Recode Decode, Hosted By Kara Swisher

Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, is in charge of Xbox and all the game studios that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Phil came to talk to us hours before the European Commission announced an in-depth investigation into Microsoft’s proposed 68.7 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which makes the enormous Call of Duty series, as well as Candy Crush on phones.  So I had the chance to ask Phil: Will he make the concessions that regulators want in order to close this deal? And is the deal really just about Call of Duty, or something else? Is Microsoft committed to keep Call of Duty available on Playstation? Phil’s a candid guy. He’s been on Decoder before. I always enjoy talking to him, and this was a fun one. Links: Microsoft’s Phil Spencer on the new Xbox launch - The Verge Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion - The Verge Why Microsoft bought Bethesda for $7.5 billion Microsoft announces big, multistudio push to create more Xbox exclusives Bethesda’s Starfield a

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which makes a very popular design tool that allows designers and their collaborators to all work together right in a web browser. You know how multiple people can edit together in Google Docs? Figma is that for design work. We just redesigned The Verge; we used Figma extensively throughout that process. So for years, people have been waiting on the inevitable Figma vs. Adobe standoff since Figma was such a clear upstart competitor to Photoshop and Illustrator and the rest. Well, buckle up because in September, Adobe announced that it was buying Figma for $20 billion. Figma is going to remain independent inside Adobe, but you know, it’s a little weird. So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he’s doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn’t do as an independent company. Dylan’s also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the “fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently short a commissioner, and the Biden Administration and Senate Democrats just can't seem to get that seat filled despite having nominated an amazingly qualified person. Her name is Gigi Sohn. The inability to get Gigi confirmed at the FCC has left the commission deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans. That means the commission in charge of regulating all telecom in the United States, including how you get your internet service, is unable to get much done. The Biden administration can't accomplish some of its biggest policy priorities like rural broadband and restoring net neutrality. President Biden first nominated Gigi Sohn to the FCC over a year ago, but the full Senate vote to confirm her just hasn't happened. We’ve been digging into the story for a few months now, trying to figure out what's going on here, and we found a simple but really frustrating answer… Links: Gigi Sohn Author Profile - The Verge  Comcast trying to “torpedo” Biden FC

I love covering the music industry, but over the past 10 years I’ve found that it’s one of the most challenging things to make accessible to a wide audience. See, my theory is that the music industry is like five years ahead of everything else when it comes to being disrupted by tech: whatever happens to the music industry because of technology eventually happens to everything else. Today I'm talking to Steve Boom, the VP of Amazon Music. Amazon just announced that they are upgrading the music service that Prime members get as part of their subscription. Starting today, one of the benefits for Amazon Prime members is that you now get access to the entire Amazon Music catalog, about 100 million songs, to play in shuffle mode. That service used to only contain 2 million songs. And they are removing ads from a large selection of podcasts including the entire Wondery catalog. I wanted to ask Steve: what’s it like to negotiate with the record labels for a service like this? What can streaming services do to make

Steve Cagle is the CEO of Clearwater Compliance, which is a cybersecurity firm focused on the healthcare industry. Basically, they lock down hospital computer systems, which contain a huge amount of personal data, and are so mission critical that ransomware attackers know that hospitals are more likely to just pay up. If the cryptocurrency explosion has accomplished anything, it’s making ransomware attacks easier and more lucrative for bad guys. Steve told me there’s so much personal information in a hospital system that a single patient’s record can sell for a huge premium over somthing like a credit card number. And we talked about amount of regulation needed to secure that data and that some insurance providers require hospitals to have a minimum level of security, or they won't be covered. It's a fascinating one. Links: Cyber Security Week 2022 Penetration test Cyberattack delays patient care at major US hospital chain Average Healthcare Data Breach Costs Surpass $10M, IBM Finds Transcript: https://www

Today I'm talking to Prashanth Chandrasekar the CEO of Stack Overflow – a highly specialized kind of social network, with a really unique business model. If you don't know Stack Overflow is a major part of the modern software development landscape: it’s where developers come together, ask questions, and get answers about how to build software, including actual code they can use in their own projects. It’s basically a huge question and answer forum. More than 100 million people visit Stack Overflow every single month. The company also sells Stack Overflow as an internal forum tool that big companies can use for their own teams: Microsoft, Google, Logitech—you name it, they’re using Stack Overflow to coordinate conversations between their engineers. The platform has a long reputation of elitism; Prashanth himself is a developer and he told me his own first experience on Stack Overflow was a negative one. In fact, he took over as CEO about three years ago, after a pretty serious moderation controversy that saw s

Meredith Whittaker is the president of Signal, the popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication. You might recognize Meredith’s name from 2018 when she was an AI researcher at Google and one of the organizers of the Google walkout. Now she’s at Signal, which is a little different than the usual tech company: it’s operated by a nonprofit foundation and prides itself on collecting as little data as possible. But messaging apps are a complicated business. Governments around the world really dislike encrypted messaging and often push companies to put in backdoors for surveillance and law enforcement because criminals use encrypted messaging for all sorts of deeply evil things. But there’s no half step to breaking encryption, so companies like Signal often find themselves in the difficult position of refusing to help governments. You might recall that Apple has often refused to help the government break into iPhones, for example. I wanted to know how that tradeoff plays out at Signal’s much smaller an

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath for an in-depth conversation about the company’s new high-end, mixed reality headset, the $1,499 Quest Pro, and why he isn’t backing down from building the metaverse. Zuckerberg and Heath also talked about the future of social media, why he enjoys “being doubted,” and the growing concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership. Links: The Meta Quest Pro is a cutting-edge headset looking for an audience Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to the Meta Quest ​​Apple’s mixed reality headset will reportedly come with an M2 chip We finally got our hands and eyes on the PlayStation VR2 Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion  Mark Zuckerberg took on China in a speech defending free expression Why BeReal is breaking out Elon Musk is buying Twitter, probably? Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23161228 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was p

Today I'm talking to Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel. I’ve been excited to have this conversation for a very long time – ever since Pat took over as CEO a little over a year and a half ago. After all. Intel is a very important company with a huge series of challenges in front of it. It’s still the largest chip manufacturer by revenue, and makes more chips than any other company in the United States. In fact there are basically only three major chip manufacturers: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, which is in Taiwan, Samsung, based in South Korea. And Intel, here in the United States. The Intel Pat took over was struggling, and was losing ground to in a variety of markets. But in the past year and a half, Pat’s restructured the company, turned over almost all of its leadership positions, opened a new line of business that would compete with TSMC and make chips for other companies including Intel’s competitors, and generally tried to reset Intel’s famous engineering culture around engineering

One of the more interesting quirks of the modern tech world is that there’s a really important company at the center of it all that doesn’t make anything. But its work is in your phone, in your TV, your car and maybe even your laptop. I’m talking about ARM, a chip design company that’s been through quite a lot these past few years, and I'm talking to Arm CEO Rene Haas. Arm designs the instruction sets for modern chips: Qualcomm’s chips are Arm chips. Apple’s chips are Arm chips. Samsung’s chips are Arm chips. It’s the heart of modern computing. Arm licenses the instruction set to those companies, who then go off and actually make chips with all sorts of customizations. Basically every smartphone runs an Arm processor, Apple’s Macs now run arm processors, and everything from cars to coffee machines are showing up with more and more arm processors in them. We want to know what you think about Decoder. Take our listener survey! Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23137412 Links: The Vergecast: The HDMI Hol

Ryan Petersen, is the CEO of Flexport, ac ompany that builds software that integrates all the different shipping vendor systems you might run into as you try to get a product from a factory in China to a consumer in Idaho: rail, sea, truck. We’ve talked about the supply chain and inventory management on Decoder with a lot of our guests — the chip shortage seems to affect every company, and sorting out how to get products made and delivered on time is a pretty universal problem. But we haven’t really talked about how products get from one place to another around the world. So I wanted to talk to Ryan, figure out what Flexport’s role in all this is, what his bigger supply chain solutions would be, and why he’s leaving his job as CEO to be executive chairman and handing the reins to Dave Clark, who used to work at Amazon. Links: Dave Clark to Join Flexport As Our New CEO Flexport Wants to Be Uber of the Oceans At Google, Eric Schmidt Wrote the Book on Adult Supervision The real story behind a tech founder’s ‘t

Today, I’m talking to Mark Bergen, a reporter at Bloomberg and the author of a new book about YouTube called. Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination. YouTube has always been fascinating to me because it’s such a black box: everyone feels like they know how the platform works, but very few people have a real understanding of the internal politics and tradeoffs that actually drive YouTube’s decision. Mark’s book is one of the best of its kind I’ve read: not only does he take you inside the company, but he connects the decisions made inside YouTube to the creators who use the platform and the effects it has on them. This was a fun one – keep in mind that for as little as we might know about YouTube, we might know even less about TikTok, which is driving all sorts of platforms, even YouTube, into competing with it. Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23113078  Links: YouTube Partner Program Hank Green on Decoder iJustine Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge,

This episode was originally published on May 3rd, 2022. Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and eventually left Google. He now runs an investment company called Future Shape.  Links: Inside the Nest: iPod creator Tony Fadell wants to reinvent the thermostat General Magic - Trailer Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work Silicon Graphics Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO Fire drill: can Tony Fadell and Nest build a better smoke detector? Google purchases Nest for $3.2 billion Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company Nest is rejoining Google to better compete with Amazon and Apple Apple Music Event 2005 - Motorola Rokr E1 / iTunes Phone Activision Blizzard hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit Nest buying video-monitoring startup Dropcam for $555 m

We’ve got a special episode of Decoder today – an interview between Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and Meta’s Tom Alison, the head of Facebook. Alex is the co-host of the newest season of Vox Media’s podcast Land of the Giants. This season is about Facebook and Meta. The season finale comes out tomorrow. Alex has been reporting for Land of the Giants for many months, and along the way he interviewed Tom. Facebook has a lot of challenges, but it seems like the biggest problem is TikTok: Facebook's problem is that it spent years – you spent years – building out a social graph that, it turns out, is less interesting than just being shown content that the company thinks you might like. Alison has been at Facebook for more than a decade and previously ran engineering for the News Feed, so he knows more than almost anyone about the history of feeds and where they are going. Links: Land of the Giants Facebook is changing its algorithm to take on TikTok, leaked memo reveals Facebook is revamping its home feed to fee

One thing that strikes me, in all these episodes of Decoder, is how little any of us really pay attention to the advertising industry, and how deeply connected it is to almost other every modern business. After all you can start a company and invent a great product, but you still need to market it: you need to tell people about it, and eventually convince them to buy it. And so you take out an add on a platform and, well, the platform companies we all depend on mostly run on ads. Google’s entire consumer business is ads. Meta’s entire business is ads. And when we talk to creators, they’re even more tied to ads: their distribution platforms like TikTok and YouTube are all ad-supported, and a huge portion of their revenue is ads.  This week I’m talking to Neal Arthur, the CEO of Weiden and Kennedy, one of the few independent major ad agencies in the world, and maybe the coolest one? It’s got a rep. Weiden is the agency that came up with Just Do It for Nike and Bud Light Legends for Bud Light. They’ve done campa

Katie Welch is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rare Beauty — the beauty products company founded by superstar musician and actress Selena Gomez. Rare Beauty sells its products online and in Sephora retail stores, and importantly, Katie does almost no traditional marketing: Rare Beauty is a true internet brand, that depends on social media strategy, influencer marketing, and community to drive sales. Specifically, the enormous community around Selena Gomez, who, again, is an international superstar with a fandom of her own. This kind of marketing is essentially new. Famous people making their own products and companies and using their online reach to launch and grow those businesses is a combination of art and commerce that is 10 – 15 years old at most, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty is only five years old, but it’s redefined the industry and helped make her a billionaire. Some of the first big successes came from the Kardashian-Jenners including Kylie Cosmetics, founded in 2015, as well as Kim Kardashian’s Skims, foun

In 2019, the Trump administration brokered a deal allowing TMobile to buy Sprint as long as it helped Dish Network stand up a new 5G network to keep the number of national wireless carriers at 4 and preserve competition in the mobile market. Now, in 2022, Dish’s network is slowly getting off the ground. And it’s built on a new kind of wireless technology called Open Radio Access Network, or O-RAN. Dish’s network is only the third O-RAN network in the entire world, and if O-RAN works, it will radically change how the entire wireless industry operates. I have wanted to know more about O-RAN for a long time. So today, I’m talking to Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten Mobile is a new wireless carrier in Japan, it just launched in 2020 – it’s also the world’s first Open RAN network, and Tareq basically pushed this whole concept into existence. I really wanted to know if ORAN is going to work, and how Tareq managed to make it happen in such a traditional industry. So we got into it – like, really into it.

Today I’m talking to Hank Green. Hank doesn’t need much introduction. In fact, he invited himself on Decoder to talk about YouTube's partner program, which shares ad revenue between YouTube and the people making videos. The split is 55/45 in favor of creators. But other platforms don't have this. There is no revenue share on Instagram. There is no revenue share on Twitter. There’s no revenue on Twitter at all, really. And importantly there is no revenue share on TikTok: instead there’s something called a creator fund, which shares fixed pool of money, about a billion dollars, among all the creators on the platform. That means as more and more creators join TikTok, everyone gets paid. You might understand this concept as: basic division. This episode is long, and it’s weedsy. Honestly, it’s pretty deep in our feelings about participating in the internet culture economy, and the relationship between huge platform companies and the communities that build on them. But it’s a good one, and it’s not really somethin

Today we’re talking to Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway. Rent the Runway is a a pretty simple idea: it’s a clothing rental and subscription business for women which launched in 2008. The basic idea is pretty simple: you can rent clothes one by one, and Subscribers pay a certain monthly amount for a certain number of pieces that they can swap out anywhere from 1 to 4 times a month depending on the tier of their membership. Rent the Runway also lets customers buy secondhand clothing either after they rent it or just outright.  But Rent the Runway has had a pretty intense path from its founding in 2008 to going public in 2021: the onset of the pandemic in 2020 cratered the business as 60 percent of customers canceled or paused their subscriptions, and Jennifer was forced to make drastic cuts to survive. But she says that now things are swinging back, as more and more people are spending their dollars going out, traveling, and generally shifting their spending from things to experiences. Th

All right, let’s talk about the metaverse.  You probably can’t stop hearing about it. It’s in startup pitches, in earnings reports, some companies are creating metaverse divisions, and Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta to signal that he’s shifting the entire company to focus on the metaverse. The problem, very simply, is that no one knows what the metaverse is, what it’s supposed to do, or why anyone should care about it. Luckily, we have some help. Today, I’m talking to Matthew Ball, who is the author of the new book called The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. Matthew was the global head of strategy at Amazon Studios. In 2018, he left Amazon to become an analyst and started writing about the metaverse on his blog. He’s been writing about this since way before the hype exploded, and his book aims to be the best resource for understanding the metaverse, which he sees as the next phase of the internet. It’s not just something that you access through a VR headset, though that’s