Decoder with Nilay Patel

While Decoder is on vacation this week, we're sharing an episode of Land of the Giants, a podcast from our friends at Recode and Eater.

Land of the Giants is a podcast that explores how the biggest tech companies rose to power, and what they're doing with that power. In this 4-part mini-season, they’re covering the world of restaurant delivery apps and exploring how big tech is transforming the business of food, and the true cost of our convenience.

 You can listen to the full season of Land of Giants wherever you find your podcasts.

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Juul became a sensation — and a sensationally dramatic story.

Lauren Etter, author of The Devil's Playbook: Big Tobacco, JUUL, and the Addiction of a New Generation, joins us to explain how a tech startup founded in a Stanford design studio to disrupt the smoking industry upended years of tobacco regulation in the United States, got a new generation of teenagers addicted to nicotine after years of declining teen smoking rates, and eventually found itself valued at 38 billion.

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Nilay Patel talks with Satya Nadella, the CEO and chairman of Microsoft.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced Windows 11, which comes with an all-new design, a bunch of new features, and the ability to run Android apps.

Nilay asks Nadella about how he thinks about Windows as a platform, what Microsoft’s responsibilities are, and how he thinks the various antitrust bills in Congress will affect Microsoft’s plans for the future.

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Nilay Patel talks with Jack Conte, co-founder and CEO of Patreon, the platform that allows people to pay their favorite creators directly with monthly subscriptions.

Nilay and Jack talk about how Patreon’s model as “membership” works, what Patreon’s relationship is to Apple and the app store, and where the overall creator economy is going on the internet.

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Nilay Patel talks with Jahmy Hindman, chief technology office at John Deere, the world’s biggest manufacturer of farming machinery. 

Nilay and Jahmy discuss what it means for our farming equipment to be run by computers, and how to fix the problems that arise because of it — like accessing reliable broadband, how the equipment should be upgraded, and who gets to fix it when it breaks.

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Nilay Patel talks with managing director of Y Combinator Michael Siebel. YC is one of the most well-known and successful startup incubators in Silicon Valley.

Michael is also a co-founder of Justin.tv, known now as Twitch, and he recently joined the board at Reddit after cofounder Alexis Ohanian stepped down and asked the company to replace him with someone who is Black. That means Michael is uniquely suited to talk about a lot of things that I’m really interested in exploring on Decoder: starting and growing tech businesses, finding opportunities for new ideas, the growing creator economy, and making sure the next generation of business leaders doesn’t look exactly the same as the last one.

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Nilay Patel talks with head of global affairs and chief legal officer of Spotify Horacio Gutierrez to help understand why Spotify and so many other app developers are so frustrated with Apple. Horacio recently testified in front of Congress about Apple’s business practices, and just wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling Apple a “ruthless bully.”

Horacio explains what he sees as the biggest problems with Apple’s behavior, what he would actually do to fix it, and how all of that connects to having more interesting, innovative, and better products in our lives.

Nilay also asks Horacio if he sees a connection between how he perceives Apple and how musicians perceive Spotify.

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Nilay Patel talks with Revathi Advaithi, CEO of Flex.

Flex is the third largest electronics manufacturing company in the world, making everything from hair dryers to the Mac Pro to autonomous driving systems for electric cars. It can also do everything from simply assembling products, to actually designing and engineering them from scratch. 

Revathi and Nilay focus on the global chip shortage, the rise of automation, the future of the manufacturing workforce worldwide, and whether Flex can avoid global politics.

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This week we have Jim Farley, CEO of Ford Motor Company, to discuss their second big push into consumer EVs with the F-150 Lightning. We wanted to see how Jim sees our relationship to cars changing as they turn into what are fundamentally rolling computers.

His answers surprised us — he hinted at one day being able to upgrade the computing systems of a car the same way you might upgrade or replace the engine, or the shocks.

As we go through this conversation, we notice how much Jim talks like a tech executive. As more and more things turn into computers, the more problems across the business landscape look like the problems of the computer industry. It's a fascinating shift.

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Nilay Patel talks with Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University Law School and one of the foremost chroniclers of Facebook’s moderation efforts. 

Kate has been researching and studying Facebook’s Oversight Board from its inception: she embedded with the board as it was forming to write a definitive piece for The New Yorker called “Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court.”

Nilay and Kate discuss the Oversight Board’s recent decision to uphold Facebook’s ban on Donald Trump and what the decision means for the future of policy and moderation on Facebook and other social media platforms.

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