Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X. Blu...
Mar 25, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Both the EU and US have spent the past decade looking at Big Tech and saying, "someone should do something!" In the US, lawmakers are still basically shouting that. But in the EU, regulators did something. The Digital Markets Act was proposed in 2020, signed into law in 2022, and went into effect this month. It's already having an effect on some of the biggest companies in tech, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In theory it's a landmark law that will change the way these companies compete...
Mar 21, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve got a fun one today — I talked to Figma CEO Dylan Field in front of a live audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And we got into it – we talked about everything from design, to software distribution, to the future of the web, and, of course, AI. Figma is an fascinating company – the Figma design tool is used by designers at basically every company you can think of. And importantly, it runs on the web. It became such a big deal that Adobe tried to buy it out in 2022 for $20 billi...
Mar 18, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you’ve been listening to Decoder or the Vergecast for a while, you know that I am obsessed with Google Search, the web, and how both of those things might change in the age of AI. But to really understand how something might change, you have to step back and understand what it is right now. So today I’m talking with Verge platforms reporter Mia Sato about Google Search, the industries it’s created, and more importantly, how relentless search engine optimization, or SEO, has utterly changed th...
Mar 14, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which that culture spreads all around the world. If you’ve been listening to Decoder, this is all going to...
Mar 11, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•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 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•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. 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•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 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•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 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•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 busine...
Oct 31, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 
