Decoder with Nilay Patel

Today is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC. It’s one of the biggest events of the year for Apple, one of the most important companies in the world. In fact, Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and it posted $18 billion in net profits in its first quarter — the most quarterly profit of any public company in history.

So, as we go into another huge Apple event, I wanted to have Verge labor reporter Zoe Schiffer on to talk about something else that’s happening inside Apple: a brewing push by its retail employees to unionize, store by store, because they’re unhappy with their pay and working conditions. Zoe is really well-sourced; she has an inside look at this fight. So, she helps us explain how this all works and what it might mean.

Links:

Fired #AppleToo organizer files labor charge against the company

Apple’s frontline employees are struggling to survive

Apple hires anti-union lawyers in escalating union fight

This is what Apple retail employees in Atlanta are fighting for

First US Apple Store union election set for June 2nd in Atlanta

Apple accused of union busting in new labor board filing

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22917648

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan. 

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

Michael is president of the Blockchain Association of Ukraine and founder of the Kuna Exchange, which lets people buy cryptocurrency and swap between them. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government set up wallets on Kuna and other exchanges to accept donations to the war effort in crypto; in April, Bloomberg reported it had received over $60 million in crypto donations.

What’s more, earlier this year Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also signed a virtual assets bill into law, which will recognize cryptocurrency as an asset in Ukraine when the war is over. As president of the Blockchain Association, Michael lobbied for this law, which you’ll hear him talk about — especially in the context of how little faith he has in the banking system. He says several times that, even before the war, it couldn’t be trusted and that people were already using a combination of crypto and dollars for large transactions instead of Ukraine’s actual currency, which is called the hryvnia.

Links:

Ukraine Readies NFT Sales as Crypto Donations Top $60 Million

Ukraine's Zelenskyy Signs Virtual Assets Bill Into Law, Legalizing Crypto

Crypto Goes to War in Ukraine

Blockchain Association of Ukraine

Russian tycoon Tinkov sells stake in TCS Group to billionaire Potanin

The Bitcoin Boom

Cypriot financial crisis

The 2020 Global Crypto Adoption Index: Cryptocurrency is a Global Phenomenon

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22902506

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 Jackie McDermott. It was researched by Liz Lian and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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

One of our recurring jokes at The Verge is that every YouTuber eventually makes a video where they talk about how mad they are at YouTube. Whether it’s demonetization or copyright strikes or just the algorithm changing, YouTubers have to contend with a big platform that has a lot of power over their business, and they often don’t have the leverage to push back. 

On this episode of Decoder, I’m talking to Dave Wiskus, the CEO of two really interesting companies: one is called Standard, which is a management company for YouTubers, and the other is Nebula, an alternative paid streaming platform where creators can post videos, take a direct cut of the revenue, and generally fund work that might get lost on YouTube. 

What really stood out to me here is that Dave is in the business of making things: this conversation was really grounded in the reality of the creator business as it exists today and how that real business can support real people. You’ll hear it when we talk about Web3 and NFTs a little bit — Dave just thinks that stuff is bullshit, and he says so because it’s not a business that exists now. That’s an important dynamic to think about — and one for more platforms to take seriously.

Links:

Dave's subscriber tweet

Nebula

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22840704

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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

Google I/O was this week and Nilay Patel and David Pierce had a chance to sit down with Google CEO Sundar Pichai to talk about the event and the products that were announced. This interview was recorded for The Vergecast, another podcast from The Verge. You can listen to The Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts – or just click here.

We hope you enjoyed the interview. Decoder will be back again on Tuesday with an all new episode. See you then.

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

Today Nilay Patel talking to Daniel Dines, the founder and CEO of UiPath, one of the biggest automation companies in the world. But not the automation you might think; UiPath sells software automation, or what consultants call “robotic process automation” so they can sound fancy and charge higher fees. UiPath and other software automation companies have a different approach to solving issues with your legacy software: just hire another computer to use software for you. Seriously: UiPath uses computer vision to literally look at what’s on a screen, and then uses a virtual mouse and keyboard to click around and do things in apps like Excel and Salesforce. The automations can be mundane, like generating lists of people to contact from public records, or intensely complicated: UiPath can actually monitor how different software is used throughout a company and suggest automations. Huge companies like Uber, Facebook, Spotify, and Google all use UIPath.

Links:

The robots are coming for your office

UiPath AI Computer Vision

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22828061

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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

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 million

What matters about Matter, the new smart home standard

ZIGBEE ON MARS!

Directory:

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel

Pat Gelsinger, current CEO of Intel

Sundar Pichai, current CEO of Alphabet

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company

Jeff Williams, COO of Apple

Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder

Jeff Robbin, VP of consumer applications at Apple

Steve Hoteling, former CEO gesture recognition company Finger Works

Jon Rubinstein, senior VP of the iPod division at Apple

Steve Sakomen, hardware engineer and executive at Apple 

Avie Tavanian, chief software technology officer at Apple

Scott Forstall, senior VP of iOS software, Apple

Jony Ive, chief design officer, Apple

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22817673

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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

Cindy Cohn is the executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. If you’re an internet user of a certain age like me, you know the EFF as the premiere civil liberties group for the internet. The EFF has fought pitched battles against things like government surveillance, digital rights management for music and movies, and government speech regulations that would violate the First Amendment. These fights were important, and shaped the internet as we know it today.

Links

Electronic Frontier Foundation

How to fix the Internet: Podcast by the EFF

How the EU is fighting tech giants with Margrethe Vestager

Apple pushes back on iPhone order, says FBI is seeking ‘dangerous power'

Here’s why Apple’s new child safety features are so controversial

Viacom vs YouTube

Texas passes law that bans kicking people off social media based on ‘viewpoint’

Santa Clara Principles

Carterfone

Decoder interview with YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Facebook v. Power Ventures

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22805290

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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

Alan Yeung is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the former head of the Foxconn project in Wisconsin. If you don’t quite remember, the Foxconn project in Wisconsin was announced in 2017 as a massive deal to build the first “Generation 10.5” LCD factory in North America. It was also one of the first big moments in the Trump presidency, complete with President Trump holding a golden shovel at a lavish groundbreaking ceremony where he said the factory would be “the eighth wonder of the world.”

But it turned out that while Foxconn was putting on a great show, no LCD factory was actually getting built, even though Foxconn kept saying it was happening.

Links

We're nominated for a Webby! Vote for Decoder!

The award winning story from Josh Dzieza - The 8th wonder of the world

Wisconsin's $4.1 billion Foxconn factory boondoggle

Foxconn’s $100M deal with the University of Wisconsin has students worried

What a new governor means for Wisconsin’s controversial Foxconn factory

Foxconn and the village: the $10B factory deal that turned one small Wisconsin town upside down

No one seems to know what Foxconn is doing in Wisconsin

After a ‘personal conversation’ with Trump, Foxconn says it will build a factory in Wisconsin after all

Foxconn is confusing the hell out of Wisconsin

Foxconn promised a ‘correction’ about empty buildings in Wisconsin two weeks ago, and it hasn’t said a word since

With Foxconn chief’s Trump meeting, the Wisconsin project gets even more political

One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren’t empty — they still are

Foxconn’s delays might finally give Wisconsin the upper hand

One year after Trump’s Foxconn groundbreaking, there is almost nothing to show for it

Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report

Foxconn’s first announced product for its Wisconsin factory is an airport coffee robot

Foxconn releases and immediately cancels plans for a giant dome in Wisconsin

Foxconn's giant glass dome in Wisconsin is back, baby

Exclusive: documents show Foxconn refuses to renegotiate Wisconsin deal

Foxconn’s buildings in Wisconsin are still empty, one year later

Exclusive: Wisconsin denies Foxconn tax subsidies after contract negotiations fail

The 8th wonder of the world

Exclusive: Wisconsin report confirms Foxconn's “LCD factory” isn't real

Foxconn tells Wisconsin it never promised to build an LCD factory

Intel selects Ohio for ‘largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet’

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22794506

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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

Chris Dixon leads crypto investing at the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z. He’s responsible for leading funding rounds for Coinbase, which went public about a year ago, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, and Yuga Labs, which is behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club among others. He is also a prolific user of Twitter, where he posts lengthy threads about crypto and web3. He is at once one of the biggest investors in the space, and its biggest booster.

Links

Decoder is nominated for a Webby. Vote!

1000 True Fans

My first impressions of web3

A comprehensive breakdown of the Epic v. Apple ruling

SEC v Howey Co.

Transcript

https://www.theverge.com/e/22784768

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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

Julia Alexander was the perfect guest to come on our show and talk about the state of the streaming industry – we’re a couple years into the huge shift to streaming entertainment in Hollywood, and it’s clear the streamers are here to stay. Apple just won the Oscar for Best Picture for a film it bought out of Sundance called Coda. Amazon now owns MGM. Netflix is investing in games and hinting at advertising for the first time. One idea that comes up on Decoder again and again is that how we distribute media has a huge influence on the media itself – and we talked about what kinds of movies and shows are getting made now that the streamers are here to stay.

Links:

Downstream Podcast

‘Extremely awkward’: Bob Chapek and Bob Iger had a falling out, they rarely talk — and the rift looms over Disney’s future

Pixar staff speaks out against Disney moving its films to streaming only: ‘It’s hard to grasp’

HBO Max and Discovery Plus will merge into one app

Apple and Major League Baseball to offer “Friday Night Baseball”

Yankees will have 21 games only available on Amazon Prime

Prime Video unveils logo for 'Thursday Night Football'

CNN Plus launches with Reddit-like interactive Q&As

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22774600

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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