This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist. I’m guest-hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Nilay is out on parental leave. Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authoritarianism.

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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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. Nilay’s out on parental leave for the next few months, so I’ll be stepping in to host our Thursday episodes while he’s out. My guest today is Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built. 

Perplexity just released Comet, an AI web browser for the Mac and Windows that’s still in an invite-only beta. I’ve been using it, and it’s very interesting. In this conversation, Aravind and I also discussed the future of Perplexity, the AI talent wars, and why he thinks people will eventually pay thousands of dollars for a single AI prompt.

Read the full transcript here on The Verge.

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator and host of the Fortt Knox podcast. I’m stepping in to guest host a few episodes of Decoder this summer while he’s out on parental leave, and I’m very excited for what we’ve been working on.

For my first episode of Decoder, a show about how people make decisions, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I sat down with Cassie Kozyrkov, the CEO and founder of AI consultancy Kozyr and the former chief decision scientist at Google. Read the full transcript over on The Verge.

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

On this episode of Decoder, Ellis Hamburger — former journalist at The Verge, early Snap employee, and founder of the brand strategy studio Meaning — joins guest host Alex Heath to share why many AI founders are missing the bigger picture.

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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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

It’s summertime, which means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. In years past we’ve talked to the leaders of Big Green Egg, Traeger, and Blackstone, and it’s always fascinating how those companies have all the same kinds of problems and ideas as any of the tech companies we have on the show. 

This time, I finally had the opportunity to sit down with SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. We’ve wanted to have SharkNinja on the show for years now, mostly because it has the best name of any company I think we’ve ever had on Decoder — it perfectly describes the structure of the company. And just in time for our grilling episode, the Ninja division of Mark’s business just launched its first ever grill. 

Check out the full transcript here on The Verge.

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Today, I’m talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic and the public face of WordPress. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine, and there’s been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.  

It’s been a long, drawn-out saga. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down. 

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.

Justin and I dug into that here, and we also explored some of the thorny issues around AI and dating, Hinge’s monetization, and data privacy in the second Trump administration. This is a fun one, with a whole lot going on. I think you’ll like it. 

Read the full interview transcript here on The Verge.

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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

Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. Decoder is on a short summer break right now, but we’ll be back starting June 23 with new episodes, and we’re very excited for what we have on the schedule. 

In the meantime, we have an episode from the excellent podcast Stay Tuned with Preet, with host and former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Last month, Preet sat down with former FTC Chair Lina Khan for a pretty high-level discussion about antitrust, monopoly power, and the ongoing shift from both political parties in the United States toward more aggressive, bipartisan regulation of Big Tech. I think you’ll find it really interesting. 

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder

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

Today, I’m talking with Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith. Taskrabbit is an interesting company; it’s known best for being a platform for hiring people to put together your furniture, so much so that Ikea acquired it in 2017. But Taskrabbit is still operating as a mostly independent company all these years later, and Ania is now in charge of maneuvering a fast-changing labor market during uncertain economic times and a potentially major AI disruption to the workforce on the horizon.

Help us plan for the future of Decoder by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. We’d really appreciate it. Thanks!

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder

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

Today, I’m talking with Runway CEO and co-founder Cris Valenzuela. This one’s special: Cris and I were live at an event in New York City last month hosted by Alix Partners, so you’ll hear the audience from time to time. 

Runway is a leading AI video generation platform, and it’s getting better all the time. That puts Cris and his company on the same collision course with creators, artists, and copyright law as every other part of the AI industry — and you’ll hear Cris and I really get into all that here.

Links: 

Help us plan for the future of Decoder by filling out this ⁠brief survey⁠. Thank you!

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 Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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