Matt Strauss is the Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer at NBC Universal. Thats a big fancy title that means hes not only in charge of Peacock but also every other streaming video offering the company has worldwide. So you can bet Matt and I got into what that structure even looks like, and how it all operates under the overall ownership ofComcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition as its traditional cable TV business continues to fade. Theres a lot in this one tech, media, sports,...
Sep 30, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast We have a very special episode of Decoder today. Its become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. This year, before his interview with Mark, Alex got to try a new pair of experimental AR glasses the company is calling Orion. Alex talked to Mark about a whole lot more, including why the company is investing so heavily in AR, why he's shifted away from politics, Mark's thoughts on the link between teen mental h...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, a relatively new software maker that develops the Arc browser. The company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages, which puts it right in the middle of a contentious debate in the tech industry around paying web creators for their work. Weve been talking about these topics pretty much nonstop for last year here on Decoder. So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explore ...
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Googles in the middle of its antitrust case in just as many months, after it lost a landmark trial in August over anticompetitive search practices. This time around, the DOJ is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market. Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner has been on the ground at the courthouse to hear testimony from news publishers, advertising experts, and Google executives to make sense of it and, ultimately, to see whether a federal judge hands the...
Sep 19, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Roy Jakobs. Hes the CEO of Royal Philips, which makes medical devices ranging from MRI machines to ventilators. Philips has a long history - the company began in the late 19th century as a lightbulb manufacturer, and over the past century its grown and shrunk in various ways. Basically, while every other company has been trying to get bigger, Philips has been paring itself down to a tight focus on healthcare, and Roy and I talked about why that market is worth the focus. R...
Sep 16, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Weve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge for several years now the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt could completely reset our cultural relationship to photography. But one argument keeps cropping up in response. Youve heard it a million times, and its when people say its just like Photoshop, with Photoshop standing in for the concept of image editing generally. So today, were trying to understand...
Sep 12, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the industry. Anthropics main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT. Mike has a fascinating resume: he was the cofounder of Instagram, and then started AI-powered newsreader Artifact. I was a fan of Artifact, so I wanted to know more about the decision to shut it down as well as the decision to sell it t...
Sep 09, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isnt static, parts of it sometimes just vanish. But its not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. In 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, joins Decoder this...
Sep 05, 2024•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. Well be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday. In the meantime we thought wed re-share an explainer thats taken on a whole new relevance in the last couple weeks, about deepfakes and misinformation. In February, I talked with Verge policy editor Adi Robertson how the generative AI boom might start fueling a wave of election-related misinformation, especially deepfakes and manipulated media. Its no...
Aug 29, 2024•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. Well be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday, and Im very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule. But while were out, wed like to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season, for a deep dive into Disney. Can it be a tech company? Its the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney Plus and it also tells us...
Aug 26, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Onion is a comedy institution and like everything else in media, it went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. We could do an entire episode on the G/O Media calamity, but the short version is: A bunch of friends just managed to buy The Onion, and they're busy relaunching the website, going back to print, and, clearly, having a blast doing it. CEO Ben Collins and chief product officer Danielle Strle joined me to explain how that even works in 2024. Links: The Onion sold by G/O Media | ...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today Im talking with Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. GitHub is the platform for managing code but since 2018, its also been owned by Microsoft. We talk a lot about how independent GitHub really is inside of Microsoft especially now that Microsoft is all-in on AI, and Gitbhub Copilot is one of the biggest AI product success stories that exists right now. But his perspective on AI is pretty refreshing: Its clear theres still a long way to go. Links: Original GitHub landing page | Wayback Machin...
Aug 19, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Theres a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. Its called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. At a high level, KOSPA could radically change how tech platforms handle speech in an effort to try and make the internet safer for minors. Its a controversial bill, with a lot going on. To break it all down, I invited on Verge ...
Aug 15, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda, and I will just tell you right away, we get all the way to people marrying their AI companions, so get ready. Its a ride. Replikas basic pitch is pretty simple: what if you had an AI friend? The company offers avatars you can curate to your liking that pretend to be human, so they can be your friend, your therapist, or even your date. Thats a lot for a private company running an iPhone app, and Eugenia and I talked a lot about the con...
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. This is Jonathans second time on the show, and its a bit of an emergency podcast situation. On Monday, a federal court issued a monumental decision in the DOJs case against Google, holding that Google Search and the text ads in search are monopolies. The court hasnt decided on the penalties for all this yet that process is scheduled to start next month. But its the bigge...
Aug 08, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, which owns a large portfolio of familiar travel brands: OpenTable, Kayak, and Priceline, as well as its largest subsidiary, Booking.com. This episode is pure Decoder bait all the way through from Bookings structure, to competition with hotels and airlines increasingly going direct to consumer, even to how European regulation affects competition with Google.Oh, and of course, how Booking is incorporating AI; Glenn has some fascinati...
Aug 05, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every time we talk about AI, we get one big piece of feedback that I really want to dive into: how the lightning-fast explosion of AI tools affects the climate. AI takes a lot of energy, and theres a huge unanswered question as to whether using all that juice for AI is actually worth it, both practically and morally. Its messy and complicated and there are a bunch of apparent contradictions along the way so its perfect for Decoder. Verge senior science reporter Justine Calma joins me to see if w...
Aug 01, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Hanneke Faber, the CEO of Logitech. Hannekes still pretty fresh to the role: She joined the company last October, after former CEO Bracken Darrell left following the pandemic boom and subsequent economic slowdown that halted Logitechs growth. Hanneke, who comes from Unilever and Procter & Gamble, is new to the world of consumer electronics. So we talked about the structural changes shes already making at Logitech, and the changes she intends to make in the future. It sound...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Supreme Court has just taken on the entire idea of the US administrative state and the Court is winning. Earlier this month, a conservative majority overturned a longstanding legal principle called Chevron deference. The implications are enormous for every possible kind of regulation and net neutrality looks poised to be the first victim. Verge editor Sarah Jeong joins me to explain why. Links: Supreme Court overrules Chevron, kneecapping federal regulators | The Verge What SCOTUS just did t...
Jul 25, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe. RJ was on the show last September when we chatted at the Code Conference, but the past 10 months have seen a whirlwind of change throughout the car industry and at Rivian in particular. This year alone, the company unveiled five new models in its lineup and also just announced a $5 billion joint venture with Volkswagen. We got into all that and more. If youre a Decoder listener, youve heard me talk to a lot of car CEOs on the show, but i...
Jul 22, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week Im talking to Matthew Ball, who was last on the show in 2022 to talk about his bookThe Metaverse: How it Will Revolutionize Everything. Its 2024 and its safe to say that has not happened yet. But Matts still on the case in fact he just released an almost complete update of the book, now with the much more sober title, Building the Spatial Internet. Matt and I talked a lot about where the previous metaverse hype cycle landed us, and what there is to learn from these boom and bust waves....
Jul 18, 2024•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Thats a cabinet-level position, where she works as the chief science and tech advisor to President Biden. Arati and her team of about 140 people at the OSTP are responsible for advising the president on not only big developments in science but also about major innovations in tech, much of which come from the private sector. Her job involves guiding regulatory efforts, government inves...
Jul 15, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today Im talking to Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic. I was really excited to talk to Nick. Like so many media CEOs, including Vox Medias, he just signed a deal allowing OpenAI to use The Atlantics vast archives as training data, but he also has a rich background in tech. Before he was the CEO of The Atlantic, Nick was the editor-in-chief of Wired, where he set his sights on AI reporting well before anyone else. I was also really interested in asking Nick about the general sense that t...
Jul 11, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Canva got its start more than a decade ago as a different form of disruptive tech for creatives. Its a web-based platform that makes design tools cheaper and accessible for individuals, schools, and businesses from tiny to enterprise. Melanie has big goals to grow the company and try to do good in the process. Links: Canva tackled digital design and now the office suite is next | The Verge Canva Inks Deals With Warner Music Group, Merlin | Variety Canva founders join Bill Gates Giving Pledge to ...
Jul 08, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Its almost the Fourth of July, and that means its time for our annual grilling episode. This year, Im talking with Big Green Egg CEO Dan Gertsacov, who has big plans for using very modern fan-based marketing techniques to expand the market for the companys old-fashioned, fire-burning, aspirational product. Links: Big Green Egg Appoints a New CEO | CookOut News Big Green Egg 50th Anniversary 1974-2024 | Big Green Egg Yep, Big Green Egg Just Made a Beer Keg | Gear Patrol AI could kill creative job...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, were talking about politics and lobbying in America. Its hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and billionaires didnt touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didnt really exist before the 1970s. Now, our political debates about everything from energy, finance, and healthcare are deeply intertwined with corporations and their money and new big players in tech now spend tons of political money of their own. To understand the struct...
Jun 27, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix. I caught up with Greg while he was at the Cannes Lions festival in France, which is basically the worlds biggest gathering of advertisers and marketers. Its an increasingly important place for Greg to be, as Netflixs new ad tier has nearly doubled in six months to more than 40 million subscribers and feels increasingly pivotal to the future of the company. On top of that, Netflix is updating its famous culture memo, and I wanted to chat ...
Jun 24, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Weve got a special episode of the show today I was traveling last week, so Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and our new senior AI reporter Kylie Robison are filling in for me, with a very different kind of episode about AI. We talk a lot about AI in a broad sense on Decoder it comes up in basically every single interview I do these days. But we dont spend a ton of time on the day-to-day happenings of the AI industry itself. So we thought it would be a good idea to take a beat and have Alex and Kyl...
Jun 20, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tubi is a free and very rapidly growing streaming TV platform according to Nielsen, it had an average of a million viewers watching every minute in May 2024, beating out Disney Plus, Max, Peacock, and basically everything else, save Netflix and YouTube. All those streaming service price hikes are driving people to free options, and Tubi is right there to catch them. CEO Anjali Sud joins Decoder to explain why she thinks Tubi's model "could be" profitable, and how Tubi competes not only against t...
Jun 17, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Private equity is a simple concept a PE firm uses some combination of money and debt to buy a company, then makes a profit but the reality of what happens to the companies that get acquired is anything but. It's everywhere, and it's not going away. In this summer remix, we're talking with Brendan Ballou, author of Plunder: Private Equitys Plan to Pillage America, about how we got here and what happens next. Links: Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted ToysRUs heres why that matter...
Jun 13, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast