The Decoder team is off this week. Well be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes; were really excited about whats on the schedule here. In the meantime, I thought you all might enjoy a conversation I had with Kara Swisher, the Wall Street Journals Joanna Stern and Bloombergs Mark Gurman about the Apple Vision Pro. All of us have been covering Apple for a very long time, and we had a lot of fun swapping impressions, talking strategy, and sharing what we liked, and ...
Feb 22, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our new Thursday episodes are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and for the next few weeks were going to stay focused on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. Theres 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, were going to talk about those cases, and the main defense the AI companies are relying on: an idea called fa...
Feb 15, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im 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 youll hear the audience, which was a group of fancy medi...
Feb 12, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Were very excited for todays episode, because from now on well be delivering you two Decoders every week. On Mondays well have our classic interviews with CEOs and other high-profile guests. But our new shorter Thursday episode like todays will explain big topics in the news with Verge reporters, experts, and other friends of the show. The big idea were going to jump into today does in fact have a lot of problems: electric vehicle adoption in the US. We invited Verge Transportation Editor Andy H...
Feb 08, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im 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 h...
Feb 05, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Senator Brian Schatz, of Hawaii. We joke that Decoder is ultimately a show about org charts, but theres a lot of truth to it. We talked about the separate offices he has to balance against each other, and the concessions he has to make to work within the Senate structure. We also talked a lot about two of the biggest issues in tech regulation today. One is Europe, which is doing a lot of regulation while the US does almost none. How does a senator think about the U.S. all ...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California. Hes been in Congress for eight years now, representing Californias 17th District, which is arguably the highest-tech district in the entire country. Youll hear him say a couple of times that theres $10 trillion of tech market value in his district, and thats not an exaggeration: Apple, Intel, and Nvidia are all headquartered in his district, along with important new AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. I wanted to know h...
Jan 23, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, which makes software to optimize shipping everything from huge containers to ecommerce deliveries. Its a fascinating company; we had Ryan on to explain it last year. Right around the first time we spoke, Ryan handed off the CEO role to 20-year Amazon veteran Dave Clark. Then, barely a year later, Dave got fired, and Ryan returned after CEO. I always joke that Decoder is a show about org charts so why did Ryan make and then unmake the biggest org ...
Dec 19, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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 thats 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 Quantu...
Dec 05, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today Im talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. Its a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, and Wixs business today is less about web publishing, and more about providing software to help business owners run their entire companies. Its fascinating, and Avishai has built a fascinating structure inside of Wix to make all that happen. Wix is also an Israeli company. Avishai ...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 OpenAIs 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 threate...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Jim Rowan, the CEO of Volvo Cars. Now, Jims 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 w...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Weve got a good one today. Im 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. Youll hear Obama say hes 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 constituti...
Nov 07, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today I'm talking with Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, a newer record label that I think looks a lot like the future of the music industry. As Golnar explains, Reservoir thinks of individual songs as assets, and after acquiring them, the company sets about monetizing those assets in various ways. This is a copyright-based business in an age where copyright is under a lot of pressure from TikTok, generative AI, and all of the now-familiar threats to the music business...
Oct 31, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im 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. Youll hear us agree that the internet at this moment in time is absolutely flooded with disinformation, misinformation, and other really toxic stuff thats harmful to us as individuals and, frankly, to our future as a functioning democracy. But youll also he...
Oct 24, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startups Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company thats built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology thats ever existed. As Kashmir reports, you simply plug a photo of someone into Clearviews app, and it will find every photo of that person thats ever been posted on the internet. Its breathtaking and scary. K...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today were 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 thats going. Roblox is determined to be a platform, even more than a product something users can develop games and experiences on. And of course, David and Alex spoke about AI. David sees...
Oct 12, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Weve got another interview from the Code Conference today. My friend and co-host, CNBCsJulia Boorstin, and I had a chance to talk with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. Rivian is a newer company RJ started it in 2009, and it took more than 10 years to start shipping cars to consumers. But its first vehicle, the R1T pickup, made a big splash when it arrived in 2021, and the company has more back orders for both the R1T and its second vehicle, the R1S SUV, than it can handle. For now. We asked RJ about that...
Oct 10, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 issuing Stability AI for training the Stable Diffusion model on Getty content sometimes clearly including AI-generated copies of the Getty watermark without permission. Getty's answer? Its own proprietary, in-house AI tool, trained with permission on its own content, using a model where the original creat...
Oct 05, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast I co-hosted the Code Conference last week, and todays 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 thing...
Oct 03, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast We spent a lot of time here on Decoder talking about electric vehicles and the future of cars and were usually talking about passenger vehicles or maybe cargo vans. But theres 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 relian...
Sep 30, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, were 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. Well be sharing a lot of these conversations here in the coming days, and the first one were sharing is my chat with Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. Lisa and I spoke for half an hour, and we covered an incredible number of topics, especially about AI and the chip supply chain. The balance of supply and demand is overall in a pretty good place...
Sep 29, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Musks 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, whos become an outspoken critic of ...
Sep 29, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta's apps, the Quest 3, and other news from the company's Connect conference, which kicked off today. After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. "I think we've ...
Sep 27, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast TechCrunch is one of the most important trade publications in the world of tech and startups, and its annual Disrupt conference is where dozens of major companies have launched and some have failed. Matt has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch for essentially a decade now, and he and I have been both friends and competitors the entire time. Weve competed for scoops, traded criticisms, and asked each other for advice in running our publications and managing our teams. So when Matt announced la...
Sep 19, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, from longtime space reporter and Verge alum Loren Grush, is out today. Its been 40 years since Sally Ride became the first American woman in space but she was far from the last. In the early 1980s six women Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid would get a chance to fly a mission on one of the space shuttles including, unfortunately, the ill-fated 1986 Challenger launch. The story of th...
Sep 12, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Okta is a big company, a Wall Street SaaS darling. For most of us, it's the thing we have to log into 50 times a week just to get any work done. But from Okta's point of view, Jameeka Green Aaron told us, it's an identity company. I spoke with Jameeka about what "identity" really means in the digital space, in your real life, and at work in 2023, and how an identity-based approach might be more or less secure than other approaches. Im also gearing up to host Code in September (apply to attend he...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast