TikTok has redefined American pop culture and upended the music industry, advertising and the economics of fame. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo examines TikTok’s hands-on approach with its creators and artists, minting a new generation of social media stars and positioning TikTok’s parent company as the first Chinese tech giant to come out with a truly global consumer app. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 29, 2021•37 min•Season 2Ep. 3
TikTok is powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence that predicts what users want to see next. This technology was developed at ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company and the most valuable startup in the world. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo explains how ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming fundamentally changed how a generation consumes media on their phones. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 22, 2021•38 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Alex Zhu, a Chinese tech entrepreneur, was seated on a train in Silicon Valley across from a group of teenagers. He watched as the kids were listening to music and making videos on their phones, and he decided to create an app that combined the two cultural obsessions. The resulting platform would become the social media powerhouse now known as TikTok. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo explains the genesis of Gen Z’s favorite app. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Apr 22, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 1
TikTok emerged as the defining app of a generation: a cultural tastemaker, a musical hitmaker and a launchpad for a new breed of celebrity. But as the app reached over 2 billion downloads, TikTok became a victim of its own success, attracting sharp scrutiny from the world’s two most powerful countries. In this season of Foundering, Bloomberg Technology reporter Shelly Banjo tracks the rise of TikTok by taking listeners inside the mysterious Chinese mega-startup behind the phenomenon and the poli...
Apr 01, 2021•2 min
A few decades ago, nobody really questioned vaccines. They were viewed as a standard part of staying healthy and safe. Today, the number of people questioning vaccines risks prolonging a pandemic that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. How we got to this moment didn’t start with the rollout of vaccines or in March 2020, or even with the election of Donald Trump. Our confidence in vaccines, often isn't even about vaccines. It’s about trust. And that trust has been eroding for ...
Mar 12, 2021•3 min
After WeWork's failed IPO, thousands of employees were laid off and the company teetered on the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, ousted CEO Adam Neumann flew to Israel with a generous exit package in hand. In this final episode of Foundering, reporter Ellen Huet surveys the wreckage of WeWork. Adam's executives and employees were asking themselves: Did Adam ever really believe in the values he preached? And what lessons will the world draw from WeWork's crash? See omnystudio.com/listener for privac...
Jul 30, 2020•42 min•Season 1Ep. 7
WeWork had spent nine years chasing lightning-fast growth, burning billions of dollars, and expanding around the world. In 2019, the company reached a turning point: WeWork needed even more cash, and Adam Neumann decided to take his company public with a massive IPO. But suddenly, in the span of a few weeks, his plan crashed spectacularly. The almost-IPO flopped and WeWork became a laughingstock. In this episode, reporter Ellen Huet asks: How did the company's fortune flip so fast, and why didn'...
Jul 23, 2020•42 min•Season 1Ep. 6
The killers of Berta Caceres had every reason to believe they’d get away with murder. More than 100 other environmental activists in Honduras had been killed in the previous five years, yet almost no one had been punished for the crimes. Bloomberg’s Blood River follows a four-year quest to find her killers – a twisting trail that leads into the country’s circles of power. Blood River premieres on July 27. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 21, 2020•4 min
Adam Neumann always had wild ambitions. By 2017, he had found an even wilder investor who wanted to fund those ambitions: SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Adam spent his billions from SoftBank on competitive tactics, seemingly random investments, and even an elementary school. In this episode, reporter Ellen Huet explores why this free-wheeling spending was so odd: Adam knew this was a bad idea. In exclusive recordings from internal meetings in 2016, he warned his employees that they had to cut back ...
Jul 16, 2020•36 min•Season 1Ep. 5
What happened at WeWork when things got ugly between the company and its employees? As WeWork expanded, a handful of employees wanted to speak out and interrupt the public image that WeWork was presenting to the world. In this episode, reporter Ellen Huet follows the stories of two former workers, some of the first insiders to speak up about what they saw on the job. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jul 09, 2020•31 min•Season 1Ep. 4
To its thousands of employees, WeWork was much more than a job. Founder Adam Neumann leveraged his employees’ emotions to motivate them. In exclusive tapes obtained by Bloomberg, Adam lectured employees that working at WeWork was special: “You do not get a chance like this again.” In this episode, a former employee describes the tumultuous experience of working inside WeWork’s headquarters, from their raucous parties to the late night meetings. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information...
Jul 02, 2020•33 min•Season 1Ep. 3
WeWork sold office space, but also it sold something else: fun. Beer flowed freely, members partied at the office, and your work was your life. But getting these offices off the ground was utter chaos, especially for the burgeoning company’s young, inexperienced workers. In this episode, reporter Ellen Huet takes a look at WeWork’s early days, when the company was growing so fast that some buildings opened without doors or functioning bathrooms. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informatio...
Jun 25, 2020•32 min•Season 1Ep. 2
The WeWork Story, Part 1: When Adam Neumann dreamed up WeWork, he took inspiration from part of his childhood: his years on a kibbutz in Israel. On stage when discussing WeWork, he waxed poetic about the spirit of community he had found there, and how WeWork was similar, but different -- a “kibbutz 2.0.” So reporter Ellen Huet wanted to find out: Was the kibbutz anything like a WeWork? And how did it shape what Adam later built? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jun 25, 2020•33 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Adam Neumann had a vision: to make his startup WeWork a wildly successful company that would change the world. He convinced thousands of other people -- customers, employees, investors -- that he could make that dream a reality. And for a while, he did. He was one of the most successful startup founders in the world. But then, in the span of just a few months, everything changed. Foundering is a new serialized podcast from the journalists at Bloomberg Technology. This season, we’ll tell you the ...
Jun 11, 2020•4 min
Bloomberg Technology reporter Ellen Huet has some exciting news about what's coming in the Decrypted feed. We’re launching a new show, Foundering, and spending our entire first season looking at the story of WeWork. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jun 04, 2020•2 min
This week on Decrypted, hosts Aki and Brad get together one last time for an announcement: This will be the very last episode of Decrypted. They also look back at some of their favorite episodes from the show, with updates on where those stories are today. (But don't unsubscribe from this feed because we'll be announcing a new show next spring!) For a list of episodes Aki and Brad will be discussing: Young Blood and the Pursuit of Eternal Youth He Sparked the Fake News Boom. Then Facebook Broke ...
Dec 10, 2019•22 min
Computers can now drive cars, identify faces and transcribe speech, but many experts said that it would take much longer for AI to tackle creative endeavors. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology's Natalia Drozdiak meets three composers using artificial intelligence to make music, and she and host Aki Ito dissect their robo-generated songs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Nov 26, 2019•26 min
Under pressure from users, advertisers and government regulators, YouTube has implemented sweeping changes to its service over the last three years to minimize the spread of harmful and misleading content. But those changes have made it harder for many of its creators to make a living off of the platform. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology's Mark Bergen visits YouTube whisperer Tim Schmoyer, who advises other YouTube creators on how to adapt to the changing platform. See omnystudio.com...
Nov 19, 2019•20 min
The U.S.-China trade war has dragged on for more than a year now, harming the livelihoods of people around the world who depend on the two superpowers getting along. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology's Shelly Banjo profiles one such person: Michael Michelini, an American who moved to China a decade ago to build out his e-commerce business. At the time, Michelini believed that the internet was making the world a more open and interconnected place. Recent tensions between the world's tw...
Nov 12, 2019•22 min
Warehouse workers suffer from an unusually high rate of injury. Now, at some facilities, workers can wear a sensor on their chest, which buzzes when they’re at risk of getting hurt. But this tracking device also gathers detailed information about the employee’s movements – and sends this data to their employer. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology’s Joshua Brustein looks at a new technology, whose proponents say will make workplaces safer, but also inspires concern about workplace survei...
Nov 05, 2019•19 min
Over the summer, Elon Musk unveiled the details of his secretive startup Neuralink. Its goal, he said, is to place electrodes in our brains so we can control a computer with our thoughts. Its experiments have so far been limited to rodents and monkeys, but Neuralink builds on strides already made in medicine, where doctors have successfully placed implants into human brains to treat a variety of illnesses. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology’s Sarah McBride visits the primate lab that’s...
Oct 29, 2019•23 min
Bloomberg's Travel Genius podcast is back! After clocking another hundred-thousand miles in the sky, hosts Nikki Ekstein and Mark Ellwood have a whole new series of flight hacking, restaurant sleuthing, and hotel booking tips to inspire your own getaways—along with a who's who roster of itinerant pros ready to spill their own travel secrets. From a special episode on Disney to a master class on packing, we'll go high, low, east, west, and everywhere in between. The new season starts Nov. 6. See ...
Oct 25, 2019•1 min
Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests have ensnared a number of companies, including one U.S. company that has the most to lose in China: Apple Inc. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology's Alistair Barr breaks down the iPhone maker's controversial decision to reject an app built to aid Hong Kong residents living through the protests, and discusses what's at stake for Apple both at home and abroad. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Oct 22, 2019•14 min
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Oct 15, 2019•23 min
Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and state governments across the U.S. are investigating the tech giants for anti-competitive behavior. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology’s Eric Newcomer walks us through those investigations, and outlines how a Democratic president may take it even further in 2021. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Oct 09, 2019•23 min
This week on Decrypted, we're re-airing our story about CeCe Moore, who helps law enforcement track down killers by combing through databases of consumer DNA test results. At the end of the episode, host Aki Ito catches up with reporter Kristen V. Brown to see what's new in this emerging field. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Oct 01, 2019•28 min
Over the last few weeks, WeWork's parent company has lurched from one crisis to the next as it scrambled to keep its IPO alive—resulting in founder Adam Neumann leaving his job as CEO. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology's Ellen Huet traces We Co.'s meteoric rise to a $47 billion giant and dissects the chaos of the last few weeks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 25, 2019•23 min
Ahead of the 2016 elections, Illinois' voter database was infiltrated by Russia's state-backed hackers. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology's Kartikay Mehrotra investigates what Illinois has done since to prepare for the next presidential election, and whether states and counties across the country are ready for 2020. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 17, 2019•20 min
For years, critics have accused Amazon.com for not doing enough to curb its impact on the environment—and recently, a group of Amazon employees joined in to try to force the issue by filing a shareholder resolution. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology's Spencer Soper takes us inside the uprising. And he'll also ask which is worse for the planet: driving to the store ourselves, or having everything delivered to us? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Sep 10, 2019•23 min
On Sept. 10, Apple will be unveiling its new products for the year. Ahead of the event, Bloomberg Technology’s Mark Gurman previews the changes Apple’s planning for its three versions of the iPhone, as well as the company’s other products. Will these upgrades help Apple out of its recent funk? Also: our own announcement at the start of the show. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 03, 2019•19 min
