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The Verge

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Musk v Altman was nominally about OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit entity, and how it went about that change. But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way.

Verge reporter Liz Lopatto spent the last month covering the trial, in all its chaos, and joins Decoder to ask: In a courtroom full of untrustworthy, unreliable people all fighting with each other, did anyone even have a reputation left to lose?

Links: 

 
Elon Musk loses his case against Sam Altman | The Verge

 
Musk v. Altman proved AI is led by the wrong people | The Verge

 
Musk v. Altman accomplished nothing but airing dirty laundry | The Verge

 
Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk | The Verge

 
Behold, the Elon Musk jackass trophy | The Verge

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Musk v Altman: Much ado about nothing

Just days before we spoke, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti agreed to sell the company, which was losing money and at risk of shutting down. Now there’s a new lease on life — and new leadership. Jonah is taking on a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI, and Byron Allen will become CEO of BuzzFeed. 

That’s obviously a huge structural and organizational change, and a really big decision — prime Decoder bait if there ever was any. What are digital media companies doing to adapt and survive in an information landscape dominated by algorithmic social platforms?

Links: 

 
Byron Allen is buying BuzzFeed and becoming CEO | Variety

 
BuzzFeed issues going concern warning, lacks liquidity | Wall Street Journal

 
BuzzFeed News is shutting down | The Verge

 
BuzzFeed sells Hot Ones studio in $82.5M deal | NBC News

 
The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed | The Verge

 
I hate myself because I don’t work for BuzzFeed (2015) | The Awl

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt; this episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Exclusive: Jonah Peretti explains why he sold BuzzFeed

Brendan Ballou is founder of the Public Integrity Project and author of the new book, When Companies Run the Courts, about the rise of forced arbitration.

Forced arbitration is similarly everywhere in modern life, and there have been some very high-profile cases these past few years highlighting how deeply unfair these clauses are to consumers. Brendan’s book delves into how and why we got here — spoiler: we can blame Antonin Scalia for some of it — but also, most importantly, how we may be able to fight back in the future.

Links: 

 When Companies Run the Courts | Hachette

 Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys ‘R Us | Decoder

 Press freedom groups demand access to Paramount records | The Wrap

 Disney gives up on trying to use Disney+ to settle wrongful death suit | The Verge

 Samsung, corruption, and you (2017) | The Verge

 The surprising case for AI judges | Decoder

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decode

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How companies weaponize the terms of service against you

My guest today is longtime friend of the show Joanna Stern. You all know Joanna: she is the former senior personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a former Decoder guest host, one of my co-founders at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends.

Joanna just left that lofty perch at the Journal to start her own media company called New Things, and she’s starting with her new book about AI called I Am Not a Robot, which is out this week on May 12th. So we had Joanna on to talk about all of that, especially what she learned going all in on automation. 

Links: 

 I Am Not a Robot | Harper Collins

 It’s time. Meet my New Thing | Joanna Stern

 Why I left My prestigious job to make YouTube videos | Joanna Stern / YouTube

 Signing off from this column after 12 years. Here’s what’s changed in tech | WSJ

 I tried the robot that’s coming to live with you. It’s still par human | WSJ

 The people do not yearn for automation | Decoder

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them

Hey, everyone, Nilay here. We’re off today, while the team and I are cooking on a lot of really great stuff in the coming weeks. We’ll be back with an all-new interview on Monday. 

In the meantime, we really wanted to highlight this episode we first aired in the fall, because it’s about a huge subject: AI in schools. The school year is starting to wrap up now around the country, and we’re no closer to figuring out how to thread the needle about generative AI in education than we were in September.

Links: 

 A majority of high school students use gen AI for schoolwork | College Board

 About a quarter of teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork | Pew Research

 Your brain on ChatGPT | MIT Media Lab

 My students think it’s fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they’re on to something. | Vox 

 How children understand and learn from conversational AI | McGill University

 ‘File not Found’ | The Verge

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rewind: How AI is fueling an existential crisis in education

It’s become an annual tradition to have Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi join us in the studio when he comes to New York for Uber’s big Go-Get event every year. This year, the big news was that Uber's expanding into a much larger platform for travel, starting with hotel booking and services like personal shopping.

Uber is going so far as to call this an everything app, so I wanted to see how far Dara thinks everything actually goes — and whether he’s feeling pressure to own more of the user experience in a world where AI companies keep promising that their chatbots will book all the cars for you.

Links: 

 Uber adds hotels to its app in big travel swing | The Verge

 Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is okay with reinventing the bus | Decoder

 I have to be honest, AI will replace jobs at Uber | Diary of a CEO

 The DoorDash problem | Decoder

 Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wants to build the everything app | Decoder

 Booking and Priceline chief wants you to yell at bots, not humans | Decoder

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt; this episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dara Khosrowshahi on replacing Uber drivers — and himself — with AI

This is Nick Statt, senior producer on Decoder. We last ran a mailbag episode during the holidays, and we decided it was a good idea to do that kind of thing more often. So we’re back with Nilay as the guest, answering questions and responding to feedback, criticism, and suggestions. 

We talk through some recent controversial episodes like our interviews with the CEOs of Superhuman and Puck, and we also discuss how we’re covering AI, thinking about the future of the show, and what it takes to win (and lose) Decoder. 

Links: 

 Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions | Decoder Mailbag (2025) 

 Answering your biggest Decoder questions | Decoder Mailbag (2024)

 Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me | Decoder

 Can Puck reinvent the news business for the influencer age? | Decoder

 The people do not yearn for automation | Decoder

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How to win — or lose — Decoder

Jennifer Scanlon is CEO of UL Solutions, one of those hidden-in-plain-sight companies we like to poke at here on Decoder. UL's been around for more than 100 years; it started as a way for insurance companies to standardize fire and safety testing as electricity was the new technology spreading into homes.

But now it's everywhere, and "safety" in tech doesn't just mean the hardware. UL is adapting quickly to the connected, AI-powered era... but do the companies making and distributing tech even care about standards anymore?

Links: 

 
How fake UL certifications led to Chinese ebike suit | Electrek

 
FCC IoT program loses UL after China probe | Cybersecurity Dive

 
FCC’s Carr probes IoT program lab over “ties to China” | PC Mag

 
The US router ban, explained | The Verge

 
More than 500,000 hoverboards recalled (2016) | The Verge

 
Brendan Carr is a dummy | The Vergecast

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That UL safety logo is a lot more complicated than it looks

Today on Decoder, I want to lay out an idea that's been banging around my head for weeks now as we've been reporting on AI and having conversations here on this show. I've been calling it software brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops. 

Software brain is powerful stuff. It's a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. But software thinking has also been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.

Links: 

 Why software Is eating the world | Marc Andreessen

 Gen Z’s love-hate relationship with AI | The Verge

 The attacks on Sam Altman are a warning for the AI world | The Verge

 Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge

 I saw something new in San Francisco | The New York Times

 Anthropic CEO issues dire warning about white-collar work | The Street

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION

The last time Canva CEO Melanie Perkins was on Decoder, the company was starting a big push into enterprise. Now, she's leading it through a total reinvention, going, in Canva's words, "from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools."

But there's a lot of competition in that AI enterprise space. Not only is Canva competing with design software like the Adobe Creative Suite, but also it's competing with AI companies, like Anthropic and Meta, that are launching their own AI design platforms. So we talked a lot about whether Canva really is the right platform to bring the whole workspace together.

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

 Canva AI 2.0 goes all in on prompt-powered design tools | The Verge

 The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe | The Verge

 Anthropic launches Claude Design | TechCrunch

 Canva is now in the coding and spreadsheet business | The Verge

 Melanie Perkins thinks the world needs more alternatives to Adobe | Decoder (2024)

⁠Subscribe to The Verge⁠ to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

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

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rewind: How AI is fueling an existential crisis in education

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