changed TV news, and what the purpose of a show like Meet the Press really is in an environment where politicians can reach audiences directly whenever they want.
Read the transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/22358331
Decoder is produced by Creighton DeSimone, Liam James, Alexander Charles Adams, and Andrew Marino, and is edited by Callie Wright.
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Nilay Patel encountered the name Blackstone on TikTok last year, just as the pandemic lockdowns were starting. He saw people posting videos smashing burgers and making pancakes outside on a griddle frequently with the caption “I finally got a Blackstone.” 20 minutes ago he hadn’t even heard about this thing, and now he was late to a trend? So he bought one. And hasn’t used his regular grill in over a year.
Nilay sat down with the CEO of Blackstone products and inventor of the Blackstone griddle Roger Dahle. They talked about Blackstone’s ability to generate recurring revenue, and how the griddle itself is a platform for a variety of additional products and services, some of which might be made by competitors. And Blackstone has big competitors in Weber, and Cuisinart — so we talked about competition, and branding, and going up against the biggest players in a space, and the creator economy. You know: Decoder stuff.
Take a listen. And you can read the transcript here: https://www.theverge.com/e/22347828
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We are back after our week off, and we’ve got a good one today. On this episode I’m talking to Thomas Ingenlath, CEO of Polestar, a new car company with close family ties to Volvo.
We talked a lot about what kind of company Polestar is — it’s pretty small, and has the ability to rethink a lot of things about how a car company is organized, while having the ability to fall back on a larger company if needed. We also talked a lot about what makes a car company a car company, at a time when everything about cars seems up for grabs.
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While Decoder is on vacation this week, we're sharing an episode of Land of the Giants, a podcast from our friends at Recode and Eater.
Land of the Giants is a podcast that explores how the biggest tech companies rose to power, and what they're doing with that power. In this 4-part mini-season, they’re covering the world of restaurant delivery apps and exploring how big tech is transforming the business of food, and the true cost of our convenience.
You can listen to the full season of Land of Giants wherever you find your podcasts.
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Juul became a sensation — and a sensationally dramatic story.
Lauren Etter, author of The Devil's Playbook: Big Tobacco, JUUL, and the Addiction of a New Generation, joins us to explain how a tech startup founded in a Stanford design studio to disrupt the smoking industry upended years of tobacco regulation in the United States, got a new generation of teenagers addicted to nicotine after years of declining teen smoking rates, and eventually found itself valued at 38 billion.
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