Our Thursday episodes are all about big topics in the news, and this week we’re wrapping up our short series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. In our last couple episodes, we talked a lot about some of the biggest, most complicated legal and policy questions surrounding the modern AI industry, including copyright lawsuits and deepfake legislation. But we wanted to end on a more personal note: How is this technology making people feel, and in particular how is it affecting how p...
Mar 07, 2024•40 min
On this special episode of Decoder, science educator and YouTuber Hank Green is guest hosting. And the guest? It’s Nilay Patel, who sat down with Hank to discuss building The Verge, the state of media, and the future of the web. Also: whether the fediverse is worth investing in, and how social platforms’ control of distribution has shaped the internet. In the words of Hank: “Nilay has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he’s going to revolutionize the media through blog po...
Mar 04, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and this week we’re continuing our mini-series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. Last week, we took a look at the wave of copyright lawsuits that might eventually grind this whole industry to a halt. Those are basically a coin flip — and the outcomes are off in the distance, as those cases wind their way through the legal system. A bigger problem right now is that AI systems are really go...
Feb 29, 2024•41 min
Today, I’m talking with Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll, a streaming service focused entirely on anime — and really, the biggest anime service still going. Rahul has a long history with anime: he spent more than seven years at Funimation, a company that started in the 90s to distribute Dragon Ball Z to US audiences, before getting the top job at Crunchyroll. Anime might seem like niche content, but it’s not nearly as niche as you might think – our colleagues over at Polygon just ran a...
Feb 26, 2024•1 hr 10 min
The Decoder team is off this week. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes; we’re really excited about what’s on the schedule here. In the meantime, I thought you all might enjoy a conversation I had with Kara Swisher, the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman about the Apple Vision Pro. All of us have been covering Apple for a very long time, and we had a lot of fun swapping impressions, talking strategy, and sharing what we liked,...
Feb 22, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Our new Thursday episodes are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and for the next few weeks we’re going to stay focused on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and StabilityAI. So for this episode, we’re going to talk about those cases, and the main defense the AI companies are relying on: an idea called...
Feb 15, 2024•40 min
Today, I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. Alongside FTC chair Lina Khan, Jonathan is one of the most prominent figures in the big shift happening in competition and antitrust in the United States. This is a fun episode: we taped this conversation live on stage at the Digital Content Next conference in Charleston, South Carolina a few days ago, so you’ll hear the audience, which was a group of fancy me...
Feb 12, 2024•34 min
We’re very excited for today’s episode, because from now on we’ll be delivering you two Decoders every week. On Monday’s we’ll have our classic interviews with CEOs and other high-profile guests. But our new shorter Thursday episode – like today’s – will explain big topics in the news with Verge reporters, experts, and other friends of the show. The big idea we’re going to jump into today does in fact have a lot of problems: electric vehicle adoption in the US. We invited Verge Transportation Ed...
Feb 08, 2024•42 min
Today, I’m talking with Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast. Casey is also a former editor here at The Verge and was my co-host at the Code Conference last year. Most importantly, Casey and I are also very close friends, so this episode is a little looser than usual. I wanted to talk to Casey for a few reasons. One, the media industry overall is falling apart, with huge layoffs at almost every media organization you can think of ...
Feb 05, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Today, I’m talking with Senator Brian Schatz, of Hawaii. We joke that Decoder is ultimately a show about org charts, but there’s a lot of truth to it. We talked about the separate offices he has to balance against each other, and the concessions he has to make to work within the Senate structure. We also talked a lot about two of the biggest issues in tech regulation today. One is Europe, which is doing a lot of regulation while the US does almost none. How does a senator think about the U.S. al...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Today, I’m talking with Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California. He’s been in Congress for eight years now, representing California’s 17th District, which is arguably the highest-tech district in the entire country. You’ll hear him say a couple of times that there’s $10 trillion of tech market value in his district, and that’s not an exaggeration: Apple, Intel, and Nvidia are all headquartered in his district, along with important new AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. I wanted to ...
Jan 23, 2024•54 min
Today, I'm talking to Dana Rao, who is General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer at Adobe. Now, if you're a longtime Decoder listener, you know that I have always been fascinated with Adobe, which I think the tech press largely undercovers. If you're interested in how creativity happens, you're kind of necessarily interested in what Adobe's up to. And it is fascinating to consider how Dana's job as Adobe's top lawyer is really at the center of the company's future. The copyright issues with genera...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 26 min
2023 will go down as the year that Elon Musk killed Twitter. First he did it in a big way, by buying the company, firing most of the employees, and destabilizing the platform; then he did it in a small, but important, symbolic way, by renaming the company X and trying to make a full break with what came before. So now that the story of the company named Twitter is officially over, it felt important to stop and ask: What was Twitter, anyway, and why were so many powerful people obsessed with it f...
Dec 21, 2023•40 min
Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, which makes software to optimize shipping everything from huge containers to ecommerce deliveries. It’s a fascinating company; we had Ryan on to explain it last year. Right around the first time we spoke, Ryan handed off the CEO role to 20-year Amazon veteran Dave Clark. Then, barely a year later, Dave got fired, and Ryan returned after CEO. I always joke that Decoder is a show about org charts… so why did Ryan make and then unmake the biggest or...
Dec 19, 2023•1 hr 6 min
The US Digital Service has a fascinating structure: it comprises nearly 250 people, all of whom serve two-year stints developing apps, improving websites, and streamlining government services. You could call USDS the product and design consultancy for the rest of the government. The Obama administration launched the USDS in 2014, after the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov and the tech sprint that saved it. USDS administrator Mina Hsiang explains to Decoder how it all works, and what she hope...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 5 min
IBM made some announcements this week about its plans for the next ten years of quantum computing: there are new chips, new computers, and new APIs. Quantum computers could in theory entirely revolutionize the way we think of computers… if, that is, someone can build one that’s actually useful. Jerry Chow, director of quantum systems at IBM, explains to Decoder just how close the field is to actual utility. Links: What is a Qubit? | Microsoft Azure IBM Quantum Summit 2023 The Wired Guide to Quan...
Dec 05, 2023•56 min
Today I’m talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. It’s a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, and Wix’s business today is less about web publishing, and more about providing software to help business owners run their entire companies. It’s fascinating, and Avishai has built a fascinating structure inside of Wix to make all that happen. Wix is also an Israeli company. Avis...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 12 min
What actually happened at OpenAI in the last three days? Decoder host and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Verge editors Alex Heath and David Pierce to break it down and try to work out what's next. Further reading: Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI OpenAI’s new CEO is Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO Emmett Shear named new CEO of OpenAI by board Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Hundreds of OpenAI employees threat...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Today, I’m talking to Jim Rowan, the CEO of Volvo Cars. Now, Jim’s only been at Volvo for a short time. He took over in 2022 after a decades-long career in the consumer electronics industry. Before Volvo, his two longest stints were at BlackBerry, whose QNX software is used in tons of cars, and then at Dyson, which once tried and failed to make an electric car. Jim and I talked a lot about how that unique experience has influenced how he thinks about the transformational changes happening in the...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min
We’ve got a good one today. I’m talking to former President Barack Obama about AI, social networks, and how to think about democracy as both of those things collide. I sat down with Obama last week at his offices in Washington, DC, just hours after President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order about AI. You’ll hear Obama say he’s been talking to the Biden administration and leaders across the tech industry about AI and how best to regulate it. My idea here was to talk to Obama the consti...
Nov 07, 2023•48 min
Today I'm talking with Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, a newer record label that I think looks a lot like the future of the music industry. As Golnar explains, Reservoir thinks of individual songs as assets, and after acquiring them, the company sets about monetizing those assets in various ways. This is a copyright-based business in an age where copyright is under a lot of pressure — from TikTok, generative AI, and all of the now-familiar threats to the music busine...
Oct 31, 2023•57 min
Today, I’m talking to internet policy legend Lawrence Lessig. He's been teaching law for more than 30 years, and is a defining expert on free speech and the internet — and something of a hero of mine, whose works I've been reading since college. You’ll hear us agree that the internet at this moment in time is absolutely flooded with disinformation, misinformation, and other really toxic stuff that’s harmful to us as individuals and, frankly, to our future as a functioning democracy. But you’ll a...
Oct 24, 2023•55 min
Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology that’s ever existed. As Kashmir reports, you simply plug a photo of someone into Clearview’s app, and it will find every photo of that person that’s ever been posted on the internet. It’s breathtaking and s...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Today we’re bringing you the last of our live-on-stage interviews from the 2023 Code Conference. Verge deputy editor Alex Heath sat down to chat with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. Roblox definitely started out as a kid thing, but the company has big plans to change all that, and Alex got to find out a bit about how that’s going. Roblox is determined to be a platform, even more than a product — something users can develop games and experiences on. And of course, David and Alex spoke about AI. David ...
Oct 12, 2023•32 min
We’ve got another interview from the Code Conference today. My friend and co-host, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, and I had a chance to talk with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. Rivian is a newer company — RJ started it in 2009, and it took more than 10 years to start shipping cars to consumers. But its first vehicle, the R1T pickup, made a big splash when it arrived in 2021, and the company has more back orders for both the R1T and its second vehicle, the R1S SUV, than it can handle. For now. We asked RJ about...
Oct 10, 2023•40 min
Last week, when I was co-hosting the Code Conference, I got to talk with Getty Images CEO Craig Peters. The generative AI boom is a direct threat to Getty in many ways. For example, the company is suing Stability AI for training the Stable Diffusion model on Getty content — sometimes clearly including AI-generated copies of the Getty watermark — without permission. Getty's answer? Its own proprietary, in-house AI tool, trained — with permission — on its own content, using a model where the origi...
Oct 05, 2023•34 min
I co-hosted the Code Conference last week, and today’s episode is one of my favorite conversations from the show: Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott. If you caught Kevin on Decoder a few months ago, you know that he and I love talking about technology together. I really appreciate that he thinks about the relationship between technology and culture as much as we do at The Verge, and it was great to add the energy from the live Code audience to that dynamic. Kevin and I talked about how thin...
Oct 03, 2023•44 min
We spent a lot of time here on Decoder talking about electric vehicles and the future of cars and we’re usually talking about passenger vehicles or maybe cargo vans. But there’s another huge industry that can also reap the benefits of electrified transportation: agriculture. I co-hosted the Code Conference this week where I had the opportunity to hangout onstage with Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa. Honestly, this was one of my favorite conversations of the entire event. We are utterly reli...
Sep 30, 2023•28 min
Today, we’re bringing you something a little different. The Code Conference was this week, and we had a great time talking live onstage with all of our guests. We’ll be sharing a lot of these conversations here in the coming days, and the first one we’re sharing is my chat with Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. Lisa and I spoke for half an hour, and we covered an incredible number of topics, especially about AI and the chip supply chain. The balance of supply and demand is overall in a pretty good pl...
Sep 29, 2023•36 min
Today, we have a special episode for you. The Code Conference wrapped up this week, and the finale included a rare interview from my Code co-host and CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin with X CEO Linda Yaccarino. To say the sit-down with Elon Musk’s No. 2 was confrontational would be an understatement. Yaccarino appeared both unprepared to answer tough questions and very combative, especially when asked about comments from former trust and safety head Yoel Roth, who’s become an outspoken critic o...
Sep 29, 2023•42 min
