Recode Decode, Hosted By Kara Swisher

Today, we have a special episode for you. The Code Conference wrapped up this week, and the finale included a rare interview from my Code co-host and CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin with X CEO Linda Yaccarino. To say the sit-down with Elon Musk’s No. 2 was confrontational would be an understatement.  Yaccarino appeared both unprepared to answer tough questions and very combative, especially when asked about comments from former trust and safety head Yoel Roth, who’s become an outspoken critic of the direction of the company since Elon took over. Roth spoke onstage at Code with Kara Swisher just an hour before, where he warned Yaccarino of the risks of the job and spoke about the extreme harassment he’s faced since leaving the company.  Yaccarino also gave us some updated stats on X user metrics and claimed the company would turn a profit in 2024. And of course, there were some very terse exchanges concerning whether Elon really plans to start charging a subscription fee to use the platform, if he seriousl

What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta's apps, the Quest 3, and other news from the company's Connect conference, which kicked off today.  After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. "I think we've done a lot of good things," he said. "But for the next wave of my life and for the company — but also outside of the company with what I'm doing at CZI [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] and some of my personal projects — I define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with." For Zuckerberg, "awesome things" means figuring out how to combine his company's AR, VR, and AI ambitions into new products.    This rare interview with the Meta CEO also includes

TechCrunch is one of the most important trade publications in the world of tech and startups, and its annual Disrupt conference is where dozens of major companies have launched… and some have failed. Matt has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch for essentially a decade now, and he and I have been both friends and competitors the entire time. We’ve competed for scoops, traded criticisms, and asked each other for advice in running our publications and managing our teams. So when Matt announced last month that he’s stepping down from his role at TechCrunch it felt important to have him come on for what you might call an exit interview — a look back at the past decade running a media outlet at the center of the tech ecosystem, with all of the chaos that’s entailed. Links:  Why We Sold TechCrunch To AOL, And Where We Go From Here | TechCrunch (2010) TechCrunch founder leaves AOL in a cloud of acrimony | CNN Money (2011) SB Nation Sacks AOL in Raid of Former Engadget Team for Competing New Tech Site, As AOL Zer

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, from longtime space reporter and Verge alum Loren Grush, is out today. It’s been 40 years since Sally Ride became the first American woman in space — but she was far from the last. In the early 1980s six women — Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid — would get a chance to fly a mission on one of the space shuttles… including, unfortunately, the ill-fated 1986 Challenger launch. The story of the six may be history, but it’s far from ancient, and there’s a lot going on here that ties directly to today. And of course, what’s an astronaut story without some high-flying hijinks in it? Listen to the end for Loren’s favorite. Links: Nichelle Nichols - NASA Recruitment Film (1977) Top Black Woman Is Ousted By NASA | The New York Times (1973) The Space Truck | The Washington Post (1981) NASA Artemis Five former SpaceX employees speak out about harassment at the company | The Verge Why did Blue Origin leave

Okta is a big company, a Wall Street SaaS darling. For most of us, it's the thing we have to log into 50 times a week just to get any work done. But from Okta's point of view, Jameeka Green Aaron told us, it's an identity company. I spoke with Jameeka about what "identity" really means — in the digital space, in your real life, and at work — in 2023, and how an identity-based approach might be more or less secure than other approaches. I’m also gearing up to host Code in September (apply to attend here), and I’m thinking a lot about AI — very much a challenge for the future of security, even in a biometric-based era. Links: Apple IDs now support passkeys — if you’re on the iOS 17 or macOS Sonoma betas How to use a passkey to sign in to your Google account Windows 11 tests letting you sign in to websites with a fingerprint or face Apple, Google, and Microsoft will soon implement passwordless sign-in on all major platforms Microsoft called out for ‘blatantly negligent’ cybersecurity practices Okta Faces Long

Perkins Miller is the CEO of Fandom, which both hosts thousands of wikis for everything from Disney to Grand Theft Auto and also runs several publications. Millions of people contribute millions of pieces of content to the platform, and Fandom surrounds all that content with ads and uses all that data to generate insights about how fans think about their favorite games, TV shows, and movies. While you might enjoy the content, a lot of people have complaints — especially about the sheer number of ads. We talked about what it means to host user-generated content in 2023; content moderation; and the general state of media, especially games media, which is pretty rocky right now. I’m also gearing up to host the Code Conference in September (apply to attend here), and I’ve been thinking a lot about AI, search, and the web — all very much big challenges on the horizon for Fandom. Links: Layoffs Hit GameSpot, Giant Bomb Just Months After Fandom Buys Them - Kotaku How Fandom's first-party data, FanDNA, is expandin

We have a little surprise in the feed today: An episode of "Land of the Giants," which is all about Tesla this season. Former Verge transportation reporter Tamara Warren and former Jalopnik EIC Patrick George, who are both deeply sourced in the world of cars, host, and every episode has reporting and insight about Tesla that really hasn’t been shared before. It was ahead of the EV competition in basically every way for a long time. But the question Tamara and Patrick want to answer is: Is Tesla still winning by default? And where is the competition pulling ahead now that every carmaker is doing EVs? I joined them in this episode to discuss how modern cars, especially EVs, are being totally rethought as rolling computers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AWS is quite a story. It started as an experiment almost 20 years ago with Amazon trying to sell its excess server capacity. And people really doubted it. Why was the online bookstore trying to sell cloud services? But now, AWS is the largest cloud services provider in the world, and it’s the most profitable segment of Amazon, generating more than $22 billion in sales last quarter alone. By some estimates, AWS powers roughly one-third of the entire global internet. And on the rare occasion an AWS cluster goes down, an unfathomable number of platforms, websites, and services feel it, and so do hundreds of millions of users. Adam Selipsky was there almost from the start: he joined in 2005 and became CEO of AWS in 2019 when former AWS CEO Andy Jassy took over for Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon. Even with big competitors such as Microsoft and Google gaining ground, he estimates that only 10 percent of his potential customers overall have made the jump to the cloud.  That leaves lots of room to grow, and I wanted t

ActivityPub is back in the news, thanks to Meta’s Threads launch and Elon’s continued immolation of Twitter — now X. That makes this the perfect time to dig into the Decoder archives to hear what Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko thinks about the future of social media. Mastodon got a head start as the most well-known of the rising decentralized social networks, but that’s changing fast. Bluesky, on a competing protocol, is picking up steam and Threads promises to decentralize in the future, using the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon. That’s a big deal, with big potential. Verge Editor-at-Large David Pierce has been covering all this very closely. Before we jump into the interview with Rochko, I spoke with David to help update everyone on what ActivityPub even is, and what it could mean for the future of social media. Links: More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter - The Verge  A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone - The Verge Elon M

Today I’m talking to Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, the ubiquitous web hosting and design company. If you’re a podcast listener, you’ve heard a Squarespace ad.  I was excited to talk to Anthony because it really feels like we’re going through a reset moment on the internet, and I wanted to hear how he’s thinking about the web and what websites are even for in 2023. If you’re a Vergecast listener, you know I’ve been saying it feels a lot like 2011 out there. The big platforms like Facebook and TikTok are very focused on entertainment content. Twitter is going through… let’s call them changes. People are trying out new platforms like Instagram Threads and rethinking their relationships with old standbys like Reddit. And the introduction of AI means that search engines like Google, which was really the last great source of traffic for web pages, just doesn’t seem that reliable anymore as it begins to answer more questions directly. It’s uncertain, and exciting: a lot of things we took for

Today, I’m talking to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the newly created division of Google responsible for AI efforts across the company. Google DeepMind is the result of an internal merger: Google acquired Demis’ DeepMind startup in 2014 and ran it as a separate company inside its parent company, Alphabet, while Google itself had an AI team called Google Brain.  Google has been showing off AI demos for years now, but with the explosion of ChatGPT and a renewed threat from Microsoft in search, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai made the decision to bring DeepMind into Google itself earlier this year to create… Google DeepMind. What’s interesting is that Google Brain and DeepMind were not necessarily compatible or even focused on the same things: DeepMind was famous for applying AI to things like games and protein-folding simulations. The AI that beat world champions at Go, the ancient board game? That was DeepMind’s AlphaGo. Meanwhile, Google Brain was more focused on what’s come to be the fa

Roblox has 66 million daily users, and people spent 14 billion collective hours on Roblox in just Q1 of 2023. But its CEO David Baszucki still wants to see the company grow.  One idea? Aging up the kinds of experiences that are allowed on its platform. Roblox recently introduced 17+ experiences. It wants to add new AI world-building capabilities. It’s even partnering with advertisers to roll out more immersive ad experiences. It’s been years since the number of adults gaming outnumbered kids – it seems like that’s driving a lot of growth for everyone, including Roblox. But these virtual world games seem like they all want to expand to be much more than just for kids, and much more than just for games. If you think about it, Roblox is already like a metaverse. Schools are using it for classes, companies are starting to advertise there, and people are just hanging out as avatars.  It’s already big, but the hope is to get much, much bigger. Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge, got the chance to chat with Davi

If you’ve spent more than two minutes somewhere on social media, you have probably come across Gary Vaynerchuk. For years I have wondered, is this just a character? Or is there a real Gary Vaynerchuk somewhere behind “GaryVee,” the social media entrepreneur and internet brand? Gary got his start working at his family’s liquor store, which he turned into an online wine shop. That’s where he started in social media, hosting a long-running YouTube show called “Wine Library TV.” He parlayed that into the gigantic GaryVee brand, which at its core, is about entrepreneurship. Gary co-founded the restaurant reservation platform Resy, which he sold to American Express in 2019, and Empathy Wines which he sold in 2020.  The Vaynerchuk empire remains vast, and it’s structured in complicated ways. There’s holding company VaynerX, which contains the ad agency VaynerMedia. There’s another company called Gallery Media which owns lifestyle websites. Gary even co-founded a sports agency – VaynerSports, with pro athletes like

The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs – mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. Then, the company can be sold or taken public again for a hefty profit. But don’t worry—if it doesn’t work out, the PE firms are extracting fees at every step of the process so they get paid no matter what happens. In another world, these PE deals are just boring financing strategies or maybe the backbone of the occasional juicy corporate takeover story. In Decoder world, PE is everywhere. Since the modern PE industry kicked off in the 1980’s, it’s grown virtually unchecked, and as author Brendan Ballou explains, that’s had seriously negative consequences for all kinds of markets and consumers. Private equity affects ever

Jennifer Witz is the CEO of SiriusXM. You probably know the company as the satellite radio brand in virtually every new car, but it also owns Pandora, a huge podcast network that includes Team Coco and 99% Invisible, a content operation with huge stars like Howard Stern, and has broadcast deals with every major sports league. SiriusXM is effectively the dominant market leader for built-in premium audio in cars, in a time when competition is increasing. As the infotainment system in cars gets ever more complex and computer-like, the Sirius experience has to keep up. On top of that, the state of car software is a mess. GM announced it won’t support Apple CarPlay in new EVs. Other companies are using various versions of Android. Tesla has its own platform. And Sirius has to support all of it with applications that compete with Big Tech companies, all while continuing to integrate the satellite hardware into the cars themselves — on top of launching satellites on SpaceX rockets. Links: After layoffs, SiriusXM loo

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, where he showed off the company’s new AI assistant tools, which Microsoft calls Copilots. Microsoft is big into Copilots. GitHub Copilot is already helping millions of developers write code, and now, the company is adding Copilots to everything from Office to the Windows Terminal. Basically, if there’s a text box, Microsoft thinks AI can help you fill it out, and Microsoft has a long history of assistance like this. You might remember Clippy from the ’90s. Well, AI Super Clippy is here. Microsoft is building these Copilots in collaboration with OpenAI, and Kevin manages that partnership. I wanted to ask Kevin why Microsoft decided to partner with a startup instead of building the AI tech internally, where the two companies disagree, how they resolve any differences, and what Microsoft is ch

Today – we’ve got a treat for you. We’re going to run a special episode from our friends over at Vox. Peter Kafka and his team just wrapped up a special 3-part series on AI.  AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve talked to both Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about AI after they announced new AI-powered search products. And in the middle of the frenzy, it's hard to tell what's really going on. What exactly is AI, how does tech plan to re-design the world with it, and why are a bunch of smart people very, very worried? In this episode, they’re diving into the gold rush around AI. Figuring out what’s just hype, meeting the VCs that are hungry to invest, and finding out if there will be room for startups, or if the giants will just own it all. If you’re a Decoder listener, this is right up your alley. Thanks to Peter Kafka and Vox. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems. We have a special episode today – I’m talking to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We hung out the day after Google IO, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s products. It’s an important moment for Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI moment – the company is quick to point out the T in chatGPT stands for Transformer, the large language model tech first which was invented at Google. But openAI and others have been first to market with generative AI products — and openAI in particular has partnered with Microsoft on a new version of Bing that feels like the first real competitor to Google search in a long time.  So I wanted to know what Sundar thinks of this moment – and in particular, what he thinks of the future of search, which is the he

Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, was previously on the show in 2021. Back then, Airbnb was betting big on long-term stays for remote work amid the pandemic, and Chesky had just restructured the company to a more functional organization, getting rid of the divisions it had before. Now, the pandemic is ending, Airbnb has itself adopted a hybrid policy, Chesky’s back in the office several days a week, and they’re two years into that new structure. So that’s pure Decoder bait. I wanted to ask Chesky how that restructure is going. Has it really made the company more agile and cohesive like he hoped? Has the bet on working from anywhere paid off? Links: Brian Chesky's tweet announcing the summer 2023 launch Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why  Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon Why the future of work is the future of travel, with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Toda

Ben Smith is the former and founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, the founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and the author of a new book called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which is about the rise and fall of the social platform age in media, through the lens of Gawker Media and Buzzfeed and, in particular, their founders, Nick Denton and Jonah Peretti. I say the fall of the social platform age pretty literally: just before we spoke, Buzzfeed actually shut down Buzzfeed News, saying it just wasn’t making enough money, Facebook and the rest are all in on vertical video, and the chaos at Twitter means a lot of baseline media industry assumptions are now up for grabs. Ben and I talked about a lot – where do journalists build their brands now? Where does traffic even come from anymore? What’s next? Of course, we talked about Semafor as well. Ben and his co-founder, Justin Smith, raised $25 million and launched a news website, newsletters, and events cover