Today, I’m talking with Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s 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 inv...
Jul 15, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today I’m talking to Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic. I was really excited to talk to Nick. Like so many media CEOs, including Vox Media’s, he just signed a deal allowing OpenAI to use The Atlantic’s 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 tha...
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. It’s 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 Pled...
Jul 08, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s almost the Fourth of July, and that means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. This year, I’m 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 company’s 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...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we’re talking about politics and lobbying in America. It’s hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and billionaires didn’t touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didn’t 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 ...
Jun 27, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m 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 world’s biggest gathering of advertisers and marketers. It’s an increasingly important place for Greg to be, as Netflix’s 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 c...
Jun 24, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve 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 don’t 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 a...
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...
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 Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, about how we got here and what happens next. Links: Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys“R”Us — here’s why t...
Jun 13, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Cohere is one of the buzziest AI startups around right now. It's not making consumer products; it's focused on the enterprise market and making AI products for big companies. And there's a huge tension there: up until recently, computers have been deterministic. If you give computers a certain input, you usually know exactly what output you’re going to get. There’s a logic to it. But if we all start talking to computers with human language and getting human language back, well, human language is...
Jun 10, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast The art of video game design is flourishing, but it feels like a really grim time to be in the business of making and distributing games. Huge global publishers and tiny indie studios alike are facing huge financial pressures, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. So where did this enormous pressure come from, if consumer interest is high and sales are great? Verge video game reporter Ash Parrish joins Decoder to explain. Links: Global games market expected to grow to $189bn in 2024...
Jun 06, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m talking with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan — and let me tell you, this conversation is nothing like what I expected. It turns out Eric wants Zoom to be much, much more than just a videoconferencing platform. Zoom wants to take on Microsoft and Google and now has a big investment in AI – and Eric’s visions for what that AI will do are pretty wild. See, Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. You’ll hear him describe how he thinks one of the big benefits of AI at wor...
Jun 03, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. I think of Decoder as a show for people trying to build things, and a lot of people have built their things on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone else’s platform is: What are you going to do when that platform changes the rules? Links: How Google is killing independent site...
May 30, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m talking with Joseph Cox, one of the best cybersecurity reporters around and a co-founder of the new media site 404 Media. Joseph has a new book coming out in June called Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically a caper, but with the FBI running a phone network. For real. Joseph walks us through the fascinating world of underground criminal phone networks, and how secure messaging, a tech product beloved b...
May 23, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the big Google I/O developer conference. Google’s focus during the conference was on how it’s building AI into virtually all of its products. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it “Google Zero,” and I’ve been asking a lot of web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero. In a world where AI powers ...
May 20, 2024•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US government claiming the divest-or-ban law is unconstitutional — a case it needs to win in order to keep operating under Bytedance’s ownership. There’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law here: Some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of prior attempts to regulate speech and the internet, while the simple facts of what TikTok has already promised to do around the world contradict some its argumen...
May 16, 2024•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has been at the top of my list of people I’ve wanted to talk to for the show since we first launched — he’s led Adobe for nearly 17 years now, but he doesn’t do too many wide-ranging interviews. I’ve always thought Adobe was an underappreciated company — its tools sit at the center of nearly every major creative workflow you can think of — and with generative AI poised to change the very nature of creative software, it seemed particularly important to talk with Shantan...
May 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we’re going to talk about the smart home — one of the oldest, most important, and most challenging dreams in the history of the tech industry. The idea of your house responding to you and your family, and generally being as automated and as smart as your phone or your laptop, has inspired generations of technologists. But after decades of promises, it’s all still pretty messy. Because the big problem with the smart home has been blindingly obvious for a very long time: interoperability. Y...
May 09, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m talking with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, whom I first interviewed on the show back in 2021. Those were heady days — especially for upstart EV companies like Polestar, which all seemed poised to capture what felt like infinite demand for electric cars. Now, in 2024, the market looks a lot different, and so does Polestar, which is no longer majority-owned by Volvo. Instead, Volvo is now a more independent sister company, and both Volvo and Polestar fall under Chinese parent company G...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I are going to try and figure out Tesla. I said try — I did not say succeed. But we’re going to try. That’s because Tesla has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks, in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes. If you’ve been following the company, you know that that gap between what the business is and how its valued has been getting bigger and bigger for years now – and lately, with Elon Musk saying he’s ...
May 02, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast A lot has changed since the last time Ola was on Decoder. Back then, he said Mercedes would have an all-EV lineup by 2030 — a promise a whole lot of car companies, including Mercedes, have now had to soften or walk back. But he doesn't see that as a setback at all, and he and Mercedes are both still committed to phasing out gas in the long run. We also spent some time talking about what's happening both on the outside of cars — Mercedes' classic look and its EV look aren't necessarily quite in t...
Apr 29, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we’re talking about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of Congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media. This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’l...
Apr 25, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming-focused voice and chat app. You might think Discord is just something Slack for gamers, but over time, it has become much more important than that. For a growing mix of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandom, and other niche communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as internet culture is happening on Discord. In many ways Discor...
Apr 22, 2024•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we're talking about Disney, the massive activist investor revolt it just fought off, and what happens next in the world of streaming. Because what happens to Disney really tells us a lot about what's happening in the entire world of entertainment. Earlier this month, Disney survived an attempted board takeover from businessman Nelson Peltz. While investors ultimately sided with Disney and CEO Bob Iger, the boardroom showdown made something very clear: Disney needs to figure out streaming ...
Apr 18, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast At the absolute most basic, Dropbox is cloud storage for your stuff — but that puts it at the nexus of a huge number of today’s biggest challenges in tech. As the company that helps you organize your stuff in the cloud itself goes all remote, how do we even deal with the concept of “your stuff?” Today I’m talking with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston about those big picture ideas — and why he thinks generative AI really will be transformative for everyone eventually, even if it isn’t yet now. Links: Dro...
Apr 15, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we’re talking about Vice, the media company: Where it came from, what it did, and, ultimately, why it collapsed into a much smaller, sadder version of itself. This is a lousy time for digital media, and it’s hard to make a profit from putting words on the internet right now. So when Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto went to go report on what happened, she and I both assumed Vice had been done in by the brutal economics of digital advertising on the web. But the Vice story is more than that...
Apr 11, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Cloudflare is an infrastructure provider basically protecting more than 20% of the entire web from bad actors. When everything is going well, you don't even have to know it exists. It's one of the only defenses — sometimes the only defense — standing between websites and the people who want to take them down. Protecting free speech on the internet around the world, across war zones and hundreds of different kinds of government, is no easy feat. That puts the company, and CEO Matthew Prince, righ...
Apr 08, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello, and welcome to Decoder. This is David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge and co-host of The Vergecast, subbing in for Nilay, who’s out on vacation. Regular Decoder programming returns next week. In the meantime, we have an exciting episode for you today all about video game emulation, which, as it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated than it seems. Gaming emulation made headlines recently because one of the most widely used programs for emulating the Nintendo Switch, a platform ca...
Apr 04, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I’m talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a pretty rough patch in the company’s history. In 2021, Intuit acquired the company, and the very next year, co-founder Ben Chestnut stepped down after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over. This is a pretty huge culture change, especially as Mailchimp became more integrated with Intuit. It was also a big cha...
Apr 01, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hey everyone it’s Nilay – I’m on vacation this week, so the Decoder team is taking a short break. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes. To tide you over until Monday, we have a bonus episode from our friends at Vox Media and Eater’s Gastropod about an incredible patent battle in the world of pizza. I’m serious: One of the biggest fights in the pizza industry took place in US court in the ‘90s — an intellectual property dispute about stuffed crust pizza b...
Mar 28, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
