Today’s episode is a little different: Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi and I recorded this conversation live on stage during advertising week in New York City at an event graciously hosted by Adweek. 

I've actually been dying to talk to Amy. Digitas is one of the most important agencies in the entire advertising business with huge clients and massive influence over big platforms like Instagram and YouTube. After all, they're the ones buying the ads that keep all of those companies afloat. As you'd expect, she has a lot of thoughts about influencers, creators, AI, and everything that is going to change the advertising industry in the months and years to come.

Links: 

Credits:

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

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Luis von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. There are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI, and we talk about all that — but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning, generally. Duolingo is a global product, and there are a lot of tech tensions there, dealing with different user needs worldwide. We talk about it all in a pretty direct way... including all those unhinged things the owl does on social media.

Links: 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24031882

Credits:

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

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

I’m talking with my good friend David Pierce, Vergecast co-host and The Verge’s editor-at-large, about something he spends an ungodly amount of time thinking and writing about: software.

Scores of new workplace apps are cropping with clever metaphors to try to make us work differently. Sometimes that works… and sometimes it really, really doesn’t. And it feels like the addition of AI to the mix will accelerate the pace of experimentation here in pretty radical ways.

Links: 

Credits:

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

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Rabbit’s adorable R1 gadget launched with a lot of hype, but early reviews of the device were universally bad. Now, a core feature, its long-promised LAM Playground has arrived. I had a lot of big questions for CEO Jesse Lyu about how it all works — not just technologically, but if his plans are sustainable from a business and legal perspective. 

Links: 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24024222

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 Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Today, I’m talking to Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg journalist and author of the new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. If you don’t know Blizzard, you do know its games — the studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch has achieved legendary status over three decades. At the same time, the company has become emblematic of many of gaming’s biggest failings.

Jason’s book is out on October 8th, and it’s an incredible, detailed accounting of how Blizzard started, grew into a hitmaker and, eventually, became a victim of its own mismanagement. Oh, and there are a series of chaotic acquisitions along the way, culminating in Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard last year. In this episode, Jason and I get into all of this and more. 

Links: 

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 Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Matt Strauss is the Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer at NBC Universal. That’s a big fancy title that means he’s not only in charge of Peacock but also every other streaming video offering the company has worldwide. So you can bet Matt and I got into what that structure even looks like, and how it all operates under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition as its traditional cable TV business continues to fade. There’s a lot in this one – tech, media, sports, and culture, all at once. It’s quite a ride.

Links: 

Transcript: 

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 Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. This year, before his interview with Mark, Alex got to try a new pair of experimental AR glasses the company is calling Orion. 

Alex talked to Mark about a whole lot more, including why the company is investing so heavily in AR, why he's shifted away from politics, Mark's thoughts on the link between teen mental health and social media, and why the Meta chief executive is done apologizing for corporate scandals like Cambridge Analytica that he feels were overblown and misrepresented.  

Links:

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24017522

Credits: 

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

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt; our editor is Callie Wright. This episode was additionally produced by Brett Putman and Vjeran Pavic. Our supervising producer is Liam James. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

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

Today, I’m talking with Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, a relatively new software maker that develops the Arc browser. The company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages, which puts it right in the middle of a contentious debate in the tech industry around paying web creators for their work. 

We’ve been talking about these topics pretty much nonstop for last year here on Decoder. So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explore why he built Arc, what he hopes it will accomplish, and what might happen to browsers, search engines, and the web itself as these trends evolve. 

Links: 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24011410

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 Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Google’s in the middle of its antitrust case in just as many months, after it lost a landmark trial in August over anticompetitive search practices. This time around, the DOJ is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market. 

Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner has been on the ground at the courthouse to hear testimony from news publishers, advertising experts, and Google executives to make sense of it — and, ultimately, to see whether a federal judge hands the company another antitrust defeat. 

Links: 

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 Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Today, I’m talking with Roy Jakobs. He’s the CEO of Royal Philips, which makes medical devices ranging from MRI machines to ventilators. Philips has a long history —- the company began in the late 19th century as a lightbulb manufacturer, and over the past century it’s grown and shrunk in various ways. Basically, while every other company has been trying to get bigger, Philips has been paring itself down to a tight focus on healthcare, and Roy and I talked about why that market is worth the focus. 

Roy and I also talked about an ongoing controversy at Philips that he had a part in: In 2021, after years of consumer complaints, Philips was made to recall millions of its breathing machines. Those devices were eventually tied to more than 500 deaths. That’s a pretty big decision, with massive life-or-death consequences, and you’ll hear us talk about it in detail.

Links: 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24006874

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 Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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