Decoder with Nilay Patel

Latest Episodes:

Why Tubi CEO Anjali Sud thinks free TV can win again Jun 17, 2024

Show notes

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 the premium streamers, but also against the big competitors for viewers' time: TikTok and Youtube.

Links:

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23942621

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.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remix: How private equity took over everything Jun 13, 2024

Show notes

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:

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.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI will make money sooner than you think, says Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez Jun 10, 2024

Show notes

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 messy. And that makes the entire process of knowing what to put in and what exactly we’re going to get out of our computers different than it ever has been before.

Links:

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23937899

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

Why the video game industry is such a mess Jun 06, 2024

Show notes

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:

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.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan wants AI clones in meetings Jun 03, 2024

Show notes

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 work will be letting us all create something he calls a “digital twin," essentially a deepfake of yourself that can go attend meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you. I’ll just warn you: I tried to ask a bunch of the usual Decoder questions during this conversation, but once we got to digital twins going to Zoom meetings for people, well, I had a lot of followup questions.

Links:

Zoom gets its first major overhaul in 10 years, powered by generative AI | ZDNet
An interview with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan | Stratechery / Ben Thompson
Zoom is cutting about 150 jobs, or close to 2% of its workforce | CNBC
Zoom meetings are about to get weirder thanks to the Vision Pro | The Verge
Zoom Docs launches in 2024 with built-in AI collaboration features | The Verge
Zoom rewrites its policies to make clear that your videos aren’t used to train AI tools | The Verge
Zoom says its new AI tools aren’t stealing ownership of your content | The Verge
Zoom adds “post-quantum” end-to-end encryption | Zoom

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23932774

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google Zero is here. Now what? May 30, 2024

Show notes

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:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld May 23, 2024

Show notes

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 by drug traffickers, evolved from the days of BlackBerry Messenger to Signal. Along the way, the FBI got involved with its very own startup, ANOM, as part of one of the most effective trojan horse operations in the history of cybersecurity. Joseph’s book is a great read, but it also touches on a lot of things we talk about a lot here on Decoder. So this conversation was a fun one.

Links:

Dark Wire by Joseph Cox | Hachette Book Group
How Vice became ‘a fucking clown show’ | The Verge
Cyber Official Speaks Out, Reveals Mobile Network Attacks in US | 404 Media
Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI | 404 Media
How Secure Phones for Criminals Are Sold on Instagram | Motherboard
A Peek Inside the Phone Company Secretly Used in an FBI Honeypot | Motherboard
The FBI secretly launched an encrypted messaging system for criminals | The Verge
Canadian police have had master key to BlackBerry's encryption since 2010 | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google's Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web May 20, 2024

Show notes

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 search with overviews and summaries, that’s a real possibility. What then happens to the web?

I’ve talked to Sundar quite a bit over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I’ve ever seen him. I think you can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future — where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, more artistic — and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever, and that he’s wrestling with that tension.

Links:

Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the internet — Command Line
Google I/O 2024: everything announced — The Verge
Google is redesigning its search engine, and it’s AI all the way down — The Verge
Project Astra is the future of AI at Google — The Verge
Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? — The Verge
YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians — The Verge
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge
How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh
Inside the First 'SEO Heist' of the AI Era — Business Insider
Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft — Decoder

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23922415

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TikTok's big bet to fight the ban bill May 16, 2024

Show notes

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 arguments. Verge editors Sarah Jeong and Alex Heath join me to explain what it all means.

Links:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is confident we'll all adapt to AI May 13, 2024

Show notes

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 Shantanu now.

Adobe sits right at the center of the whole web of tensions, especially as the company has evolved its business and business model over time. And now, AI really changes what it means to make and distribute creative work. Not many people are seeing revenue returns on it just yet and there are the fundamental philosophical challenges of adding AI to photo and video tools. What does it mean when a company like Adobe, which makes the tools so many people use to make their art, sees the creative process as a step in a marketing chain, instead of a goal in and of itself?

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