Decoder is a show from The Verge about big ideas — and other problems. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to a diverse cast of innovators and policymakers at the frontiers of business and technology to reveal how they’re navigating an ever-changing landscape, what keeps them up at night, and what it all means for our shared future.
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Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday. In the meantime we thought we’d re-share an explainer that’s 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. It’s not been quite an apocalyptic AI free-for-all out there. But the election itself took some really unexpected turns in these last couple of months. Now we’re heading into the big, noisy home stretch, and use of AI is starting to get really weird — and much more troublesome.
Links:
The AI-generated hell of the 2024 election | The Verge
AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election | Decoder
Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy | The Verge
Donald Trump posts a fake AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement | The Verge
X’s Grok now points to government site after misinformation warnings | The Verge
Political ads could require AI-generated content disclosures soon | The Verge
The Copyright Office calls for a new federal law regulating deepfakes | The Verge
How AI companies are reckoning with elections | The Verge
The lame AI meme election | Axios
Deepfakes' parody loophole | Axios
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Disney Is a Tech Company?
Monday, August 26, 2024 • Duration 38:23
Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday, and I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule.
But while we’re out, we’d 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? It’s the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney Plus — and it also tells us where it needs to go in the future to compete with Amazon, Apple, and Netflix.
Links:
Disney Is a Tech Company? | Vulture
Why Disney plussed itself | Vulture
Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander | Decoder
The clock is ticking on Disney’s streaming strategy | Decoder
The Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is now available | The Verge
Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus | The Verge
How baseball's tech team built the future of television | The Verge
The year Netflix ended the streaming wars | The Ringer
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Supreme Court ruling that could kill net neutrality
Thursday, July 25, 2024 • Duration 38:09
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 to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more | The Verge
FCC votes to restore net neutrality | The Verge
Reinstatement of net neutrality rules temporarily halted by appeals court | The Verge
Clarence Thomas' 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel | ProPublica
The Supreme Court's coming war with Joe Biden | Vox
Transcript:
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Watching Silicon Valley Bank melt down from the front row with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 • Duration 01:02:51
Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras found himself playing an important role during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
Brex is what you might call a neobank — not a traditional bank but rather a financial services provider that helps companies manage how they spend money, corporate cards, travel expenses and the rest. In the middle of the SVB collapse, Brex was more than just a spending management company. It was also a safe place to park money.
Brex saw billions of deposits in a very short period of time, giving Dubugras a bird's-eye view of what was happening — and what was happening was not great for the banking system, especially in Silicon Valley. (Our own Liz Lopatto has been covering this in depth.)
I wanted to hear Dubugras' perspective on SVB both as a fintech CEO and a founder himself, whether he thought the crisis was rational or just a panic caused by group texts and easy-to-use mobile banking interfaces, what he thinks will happen to the startup ecosystem next, and how much of an opportunity all this was for Brex.
Dubugras is a young CEO. He just turned 27. He really surprised me with his depth here, and he will probably surprise some of you as well.
Okay, Henrique Dubugras, CEO of Brex. Here we go.
Links:
The tech industry moved fast and broke its most prestigious bank
Liz Lopatto - The Verge
A fintech CEO is trying to raise more than $1 billion to fund bridge loans for startups impacted by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse
Robinhood Users Say The Trading App Won’t Cash In Their Profitable Bets Against Silicon Valley Bank
What Is A Neobank? – Forbes Advisor
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23433504
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks
Friday, March 31, 2023 • Duration 01:10:34
Chris Cocks is the CEO of Hasbro, a company that just turned 100 this year. Hasbro is a huge company, making everything from Transformers to Lincoln Logs to My Little Pony and Monopoly. It also makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, which are massive and growing businesses. Chris was the head of that division, called Wizards of the Coast, before he became the CEO of Hasbro overall last year. Since then, he’s started the process of restructuring the company, which is pure Decoder bait.
He’s also dealt with some crises: He’s fended off an activist investor that wanted him to spin Wizards of the Coast out into a new company. The Magic community was upset that too many card sets were being released, including rare collector cards that could suddenly be bought by anybody who had enough money. Then, an attempt to change the open gaming license for Dungeons & Dragons led to a fan backlash, and Hasbro walked the entire plan back. We talked about these challenges, how he handled them, and what it means for toys and games to have such passionate fandoms. It really changes how Hasbro operates.
He’s also selling off part of eOne, the company’s TV and film production company — we get into why and how he decided to do that.
Chris is a lifelong gamer — you’ll hear him talk about that history several times. And he’s also keenly aware that toys and games have become an adults’ market as much as a kids’ one, and that changes the company’s business strategy. This is really a remarkable conversation: toys are a big, complex business.
Links:
Chris Cocks Is Hasbro’s Gamer in Chief
Chris Cocks Statement at Hasbro Investor Day
Hasbro strongly refutes claims it is ‘destroying’ Magic: The Gathering
Dungeons & Dragons finally addresses its new Open Gaming License
Hasbro CEO on D&D fiasco: ‘We misfired’ on the OGL but have ‘since course corrected’
Magic: The Gathering Becomes a Billion-Dollar Brand for Toymaker Hasbro
Hasbro Puts Newly Acquired TV Brand Entertainment One (eOne) Back Up For Sale
Transcript:
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Amanda Rose Smith. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter?
Tuesday, March 28, 2023 • Duration 01:16:37
Today I’m talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and it’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls, you join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server, or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave, and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email and you’ll get it – if you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.
Now if you are like me, you hear the words open-source and decentralized, and then the word CEO, and you think – wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends – you’re going to hear Eugen and I say the phrase benevolent dictator for life in dead seriousness, because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.
Of course, we also talk about money, and structure – Mastodon doesn’t make a lot of money, and Eugen is figuring out how to build a structure that scale past just a handful of people — but keep that in mind, actually. This tiny mostly volunteer labor of love might very well be the future of social networking, and, if you believe the hype about ActivityPub, might have some part in the future of the web. That’s pretty exciting, even if things are seem a little messy in the moment.
Links:
More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter
A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone
Elon Musk
Benevolent dictator for life
Mastodon Social
Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social)
XKCD
Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle?
Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse
We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
Denial-of-service attack
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23422689
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien
Thursday, March 23, 2023 • Duration 01:01:55
Meredith Kopit Levien is the CEO of The New York Times, which is perhaps the most famous journalism organization in the world, and certainly one of America’s most complicated companies.
The Times is 172 years old, and has only recently become a force on the internet. It’s hard to remember, but back in 2014 and ‘15, people thought the Times was doomed — that it would be replaced by BuzzFeed and Vice and Vox. Instead, the company has undergone a radical and sometimes painful public transformation, and emerged as something closer to Netflix or Spotify – a subscription business with a huge investment in product and engineering.
Meredith has led a lot of that change, and in particular, she’s led the charge in turning a Times subscription into much more than paying for news – NYT Cooking and Games are hit apps, and of course she bought Wordle last year in a bit of a coup.
We talked about that structure, how Meredith intends to appeal to a broader audience with all those products when the country is basically divided in half politically and one half doesn’t care for the Times at all, and about platforms and growth. And like all media organizations, the Times has a complex relationship with Google, so we talked about that, too.
Links:
Our Strategy | The New York Times Company
NYT CEO outlines plans to reach 15 million subscribers by 2027
Why the New York Times is buying the Athletic
Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play
The Economics at the Heart of the Times Union Standoff
'Unstoppable innovator': The meteoric rise of Meredith Kopit Levien, the next New York Times CEO
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23416720
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Amanda Rose Smith
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Taylor Swift vs. Ronald Reagan: The Ticketmaster story
Tuesday, March 21, 2023 • Duration 31:26
This special episode dives deep on Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023, because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts. Here we go.
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23409098
Credits:
Thanks so much to everyone who talked to us and shared their valuable insights for this episode including Dean Budnik, Florian Ederer, Russ Tannen, and Sandeep Vaheesan. And special thanks to Makena Kelly and Jake Kastrenakes.
This episode was written and reported by Jackie McDermott and Owen Grove. It was produced by Jackie McDermott, Owen Grove, and Creighton DeSimone with help from Jasmine Lewis. It was edited by Callie Wright.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots
Thursday, March 16, 2023 • Duration 01:03:08
In this installment of our Centennial Series on companies that are over 100 years old, we are talking to Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. The last few decades have thrown some hurdles in Barnes & Noble’s way, however. Far from being the monster that inspired the plot of the movie You’ve Got Mail, it’s had to face down a new Goliath called Amazon and the general decline of big-box retail stores. After years of closures and declining revenues, Barnes & Noble was bought out by activist investors in 2019, who installed Daunt as CEO, and he’s managed to turn things around by doing two main things.
First, he has decentralized operations of the stores, letting each store act like a local bookshop and giving his booksellers more control over what titles they sell and display. He immediately ended a system that allowed publishers to pay for special placement in bookstores, which he said corrupted the entire system in service of short-term profits. Second, he’s using Barnes & Noble’s scale to build a purchasing and distribution pipeline that serves as the rest of the book industry’s competitor to Amazon.
We get into all of it — the culture wars, J.K. Rowling, book ban bills in states across the country, and how Barnes & Noble went from being the bully on the block to competing with Amazon.
Links
Hedge Fund Buys Barnes & Noble
Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble? - The New York Times
How Barnes & Noble transformed its brand from corporate bully to lovable neighborhood bookstore
Barnes & Noble to expand, marking a new chapter for private equity
#BookTok: Is TikTok changing the publishing industry?
How book lovers on TikTok are changing the publishing industry
Barnes & Noble History
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23406145
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström
Tuesday, March 14, 2023 • Duration 58:49
Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.”
With the title of co-president and chief product and technology officer, Söderström is responsible for not only how Spotify looks and feels but also all the AI work happening behind the scenes to power its increasingly important recommendations. According to Söderström, it turns out that improving those recommendations is actually at the heart of the big redesign. “I think companies that don’t have an efficient user interface for a machine learning world are not going to be able to leverage machine learning,” he told Alex Heath on the newest episode of Decoder.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
Spotify is laying off 6 percent of its global workforce, CEO announces
Spotify’s new design turns your music and podcasts into a TikTok feed
Alex Heath's Tweet
Functional versus Unit Organizations
Two-Pizza Teams
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23402123
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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