Nilay Patel
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
This is the first thing that struck me listening to the interview is that Zuckerberg feels like he has control of the next platform shift. That platform shift is going to be glasses and that he can actually take the fight to Apple and Google in a way that he probably couldn't when Meta was a younger company when it was just Facebook.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
You guys got into that in depth. But the other thing that really struck me about this interview... Zuck just seems loose. He seems confident. He seems almost defiant in a way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah. The one thing I'll say is he was in a very talkative mood with you, and you let him talk. There's some answers in there, particularly around the harms to teens from social media, where he says the data isn't there. I'm very curious how parents are going to react to his comments in this episode. Me too. All right, let's just get into it. Here's Alex interviewing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I'd like to thank Mark Zuckerberg for joining Decoder and thank Alex Heath for guest hosting. I'd also like to thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. You should subscribe to Alex's newsletter, Command Line, which comes out every week. It is absolutely jam-packed with industry insight, scoops, and smart analysis. It's a must-read.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads, a meta product. I'm at Reckless1280. We also have a TikTok for as long as TikTok lasts. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Kelly Wright. This episode was additionally produced by Brett Putman and Viren Pavic. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We have a very special episode today. It's become a Decoder tradition every fall to have Verge Deputy Editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at MetaConnect. And there's a lot to talk about this year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
The company announced new developments in AR, VR, and the fast-growing world of consumer smart glasses. alex it's good to have you thanks for having me good to be back you got to try on some prototype ar glasses you got to sit down with zuck tell us what's going on here
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Let's talk about safety broadly, and then I want to talk about Anthropic specifically. So the idea of AI safety is we built a reasoning robot that can take action in the world all by itself. That thing had better be aligned with us, right? It had better follow the rules we lay out for it. OpenAI famously overthrows Sam Altman for 25 minutes, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
because their board thinks that he's not trustworthy, but now he's back and then everyone's quitting because they want to start safer AI startups. What is going on there? Is OpenAI just not building a safe AI? Is it not safe enough? What are the dynamics?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
So the culture of these new companies that say we're safer, how are they measuring safety? Or is it just everyone is saying it, so we believe it? Is there a test? Is there like an SAT for AI safety?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
I think a lot of people see the AI safety debate as... don't make racist pictures in Grok or whatever. Don't let Gemini make racist photos and they're going to pull it down and we're going to make sure we don't do it. And there's just a combination of content moderation and prompt engineering that feels very familiar. That debate feels very familiar. And then there's
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
The bigger problem, which is what if these things take actions that we don't want them to take because we've given them control. We have given control of the electrical grid to AI and we know it's safe, which is the promise of the AGI system. And it feels like we can't solve the first one.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we're going to try and figure out digital God. I figure we've been doing Decoder long enough. Let's get after it. Can we build an artificial intelligence so powerful that changes the world and answers all our questions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
So how on earth are we going to solve the biggest one?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
So let's talk about Anthropic specifically. Dario's post, particularly interesting because Anthropic has the safety reputation because they were the first of their kind to leave OpenAI and say, we're building a safer one. But the post is, hey, I'm still building AGI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Even though we have this reputation, even though I want to go slow, and even though we care about safety, I'm chasing the same goal as OpenAI. Why do you think he's trying to walk that line right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
You wrote about Dario's post. You wrote in that piece, Anthropic is looking to raise at a $40 billion valuation. OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion. Is all this money just for NVIDIA GPUs? What are they spending it on?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Yeah, that's the other part of this. How are any of these companies going to make money? How is Anthropa going to make money?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
you will not be surprised to know that the AI industry has decided the answer is yes. In September, OpenAI's Sam Altman published a blog post claiming we'll have super intelligent AI in just a few thousand days.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
All these fundraising moments are happening right on top of each other, right? OpenAI just raised, XAI is raising, obviously Anthropic is looking. Is there a reason? Is this just a coincidence? Life cycle of these companies?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Is there any chance that these companies are going to run out of money before they raise again? Like, if they're burning it that fast and they need to raise this much, it does feel like these lines might converge faster than anyone hopes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
I want to come back to that and how much these companies are reliant on the big companies, because there's a lot of complication there. But just big picture, here we are, famous tech CEOs are writing manifestos about building digital gods so they can somehow spread democracy. And I'm getting the, this is all just a ploy to raise money vibe from you. Is it that simple? Is it that cynical?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
And earlier this month, Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, published a blog post laying out what he thinks such a system will be capable of when it does arrive, which he says could be as soon as 2026. That blog post is 14,000 words long. Dario has a lot of ideas. What's fascinating is that the visions Sam and Dario lay out in their posts are so similar.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Let me ask you one very dumb question. And I do want to talk about the big companies and how they're related to all this. Both Anthropic, OpenAI, the rest of them, they're all kind of built on LLMs, right? Like they're built on one very foundational technology. And the idea is that if we just throw more data and compute and time and electricity and money at it, we can just get there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
We're just going to horsepower our way into an AGI. Then at meta, there's Yann LeCun, who's like, no, you can't. There are some other people who are very skeptical of this approach. Can they do it? Is this the right path? Is this even worth it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Yeah. It just strikes me that if you're, you know, an Andreessen Horowitz limited partner, you are probably on the order of like a college pension fund. And you're like, so digital God, if we just give you all the money, you'll make digital. And that's going to return us how? And it doesn't seem like that loop is closing very fast.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
No one's making money and we need more money to build the next thing with which might make us money by putting all the travel agents out of business. And it's just somewhere in there is a bunch of question marks. And I it seems unclear to me how any of that gets resolved.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
They both promise dramatic, super-intelligent AI that will bring about massive improvements to work, to science and healthcare, even to democracy and prosperity. To happiness. Digital God, baby. But while the visions are similar, the companies in many ways are openly opposed. Anthropic is the original OpenAI defection story.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Dario and a cohort of his fellow researchers left OpenAI in 2021 after growing concerned with the company's increasingly commercial direction and approach to safety. And they created Anthropic to be a safer, slower AI company. And the emphasis really has been on safer, which has sometimes had a pretty dramatic effect on the company's reputation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
We're back with Verge senior AI reporter Kylie Robison. Before the break, you heard Kylie mention a big piece of news from earlier this month, that OpenAI is shifting towards a for-profit structure. That was part of OpenAI's recent $6.6 billion funding round. The switch to a for-profit company has to happen within two years, or those investors can ask for their money back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
This is important for a very decoder reason. If you're a decoder listener, you know that structure is important. How companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are organized, who their investors are, how they plan to make money, and where all the compute comes from will have a huge impact on the kinds of products they build.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
It will affect how fast they release those products to stay competitive, and whether safety will take even more of a backseat in the future.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
If you believe that AI is going to usher in a utopia, as Sam Altman and Dario Amode theorize, well, it increasingly looks like utopia depends on major cloud computing providers continuing to write the checks, and whether other investors think there's a massive payout waiting for them on the other side of the race to build AGI. So I think that brings us to now, basically.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
OpenAI is converting to a for-profit. It seems that's very contentious. Just before we started speaking, there was both a big New York Times story and a big Wall Street Journal story about different aspects of that process, and mostly OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft. So how much equity will Microsoft get in exchange for already being the biggest investor slash donator to OpenAI right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
And then... how much more compute and how much more dependency will Microsoft have on OpenAI versus going its own way. There's a lot in there. My favorite piece is that if OpenAI does build AGI, it gets out of its Microsoft contract, which is cited as a goal, as an incentive for OpenAI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
We should build Digital Gods so we can get out of this Microsoft deal, which is hilarious, just on its face hilarious. And then there's also people at OpenAI who are apparently complaining that Microsoft won't give it enough compute so it can train the next model and actually build AGI. What is going on here?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Is this just those two companies had a weird falling out after Sam got ousted and came back? Is it OpenAI is totally dependent on Microsoft and there's friction there? If Microsoft goes away, can OpenAI continue to succeed?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Just last year, a major New York Times profile of Anthropic called it, quote, the white-hot center of AI doomerism. But the launch of ChatGPT and the generative AI boom that's followed has kicked off a colossal tech arms race. And Anthropic is as much in that game as anyone else.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
It seems like broadly OpenAI being dependent on people writing ever bigger checks and getting more and more Azure compute time. That's a huge dependency for a company, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
So OpenAI is really dependent on Microsoft. Anthropic has that same kind of relationship with Amazon, right? Yes. They're paying their bills, and that's fine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
There's not the boardroom coups is like a real... Just a real measure of a company.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Do you think that the state of the industry and the tone of these big pitches is related to these business pressures. Hey, we have to start shipping products that people pay for at scale to prove out that there's demand for all of this investment. Hey, there's ferocious competition for talent.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Hey, our big cloud provider benefactors might start to wonder if they should just build their own products. It seems like that's a lot of anxiety that is being expressed as, oops, we might destroy the world if we succeed.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
It's taken in billions of funding, mostly from Amazon, and it's built Claude, a chatbot and language model, to rival OpenAI's GPT-4. And now, Dario is writing long blog posts about spreading democracy with AI. So what's going on here?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Do you think we should trust these folks? That's a tough one. My instinctive answer is no, right? We're reporters. We shouldn't trust them. But they are trying to build things that products are shipping. You can use them to whatever extent you want to use them. They have a vision. You can believe it or not. Are they generally trustworthy in your interactions with them or the people they work for?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
then people will just vote with their dollars. The other way is politics where people vote with their votes. I'm not sure that the market competition is producing much alignment, for lack of a better word. Like no one's picking an AI system right now because it's quote unquote safer. They're just picking the one that's in front of them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Why is the head of Anthropic suddenly talking so optimistically about AI when his company was previously known for being the safer, slower alternative to the progress at all costs open AI team? Is this just more hype to court prospective investors or researchers? And if AGI really is just around the corner, how are we even measuring what it means for it to be safe?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
And maybe one day they'll just pick the one that's preloaded on their iPhone. On the politics side, California had a bill and Gavin Newsom just vetoed it. It would have made these products safer. Anthropic didn't oppose it. They didn't endorse it. There was some ferocious opposition. Is the politics of this just doomed and we're relying on the market? Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
I just want to be clear, I was 16 years old when Section 230 was passed. I'm not that old. Sorry. But it is true that we live in the shadow of that law and people have many, many opinions of it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Here, it just seems a lot simpler, right? Like, I feel like we know how to write product liability laws. Is it just too hard or the tech industry is too good at claiming that no government can ever possibly understand their work?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
It kind of sounds like the fact that the big tech companies have a ton of control is the regulating part of the market right now. It's not Gavin Newsom. It's not whatever Biden administration executive orders were passed. It's not any other law. It's not competition between them, even though they all say they're safer. It's maybe just Satya Nadella saying, well, you seem out of control.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
I'm going to build my own. Or it's Andy Jassy saying, I want to use AWS for something else. It seems like that is actually the place where the most control over these companies will be expressed.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Is that who I have to trust? Is it just that Satya's a good guy?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
To break it all down, I brought on Verge senior AI reporter Kylie Robison to discuss what it means, what's going on in the industry, and whether we can even trust all these AI CEOs to be telling us what they really think. All right, digital god and capitalism, but mostly digital god. Here we go. Kyla Robinson, welcome to The Coder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
So where we're at right now, just to sum this up, is it feels like Everyone is racing towards building the same kinds of products against the same vision at faster and slower rates. Some people think they shouldn't because they might destroy the world. But if we get it right, everything will be groovy and no one's really in charge.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Who is to say whether Ilya Sutskover's company, which is literally, I believe, called Safe Super Intelligence, is actually safer than Anthropic? There's just a lot of people claiming this thing that they think the market wants or people might want or is worth the money. But there's, I don't think the market broadly understands that it even wants that or how to measure it or how to say it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
And then the other choice you have is some other body of people, whether that's just the providers of cloud computing or whether it's the government could make some decisions and they seem not motivated or not capable to make those decisions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
What's next for these companies? What should people be looking out for?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Well, I'm going to be hidden away from them safely in a bunker somewhere else. Kylie, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Thanks again to Kylie for joining me on the show, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. And please let us know what you think a chill digital god should look like. I'm curious to know what you think. If you have those thoughts, you can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads. I'm at reckless1280.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
We also have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you really love the show, hit us with that five-star review. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
I am excited to talk to you about Digital God.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
And the race to either build it or spend money on building it, and whether Digital God will be cool.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
It feels like there's a lot of debate on whether Digital God will be cool or not. Where do you come down?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Yeah. Is digital god chill, I think, is a motivating question for Silicon Valley right now. It really sums up a lot of things. And you have described this as tribalism. You've described it as religious. You've described it as ideological in the conversations we've had. At a high level, just explain what's going on here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Yeah. And that conversation is not chill, regardless of whether digital God is chill. The debate right now seems ferocious.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
So into this steps Anthropic and Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei. Anthropic famously the first of the we're leaving open AI to start a safer AI company companies. There are now lots of them, but they were the first. He's trying to split the difference. He's got this long blog post called Machines of Love and Grace. And he is saying, like, we're trying to build the safest one.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
We look at all this cool stuff we could do if we can pull it off. What is going on there?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
This is right next to OpenAI, which is making many of the same claims. Sam Altman wrote his own blog post a few weeks ago saying within a few thousand days, we might have AGI and here's all the stuff we could do. They've obviously just raised a lot of money. There's a ferocious competition for talent in this industry. We keep calling it digital god because that's funny to say.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
But is the end state the same? Are they all racing to the same place?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Can you actually explain the mechanism of that to me? I've used these tools today. Some of them are very powerful. They can certainly make a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti at ever increasing levels of fidelity. But I don't know how they spread democracy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
So this is a show about decision making. And every time I hear a pitch like that, it occurs to me that the goal is to give up some enormous amount of decision making. I don't know how to distribute food throughout our city or lay out the electrical grid or whatever it is. And we're just going to let the robots in the data center do it. And the data center might be owned by someone. That's fine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
Don't worry about it. And then we'll be free because the AI will just do it. That's the pitch, right? Is that we'll just hand over a bunch of control to an AGI. I mean, that's why I keep calling it digital god.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
The promise I sort of understand, right, we'll have ultra powerful computing systems that can reason and help us solve problems and they'll never get tired or have feelings about what we're using them for. Fine. I read these blog posts. I read Sam's. And it seems like the part where a bunch of people still have to make decisions is fully swept under the rug.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
That's the thing, right? Just give us money. Is that why Dario wrote this? Is that why Sam wrote his? Is that why Marc Andreessen wrote his?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
We're back with Verge Senior AI Reporter Kylie Robison. Before the break, we're talking about Anthropic CEO Dario Amode's very long, very intense blog post discussing the benefits of super intelligent AI. But a big part of developing super intelligent AI is safety. For AI to benefit humanity, it needs to be safe. You'll hear AI researchers talk about this using the word alignment.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The AI arms race to build digital god
AI needs to be aligned with humanity and our best interests. But what does it even mean to develop safe AI? That's a big question. And that's why it's such a big deal that Anthropic, which was the highest profile of the safer AI companies, is starting to talk more about how a super intelligent AI could change the world, and not just focusing on how it might go wrong.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
It's a WordPress world. The Verge is moving to WordPress. Everyone's going to end up moving to WordPress. They're going to be a monopoly. And I'm going to have Matt back on the show and be like, what are you going to do with all of your untold riches and power?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And he just sighs at me. We'll get there. Ben, you were a reporter. Now you're the CEO, right? So you have to deal with your new unionized, I guess you could call it a newsroom. I don't know what you call that. We call it a writer's room, but yeah. The unionized writer's room. You've got Danielle out here doing... bidding out contracts to migrate to WordPress with a design shop.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
You decided to launch a print newspaper. How are you organizing all that as a CEO in your head? Is this all new to you? Were you excited about these challenges?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Gizmodo Media in turn got sold to a private equity firm and rebranded as Geo Media in 2019. The O presumably stood for The Onion. We could do an entire episode on the calamity of GeoMedia, but the short version is that it spent the last five years systematically selling everything off.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
What's going to be more lucrative in the long run? Is it the paper or the website?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
That's how Ben and Danielle came to be in charge of The Onion, alongside CMO Lila Brilson and Scott Kidder, the part-time CFO. Before this, Ben was an award-winning disinformation reporter at NBC News. and he made an offhand joke on Blue Sky about buying The Onion.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
You'll hear him describe how that led to a series of meetings and plans, and ultimately, to Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson bankrolling the deal. I love stories like this, and I really wanted to know how that actually came together, how Ben and Danielle see The Onion working now, and what the business model is going to be.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We're back with the Onions, Ben Collins, and Danielle Strulé to dig deeper into how the satire website is changing up how it plans to make money. That actually brings me back to taking out Taboola. Taboola is the chum box in the bottom of every webpage on the internet. And it's basically free money for a lot of publishers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And you immediately turned off the free money because it destroys your user experience. I mean, it is a deal with the devil. When you're thinking about, okay, we're going to have multiple revenue sources, are you thinking about any advertising on the site itself? Are you thinking about other ways to monetize the website?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Or is it you subscribe and you get access to the website as well as a newspaper?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And really, what it's been like to grab a bunch of friends from a group chat and start a company together that now runs something as important as The Onion. On top of all that, The Onion just relaunched its print edition, and I really want to know how that even works in 2024. Where do you get something printed? How do you estimate how many copies to print?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
So are you monetizing the website at all? Are you doing advertising the website right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I guess this is part of my question and I think, Ben, you covered this very directly. Daniel, it sounds like you lived this very directly. This world, especially programmatic world, the reason all these media companies just sold their soul for scale on other people's distribution is because programmatic advertising pays pennies, right? And so you just need to collect as many pennies as you can.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And every other concern of this scale kind of runs into that problem of we want to sell direct ads more premium. We want to make something more beautiful. And the advertisers say, well, can you get me 20 million people to look at this picture of a shoe? And then things kind of just come to a close. Are you set up for those problems? Do you have ideas there?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Are you just not worried about it because the core product is the subscription? What's the dynamic in your head?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And there's 10 million crypto bots at least.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And how do you do all that on top of migrating the entire Onion website to WordPress? There's a lot going on in this episode, but the one thing I want to call out is just how much fun Ben and Danielle seem to be having. That's a rare quality in media right now, and it's infectious. In fact, I'll just come out and say it, because I think you're going to hear it in the episode.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I think we all would. But that's – it's interesting because the push back then was that you shouldn't have a paywall. You should never gate any information. And not trading the analog dollars to digital pennies was some sort of moral – capitulation. That moment I think we all look back on, but it feels like the pendulum has swung.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I'm actually curious if what you're seeing in your subscriber list when you look at it or you see who you're converting into paying is people who have the same regret from that moment in time or whether it's new younger people who would like different experiences. Because you might be the same result, but it's two very different audiences.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I'm rooting for them to succeed. I have all the same memories of reading The Onion as anyone else, and I hope they figure it out. Okay, The Onion's Ben Collins and Danielle Strelay. Here we go. Ben Collins, you are the new CEO of The Onion. Danielle Sterlet, you are the new Chief Product Officer. Welcome to Decoder. Pleasure to be here. We're really excited. I am very excited to talk to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I want to come back to actually the thing you said about the dumbest sentence that sums up the day and then the idea of Palestine coverage in a comedy newspaper. But let me just wrap this line of questioning up with what I think of as the decoder questions. You took over a company. You made a new company. You've got a new C-suite. You've got a new investor.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Did you all just sit down and draw an org chart and say, well, this is good enough? How did that work? Pretty much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Who was the person who got to say, please stop making slideshows?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Somebody had to say it. Was there like an all-hands meeting? How does it work to take over a well-oiled machine with a new group of executives?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Does that stack roll up to you as well, Ben?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Danielle, you just told me this is your first podcast ever, so this is going to be real fun. I'm excited. All right, let's start with this. You are the new executives of The Onion. It was previously owned by... A thing called GeoMedia. I'm not even going to try to explain the genesis or the name of GeoMedia. But now you have a new company called Global Tetrahedron that owns the onion.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Yeah. All right. I got to ask you this question, Ben, because you're a new CEO. So I'm going to ask you personally, and then as a group, you and Daniel and everyone else, you have a lot of decisions to make. You decided to relaunch a print newspaper. You decided not to mess with the process. That is an important kind of decision. How do you make decisions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
A core thesis of this show is that every executive at a fan company wants to have written a book like that, and this question is just bait for them. So welcome.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
You guys are a new executive team, right? You've all been friends, but you haven't made a lot of decisions together. There's a lot of weeds-y kinds of choices you have to make. How have you decided to make decisions together? Because friends working together, it can be kind of dicey.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
That's true. That's just some CEO stuff. I feel like if there's one book you get handed when you become the CEO, it's like, do it in half the time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Explain how we got here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Welcome back. I'm talking with The Onion's Ben Collins and Danielle Strelay to discuss why they're getting back into print and what it actually means to launch a print newspaper in 2024. Let's talk about the big decision here, which is launching a print newspaper. And then I want to talk about the writer's room and how it relates to the broader culture.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Launching a print newspaper does not seem like a plug-and-play idea. I saw a picture in the New York Times of the actual printing presses, and I thought to myself, where might one find those? How did you – again, this is – it feels like the group chat says we should launch a print newspaper, and then you have to go do it. What was the process of actually doing it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Oh my God, is it just like the Amazon third-party logistics economy allowed you to print a newspaper?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Did you have to like buy the software again? No. The other chief has been there for 25 years. Did he pull out a dusty old Mac 2 and fire up InDesign?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
That's the exact kind of media problem I want to have. That's what I thought I was signing up for. Yeah. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
You said you printed 40,000 of them for the DNC. Was that just a shot in the dark guess? Was that based on signups? How did you make that decision?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
So you're giving these out for free, this first set of 40,000. That's just the marketing, the lead gen. Are you going to give the next ones out for free as well? Is it you're going to have the box of jokes? By the way, my first one I picked up in Madison, Wisconsin, outside of Atomic Records. I had the same.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We're all goth furries now because of Tom.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Let's wrap up just by talking about those jokes for one second. You have a long history in disinformation on these platforms. Onion headlines showing up on platforms' divorce of context are themselves an opportunity to provide misinformation. There's a competitor to the Onion called Babylon Bee, which is all wrapped up in the culture war in this exact way. The Onion has a point of view.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
It has a politics. You can see it in the jokes. You can see the material right now, particularly on Palestine, for example. How do you think about that point of view? How do you think about the decontextualization of the work, especially as it relates to the internet?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I buy that. I think my questions make it more specific. That makes sense in the bundle, right? When I was a young person reading The Onion in a bundle of headlines and a paper – There was a valence to the cover. You could feel it like this. Don't kill people. It's like an idea that comes across the onion, like quite often. Divorced of the bundle, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Unbundled, like almost all news is now across social media platforms, algorithmic in time and space. Sometimes that goes really sideways, really fast. And like Ben, you were in it, right? This was your beat. I'm just curious how you think about that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Oh, good. Like every media CEO, you've come on Decoder to demand money from Google. You're settling into the role then.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
When you think about the onion comes from a place of empathy, it is tempting to pigeonhole that as just some woke bullshit, right? I mean like Elon Musk likes to do that and it seems like you're being pushed into a political part of the culture war even if that's not the intent. Is that something that you're just OK with? Is that something you want to fight against?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Let me ask you just to wrap up here. You're launching the print edition at the DNC. You did the exercise to make a print edition around the debate. Something very radical has happened in American politics over the past five weeks and it does feel like one movement is captured by rage and does not have the momentum. We will see what happens in this election.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
But it feels like one – the Trumpist world does not have the momentum and its rage defines it and the democrats seem to be pretty happy right now. There's Beyonce tracks playing. Everyone's happy. Eventually, you're going to have to satirize them, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And in this moment, even when we lightly cover the bad things that Democrats do because they have bad policy ideas and they are playing fast and loose with the facts in their digital campaign just like everybody else, I don't want to call it backlash. There's like an anxious fury that comes right back at you that says, if you screw with this, we're going to get the other guy again.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
So just leave it alone. How do you think about that as expressing the union? Because if Kamala Harris wins – She's the most powerful person in the world. And The Onion has but one job, which is to make fun of her.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We're ending with like what is essentially a curiosity gap headline.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
So we're going to wrap this up here. I'm just curious about that because I think there's at least one generation of people new to the electorate for whom every election has been existential. And the idea that our politics exist in a plane where comedy exists as well is kind of new to that new audience. And I'm curious to see how that plays out for y'all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Because the Daily Show comparison to 2001, that was when I was in my 20s and it just felt very different.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
All right. We got to end it there. As you can tell, I could talk to both of you about this forever and ever. We are going to have to have you back soon to see how all this is going. But thank you so much for showing up in the middle of DNC in the middle of this big print launch. I really appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks so much, man. Thank you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I'd like to thank Ben and Danielle for taking time to join me on Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads. I'm at Reckless1280. And we have a TikTok.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
It's a lot of fun. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with a five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Yeah, so let me ask you some just questions. I always joke on the show that I watch a lot of music documentaries, and the first act is the band in a garage, and then immediately they're playing the arena, like... No one ever sees that middle part. Everyone takes it for granted. And you are firmly in the middle part, right? You are a great misinformation reporter at NBC News.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And now you're the CEO of The Onion. And I feel like everybody wants that possibility to be true. Like, well, I should just buy it and fix it. And you accomplished at least the first part of it, which is you have purchased it. But just tell me about that process. A little bit more because I still think these ideas can be hard to execute. No one really knows what happens. You call Danielle.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
You're in the moment now. Did you have to – when you presented to Jeff, who's the money, did you need a business plan? When you went to G.O. and said, we'd like to buy this, were they like, we want a bigger number? Talk about those parts because that's, I think, the part that nobody really gets to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Ben Collins and Danielle Strulé, the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion. This episode's kind of a wild ride. The Onion is a comedy institution.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
There's an idea here that you have, which Defector for media – my friend Casey at Platformer, right? These ideas that you're going to start smaller media companies. That only works if your investors are okay with ultimately running a small private media company. And maybe you don't have investors. Some of those organizations don't have any investors.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Maybe you have investors who do think, okay, I'm just going to effectively donate some money to this outfit to stand it up, get it running, and then I'll be happy that this thing exists. What's your relationship with Jeff, your big investor, who is a Silicon Valley tech CEO? Is he expecting big returns? Do you have other investors who are expecting big returns?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Or are we just trying to preserve the onion?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
This is the real danger of interviewing people from the onion, I would point out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
It launched in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin as a parody newspaper, and over the years, it's become hugely influential. You'll hear Ben describe The Onion's role as writing the dumbest possible sentence about what's going on on a day-to-day basis. a task which means The Onion often publishes the sharpest headlines in media, even if The Onion itself is literally fake news.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
There's a thing with tech CEOs and billionaires. They have their thing. And then, you know, Mark Benioff needs to own Time magazine so he can go to the parties. And Jeff Bezos needs to own The Washington Post so he can go to the parties. And Lauren Powell Jobs needs to own The Atlantic so she can go to the parties. Because their enterprise software companies are not cool.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
But he's not expecting 10x returns in your first year or anything like that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
That's good. Everyone should have directly addressed their billionaire. I think that's important. That should become part of the decoder rubric.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Don't worry. We're going to come to that. So you buy the company. You're in the mix. What did Gio have to say? Were they just fine? Like, please take this off our hands?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
You know, the Onion was rolled up into Jio. You mentioned they had to get them off Kinjo, which is their software. They were also selling it. I'm sure they had their ad stack. You very notably took Taboola off the pages. How quickly, once you bought it, were you able to say, OK, we're moving, we're taking all of this archive and content and taking it somewhere else?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Because that is the big, tricky, hard decision.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
But like everything else in media, The Onion went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. It was acquired by Univision in 2016, which didn't really know what to do with it, so it was merged into the Gizmodo Media Group, which is what the remnants of Gawker were called after Hulk Hogan sued that company into bankruptcy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I looked at the site just now. It's like, oh, man, that doesn't look like a Kindle website anymore. Did you have to hire designers and engineers? How did you pick a platform?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
So the decision I want to ask you about the most, which I emailed you and asked you about this decision. In July, you were on the committee at Publicis that bought a giant influencer marketing company called Influential, which is not confusing at all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
$500 million to buy influencer marketing capability. Tell me about that decision. Why go acquire an influencer marketing company?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Get started on your next big idea today in Jira.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other products. Today, I'm talking to Digitas CEO Amy Lanzey, and you'll notice this episode is a little different. We recorded this conversation live on stage during Advertising Week in New York City at an event graciously hosted by Adweek magazine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
So I just want to put this in context. This is a trend right now, these acquisitions of these influencer firms. WPP just bought three of them. Stagwell, which is Mark Penn's company, their product just appears to be acquisitions. They bought four in the past year. I don't know anything about advertising. I know enough about Mark Penn. What's differentiated between these?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
How did you decide, OK, we're going to spend $500 million on influential?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Let's talk about that technology. And this is really now, we're just in the heart of the reporting call. This is the thing that I have been thinking about the most recently. You say technology. OK, we influentialize API access to most of the big platforms. It can do visual recognition of a lot of the content on those platforms. It can see who's talking about what inside, say, the social videos.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Is that just more ad targeting? We want to go reach these consumers, so we're going to find the creators who are making work that reaches those consumers and make them do sponsored videos for us?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
We've actually been dying to talk to Amy for quite a long time. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Welcome back. I'm talking to Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas Live on stage in New York City. We were just talking about the tech that goes into an influencer-based ad ecosystem. Now it's time to ask, what even is an influencer? This is the vergiest verge question I can possibly think of asking you. What is the difference between a creator and an influencer?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Amy is really sharp on what value a company like Digitas brings to its clients and the role her company plays in the online ecosystem. But it seems very clear that all of that is changing rapidly as more and more ad dollars go directly to creators and influencers on those platforms instead of ad agencies and the platforms themselves. As you'd expect, Amy has a lot of thoughts about this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
So in your mind, the difference between the creator and the influencer is just scale, just scale of audience?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Yeah, I'm wondering if the creators are using them interchangeably, because I hear from creators who say things like, I am not an influencer. And I'm wondering if that's a sorting that's coming, whether there's going to be one class of creators on these platforms that has one set of rules and a class of influencers that has a different set of rules.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I don't know if that's going to shake out anytime soon, but it feels like it will come.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
What you think really matters.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
That's why I'm asking you. If you ask the YouTubers, they will tell you that money has nothing to do with what they make. But you are actually the money. And I'm wondering if you think there's more integration with influencers or less integration with creators.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Digitas is part of a huge holding company called Publicis Group, which just spent $500 million to acquire an influencer marketing agency called Influential. Amy was on the committee that made that deal, and you'll hear her explain how and why huge advertising companies are starting to automate and operationalize influencer and creator content.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
It's interesting that you brought up this split between PR and marketing. The reason I started thinking about this story and asking about this story is I found myself over the summer giving what can only be described as pep talks to comms people at big tech companies. And if you are a comms person at a big tech company asking me for a pep talk, I know something is wrong. Something is deeply wrong.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
And what they were all saying is, We're all turning to influencers over and over and over again. And it's our marketing divisions that are getting the budgets because they can just pay for sponsorships to get exactly our message said the way we want to. And our comms and PR teams are shrinking. We can feel it coming, shrinking. Also, we're out of reporters.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I don't know if you've looked around the industry. Those seem to be pretty rare. That feels like a dangerous spiral, right? Everything is going to get bought. There will be no more media left to earn. There are markets for the big tech companies, in particular, there are markets where it is entirely pay to play.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
They launch a new feature and you, in EMEA, you gotta just pay some influencers to ever talk about it. Does that worry you, that we're kind of chasing down this road where everything's pay to play?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
This, I think, connects with one of my criticisms of platforms. I'm curious if you feel the same way. If you ask Adam Asary at Instagram or Neil Mohn at YouTube, they will tell you. People want people. They want individuals. They don't want brands. They don't want institutions. They want people. It's all people. And my response to them is, you know you guys run the platforms, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
The idea is to use AI to examine all of the content on the platform, find the right influencers reaching the right audiences, and use software to contract with them on sponsored content at scale. It's a big idea that's sweeping the advertising industry, and I wanted to know how Amy saw it all playing out in the months and years to come.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I just imagine Mark Zuckerberg with a big knob that says virality on it. I've been doing this for a decade. I'm more and more convinced there's a big knob that says virality on it in his office. And it feels like they want it to be, the platforms want it to be individuals. They want to delegitimize institutions at whatever scale.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
They want to make sure that they are constantly working with an army of 20-year-olds who might burn out, but they're an endlessly replenished army of 20-year-olds. And that makes it really hard to build anything sustaining anymore. Do you feel that same kind of underlying chaos, that the platforms want it to be a little bit unstable?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
One of the other trends I see just across the board with creators in particular is the rev shares on the platforms. Just you're a YouTuber, you're going to get your AdSense rev share. That's gone down over time. They're making less money just showing up in publishing content. So they're having to turn to brand dollars. They're having to turn to sponsorships.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I always joke that you can tell when a YouTuber is about to get their wings because they make a video about how pissed they are at YouTube. And it's like, oh, you grew up. You graduated today. We're going to throw a party. And then they figure out whatever the next thing they're going to do to make the revenue and manage the chaos of YouTube.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Do you see that as an opportunity for you to say, OK, all these creators, they can't trust the platforms. They are learning they can't trust the platforms. Maybe we can be a more stable component of their revenue mix?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
We also spent some time talking about a smaller question that no one seems to know the answer to. What is the difference between a creator and an influencer? Let me know if you know the answer. Okay, Digitas CEO Amy Lindsay, here we go. Amy Lanzi, you are the CEO of Digitas. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Do you ever open TikTok or Instagram and hit the one video in the feed that's basically just low-rent QVC and think, what the fuck is going on? Yes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I hear that and I just think work from home was a mistake. That's fine. It strikes me that all these big influencer marketing company acquisitions, the shake out in the market, you're looking at a very powerful tool that did not have a lot of pricing data in it. It did not have a lot of consistency in it. It didn't have just a lot of people repeat making deals.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
gaining information and experience in it. And now you've bought a big company, there's a bunch of other big companies, and a lot of stuff is going to get normalized and sorted out in models. And it feels like maybe a bunch of pricing chaos is going to result in a crash in prices, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
That this might be a bubble because there's no information and we're going to all learn a bunch of ROI information and prices are going to come way down. I've heard this danger from creators. People are worried about it. Do you feel the same way?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Before we started, Amy asked me about memorable Decoder interviews and asking the CEO of AWS why he advertises in the airport. Surprisingly spiky. Did not know the answer to that question. This all started because a few weeks ago I asked you about the rise of creators as creative directors. And in particular, I see small brands who are very worried about selling one more thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
It's all they think about, saying, why hire an agency? Why hire the overhead that can just rush into a trend? I'm just going to hire the creators directly. They'll do all my work for me. They'll sell the thing. I'll give them some equity. We're all going to win together. I see this more and more, especially small tech brands love to do this. Do you think that's a durable long-term trend?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I am very excited to talk to you. We are in a very intimate room at Adweek House in New York. And so I asked you earlier if I could do this a little differently than a normal episode of Decoder. A few weeks ago, I emailed Amy and I said, I have a number of questions about advertising. And she emailed me some great answers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
That feels like a graduation point, right? You're saying, okay, you run a small company, maybe you start a direct consumer. You're gonna go pursue a direct sales model. Maybe you'll hire one or two influencers to help you out. At some point you're gonna scale and you're gonna need a big agency. What's the moment? When can you tell that that moment has arrived?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
You mentioned MrBeast. There's, I would say, a category of creators who have transcended the platforms. They've transcended the algorithm. MrBeast, I think he said he made Feastables because no one could afford his ads. So he might as well sell energy bars. This trend of digital creators, No longer shipping bits, but choosing to ship food items seems bananas to me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Like if you can sell software, you should sell software. You should not sell bottled water, which is what the Paul brothers are doing. That feels like, okay, their ad rates are so high, it is more effective for them to literally ship water around the world than to accept one more brand deal. That feels deeply unsustainable to me. But it is a trend that I see over and over and over again.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
What do you think is driving that? That their rates are just so high? Or is it that big brands don't want to pay the numbers that it takes to sponsor Mr. Beast for data? I think, well... Or the return isn't there, I should say.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
And then I was like, I should call Amy and do the rest of the reporting for the story I'm working on. And then the opportunity to do it live with an audience showed up. So I'm going to ask you the normal Decoder questions. about structure and decision making. And then I'm just gonna do some reporting about what on earth is going on in the media. And hopefully at the end of this, we will know.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Well, I think it's both.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
They all want to diversify. They're all getting old. I'm getting old. You're graying the beard now. I'm not.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
We're all going to be YouTubers forever. But they all know they can't do it forever. It's demanding. It does burn them out. So I think everybody wants something more durable than that, something that will outlast them. A bottle of water might outlast you. But then, in particular, what I see is their rates, the sponsorship rates for the biggest YouTubers are so high
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
that brands won't come to them anymore. And so they're saying, well, I can just take my influencer power and use it to market my own brand. And I will just, I'll pocket the margin, even though I'm selling some of the lowest margin products in consumer goods history, which is crazy to me. And that equation seems like at some point we'll no longer like balance out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I've been trying to come up with a fake vodka for years. If anybody wants to help me, my ego is not healthy enough. Let me ask you about the pressure from the other side. The idea that a small brand can go to a creator and they will just basically talk about their brand and be their creative director, fine. On some small scale, that's fine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Maybe they'll graduate and they'll come higher at Digitas. On the other side, you have the giant platforms saying, you know what? Give us your creative. We'll use AI. We'll generate infinite targeted video ads using your creative. One for every person who might see it. And that'll be how it goes. That's just the future of TikTok. Smart Plus announced this week, right? AI-generated ads on TikTok.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
On the one hand, I think, well, that won't work. And on the other hand, I think, well, money is going to chase that idea because it seems really compelling in one particular way. Is Digitas going to do AI-generated advertising in this way? Do you think the platform's basically promising they will make infinite creative for brands is a real threat?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
For the Decoder audience, Digitas is a very important advertising agency. It's part of a larger holding company called Publicis. You recently changed the positioning of Digitas to be a network experience agency. So tell us what Digitas is and what on earth that means.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
More content is a really interesting idea. If you look at all the big platforms and their AI ideas, one, they are all chasing AI video generation because they want to do exactly this, infinite targeted creative, and you need AI video generation for that. But then you look at the big creator platforms, and they're saying to creators, YouTube is saying, hey, we'll do AI-powered chat for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
So your audience can talk to you and an AI version of you will talk back to them. Meta just announced the same essential idea for creators on Instagram. Is more good? I feel like at some point, the need to pump every platform full of content all the time will just make people turn away and seek something a little more carefully considered.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I'm hoping that because I'm very insistently still just one person. I get to clone myself into 1,000 Zoom avatars, which is a real thing the CEO of Zoom proposed on my show. And it feels like that would be an opportunity for, for example, journalism to continue existing. And yet the demand is for more. It's always for more. Do you see that coming back at all?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Welcome back. I'm talking to Digita's CEO, Amy Lanzi. That was all the opening I needed to talk about the fun and creative side of advertising, which really does exist to drive attention. You talked about differentiation in games there. Let me ask you about the fun side of advertising, the creative side.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
One of the things that I have been thinking about a lot is we have built The Verge over the past decade plus and we go try to find new audiences in other places is that I would say the story of the last decade is giving up distribution to big platforms.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I see a lot of platforms algorithmically pushing everything towards the same look, the same feel, the same formats. It feels like we've lost a lot of creative differentiation through the algorithmic platform era. Advertising is not standing out. Are your creatives frustrated? Are they worried that they're being asked to kind of make the same stuff expressed in 50 different platforms?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
The flip side of that is when you use a platform like Influential, you go contract a bunch of creators. The thing creators say to me about what makes a sponsorship work is they've got to let go. The brands have to let go. They've got to let me do my thing. I've got to be authentic. How do you balance that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
You have in-house creatives who are beholden to a client, and then you are using Influential to contract creators who are saying, actually, you can't tell me what to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
And now it feels like that distribution is changing one more time as more and more creators and influencers do direct brand deals, as advertisers give, or as platforms give more and more tools to advertisers directly, as things like television start to have programmatic capabilities and connect to TV apps. How do you see all that distribution changing inside the concept of the network agency?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
All right. We got to wrap up, but I just want to do a very quick lightning round with you. Yes. And ask you about platforms. Okay. Your favorite.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Because they want your money, I've been told.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
So let's just go through them. Google, in a fair bit of trouble lately. Don't know if you've noticed, our nation's Justice Department is taking quite a lot of interest in them. They might get broken up. That was proposed this week. The ad tech trial is ongoing. Do you see any change in your relationship to Google? Do you see any pricing changes in how you think about search?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
If they pull apart that ad tech monopoly, is that good or bad for you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
All right. That's Google. You mentioned TikTok. Equally chaotic in different ways. May not exist this time next year. How are you advising clients to invest or think about TikTok?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Are you advising people that this is a short-term bet, you gotta get what you can out of it now and walk?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
You'll notice the answer to every platform question, that's why I shouldn't talk about it. Instagram, I hear from creators all the time, Instagram has the greatest reach, is the most culturally relevant, pays the worst rates, just on a creator basis, so that's why sponsorships are tremendously important in terms of Instagram. How do you guys deal with Instagram? What's the relationship there?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
What sells the most shampoo? Is it Instagram or TikTok? TikTok.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
You got to pick one.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Which moves the most?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Okay. This was all just a lead up to ask you about X. How do you feel about X today?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Do you advise your clients to spend on it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Back when X was on Twitter, and it was still a bad business, but it had less Nazis. Less, I didn't say none. The reason people bought there was live and relevancy and immediacy. Has any platform filled that void? Has Threads filled that void for anyone? That was a big head shake. I don't think so.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
All right. Well, we got to get out of here. Amy, thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I'd like to thank Amy Lanzi for taking the time to join me on Decoder. Thank my friends at Adweek for hosting us. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, please drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or hit me up directly on threads.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I'm at reckless1280. We also have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Our supervising producer is Liam James. Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
When you think about Digitas and how it's organized and Publicis, which is a larger company, One of the biggest stories, I think, of the internet media age is just scale. These platform companies have enormous scale. They have an enormous amount of data. They don't share the data between themselves. That's their moat. How do you work inside of that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Do you have enough scale to go compete and get terms from the platforms?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
The reason I asked that question that way is I think the story of the past decade or so in advertising and marketing is roll-ups in the huge holding companies, right? You see the amount of consolidation that's happening. Digital house publicists, obviously the biggest of them all. Is that changing now, do you think? Is that scale that, let me ask this question that way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
I saw that as a reaction to the platform scale. we're gonna get scale over here because you're big so we have to be big. Now I see dozens, millions of independent creators and I wonder if the scale is as important.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Epsilon is your data platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Yeah. Describe, let me ask you the decoder questions because I think this is an appropriate time. Describe the structure of Digitas, how you've run your group and how that connects to the structure of Publicis.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
So if I show up at Publicis' front door and I'm like, I want to sell some stuff. I don't know how advertising works. I'm a reporter. It's very important. They keep me away from that side of the house. How do you pick between agencies inside of this giant holding company? Do you fight for clients inside the family?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
And then obviously Pulisic has its own set of capabilities that I'm sure are shared between all of your agencies. What goes up and down? When do you say, okay, this needs to graduate to scale across all of our agencies versus we're going to pull this down and I'm going to take ownership of this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
This episode is brought to you by Jira. Jira is the only project management tool you need to plan and track work across any team. So if you're a team of developers, Jira better connects you with teams like marketing and design so you have all the information you need in one place. Plus, their AI helps you knock out the small stuff so you can focus on delivering your best work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
Do you ever keep anything from your sister agencies?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
This is the other decoder question, and I think it's going to lead into everything else. You have a lot of decisions to make. What you keep inside Digitoss, what you scale up. There's a big decision I want to ask you about, about what to acquire. What's your framework for making decisions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How influencers are changing advertising with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi
My entire show is LinkedIn paid. I just want to be very clear about this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
One of the things that's really interesting about your description of the timeline there is all of the new apps are necessarily in the cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Everybody went home. We all have to work online together. Necessarily, we're going to work in web browsers in a collaborative environment together. And particularly on desktop, there's no action in native apps. There's still a little bit of action in native apps on mobile for a variety of reasons that we've talked to lots of CEOs about on the show. Dylan Field, CEO of Figma.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
He's like, I got to build it natively on iOS because the browser isn't good enough to let me do Figma on the browser on iOS. The second you open your MacBook, the browsers are good enough. And he's like, this is where I should deploy an application. This is where I get immediate distribution.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
The idea that all of these productivity apps work in the cloud so we can all collaborate together and all the data is stored centrally and you don't have to sync it, that seems like the end of the road for the desktop productivity application. You write installer.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Do you see any glimmers that some huge, powerful Mac app is going to show up or some huge, powerful Windows app is going to show up, run locally on your computer and revolutionize the business world?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
hopefully faster, more efficiently, and lately, more remotely. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it really, really does not. Something is changing about software at work, and I often find the best way to understand the future is to take a moment and consider the present. Okay, David Pierce, Software at Work. Here we go. David Pierce, welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It feels like that was the core way of thinking about things before broadband internet. Yeah. Like Apple had entire software suite called iSync. Yeah, that's right. Do you remember? No one ever used it because it was so complicated and fiddly. And then the cloud existed. And then you could just sync everything over iCloud. And so iSync went away.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But the idea that you would maintain sync on files across devices in a fairly manual way was built because the internet connections were not fast enough. And now you're saying the people don't trust the cloud enough. So we're going back to that model.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That's a good place to take a break. I want to come back and I want to talk to you maybe just about Slack for the rest of the episode. Oh boy. And put all these ideas into that little case study. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
David, we just talked about kind of a lot of ideas all at once. The idea that everything would be in the cloud, the idea that everybody on the team had to buy into a way of working to make a lot of this productivity software actually functional in an organization.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
The idea that the big players were bundling capabilities, but you would still have some like renegade teams inside your company using the tool they want. And then, I don't know if people caught this, you brought up the idea that Salesforce bought Slack.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
So I just want to put this into focus around Slack in particular because it's just a good case study. Slack just turned 10 years old. You and I have covered the hell out of Slack. I've interviewed Stuart Butterfield, maybe not on the Coder but on the Vergecast for sure. He was the founder of Slack. Slack was supposed to be a revolution 10 years ago, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to my good friend, David Pearce, who's my co-host on The Verge cast and The Verge's editor at large. And we're talking about something that David spends, honestly, too much time thinking and writing about, software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It was going to replace email and then they kind of walked back from the idea that they were replacing email and embraced Slack. replacing email again. Then Microsoft showed up with Teams, which is mostly a video conferencing platform, but they added some Slack-like features and that. Everybody has Microsoft Office, so Slack got out-competed in that way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They filed antitrust lawsuits in Europe, and then Salesforce just buys Slack. And like I was saying, the idea is you're going to use Slack. Why not use our CRM solution as well? Why shouldn't Slack be the CRM solution that you are using? You're talking to your team about selling stuff. You're probably using Salesforce anyway.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Is this your first time on Decoder?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Now you can just chat to it through whatever Mark Benioff AI system that is being integrated in Salesforce. Yeah. I watched Dreamforce. I couldn't tell you what's going on, but that's basically the idea. Inside of that is the first thing we talked about, which is the whole point of Slack was that everybody would buy into a new kind of metaphor for working.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that would somehow change your company and make you more efficient. And actually it turns out that metaphor maybe didn't take and everyone just is like spamming each other with text messages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Well, it's interesting because you and I host another show together. But usually when we do other episodes of that show, I'm the guest and you're the host. And now the tables have finally turned. I know. I don't know how I feel about it. Only... The penalty is that you have to talk about enterprise software on this show. I've brought this on myself.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
So I will note that the background in for Slack is searchable log of all communications and knowledge. Yeah. Whether or not you start with the name or you end up with the name or you reverse engineer the name, that was the acronym. And the idea was that you would operate Slack at the pace of email. It wouldn't replace email, but you're talking, you're making decisions in Slack.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You have a history of all of the files and figures and conversations around those decisions. And then you could just go refer to it. You could find it. It's all happening there. And what ended up really happening is everyone was just chatting in real time in like a fractally expanding number of Slack channels.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
In the service of this being a case study, where do you think the breakdown between the metaphors that Slack wanted people to use and the actual user behavior came from?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That's very much the difference between Decoder and the Verge cast is on this show, we're going to talk about enterprise software at great length. So you, in addition to hosting the Verge cast with me and being editor-at-large of the Verge, you also write Installer, which is our newsletter where you try all kinds of software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
When Stuart was still running Slack and he came on the show, he talked a lot about how they onboarded people into Slack and taught them how to use Slack. And they spent a lot of time teaching new Slack employees how to use Slack. I had the same reaction as you, which is why doesn't the product teach people how to use Slack? And it's kind of all the way back around to the first thing you said.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You can either build a very opinionated product that works extraordinarily well for a small number of people, or you can just take all the training wheels off and let people sort of build whatever product they want. and so that they can work however they want.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that's how you get, even at Microsoft Excel, they can't take any features out of Microsoft Excel and point people to a simpler version of it because every 5% of users is millions upon millions of people. Slack is in that zone. A lot of other products are in that zone. Is it just we have to go through other kinds of fads?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
We all used IRC and email, so then we used HipChat for five minutes, then we used Campfire, and now we use Slack, and maybe one day Slack will just fully give way to Teams or whatever?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I believe you do this as a form of therapy because you are addicted to software, which I'm worried about you as your friend. I'm worried that this is a problem that you have. But it means you have tried a lot of software in your life.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Let me ask you about switching costs in that context for one second. We can keep picking on Slack, and I think both of us are motivated to do it. I would like to, yes. It's a little unfair, but we both use it all day long. But if I was to say, okay, the Verge isn't using Slack anymore. We're switching back to email. The switching cost of that would be almost impossibly high.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I think we would just have a straight mutiny. We would not know how to work, quite honestly. If I showed up and I said, we're going to stop using Concur. We're going to use some other enterprise provider for expenses and travel. I don't think our team would care a lot. but it almost would be harder to switch because no one cares a lot. Like I could bring down the dollars by some amount, 10%, 20%.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Great, that's a good reason to switch. But then everyone would, I would lose that in productivity because no one would pay attention to the email. that we're switching out Flims for Flams or whatever we're doing. And then they would try to file an expense. They would use the old app. And then we would just be sort of running the individual training all the time. Is that something you can fix?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Is that what you just get the bundle for? Like, screw it, Microsoft, just do it all for me. Is that the opportunity for any of these companies is to make an expense software that everyone loves so much that everyone actually pays attention to the emails?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Why haven't Microsoft and Google just run away with this? Is it antitrust litigation? Is it that they're not good at everything they try to do? Is it Google kills its products too fast?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I'm back with Verge Editor-at-Large David Pierce discussing the next big thing in enterprise software and if it will be as big of a change as software is eating the world. The last turn I want to talk about, and I'm very curious if you've actually seen any features here that work or are valuable. I already know what you're about to ask. It's obviously AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
So the dream here, and you mentioned Zoom, the CEO of Zoom, Eric Yan, is on the show, and his dream is that we'll make an AI agent out of you with everything Zoom knows out of you, and your AI agents, potentially thousands of them, will go off and have meetings on your behalf while you sit on the beach. I want to be 100% clear. This is a real thing he said on the show.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
This is the thing he wants to build. I don't know about that. That is as gentle of an evaluation of that idea as I can give. Somewhere underneath that is I work at a company where a lot of people have made a lot of decisions. I don't know what those decisions are. There might be some wiki and some horrible piece of enterprise wiki software that I don't really know how to access.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And my Okta's acting up and I just have, whatever, I'm not going to do it. This Slack room is too busy. I have no idea what decisions are going to be made here. I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing. All this is a mess. I'm just going to ask some all-knowing enterprise AI, hey, what's our history of sales in this region and who is our biggest client?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And it will spin through all the company's data and answer the question and tell me how to make the next move. That's the dream. Is any of that a reality yet?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
The way that I always think about enterprise software and software at work is the Marc Andreessen quote, software is eating the world. There's a lot of ways to interpret that quote. But what I specifically think about is that all of the things you do at work will go from being paper and pencil or sculpting clay models to using software on your laptop, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
How do you square that with, hey, there's a big push to run more software locally? Hey, people are very cognizant of the amount of data they're giving up to centralized AI providers or centralized cloud providers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Hey, I'm just generally uncomfortable with my law practice, my medical practice, having all of its data taken up into the cloud where I'm no longer in control of my client data or my patient data.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Like fundamentally, all of people's work will be done in software. And then we've had so many CEOs show up on the show and say, the second we start making an investment in software, now we've made a forever investment in software. We're just going to keep spending money on developing software, on software engineers, on maintaining the software, on figuring out our cloud storage bills.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
The big idea that we started talking about is the Andreessen quote, software is eating the world. All these businesses are software businesses or they're going to operate on software. That is very clearly happened. Most people show up at work, they get handed a iPhone that runs their enterprise software. They get handed a laptop that runs their enterprise software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
No matter who you are, it's all just happening. It's all just happening inside of software. And then some other actual work happens somewhere else. I think we can agree for the purposes of this Dakota episode that is almost complete. Like that transition is complete in the workforce. Is the next turn AI that's actually going to redefine how we do work?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Because the AI companies are absolutely betting that they can pay off all this investment with that level of change and turnover and upgrade and investment.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Is that how it's going to get sold? This will make your company more productive. So you might as well just let digital God make a bunch of decks for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Now we're just doing software all day long. Is that generally right? Is that how you see the growth of enterprise software that we used to have floors of accountants and now we've got floors of people using Excel?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
All right, David, we're going to have to have you back soon. Thanks so much for being on the Cutter. Thank you. I'd like to thank David for taking the time to join Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads. I'm at Reckless1280. We also have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Specifically, we're talking about the software you use at work, the stuff you like or maybe just tolerate and use every day, the stuff you probably hate and try to avoid using at all costs, and the stuff you love and hate because your job revolves around using it all day long. It's fair to say that businesses of all kinds changed radically when software entered the office.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I'm going to hold you to that because later on we're definitely going to talk about whether AI will cause layoffs. But first, let's start at a high level. I want to try to define some categories of enterprise and productivity software with you. There's enterprise software, which is software that is sold to big businesses, and that can be a lot of different things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, that's classic enterprise software. Everybody needs a word processor at their computer, at their desk. You can just pay per seat. Here's this productivity software. Email clients, whatever that is. Whatever that set of things is one kind of enterprise software. Then there's I don't know, whatever runs your industrial robots. Right. Procurement. There's that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Then there's productivity software, which consumers use. People plan their weddings in Notion and Trello. You try all this stuff. You play with all this stuff. You cover this industry pretty extensively. Can you draw a definition for us here? How do you think about the different lines?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That's the foundation of the famous Marc Andreessen quote, software is eating the world. And now it seems like it's all about to change again as AI automates more and more of that software. At least, that's if you believe all the CEOs who have come onto Coder in the last year telling me that's what's about to happen.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah. I feel like a fair warning for the audience here is that David loves software. And my goal in life is to never use software at work. If I could get to the point in my career where people bring me printouts of things and I circle them with Sharpie and send them away, it's the dream. Truly the dream that I work towards every day. I'm farther from that dream with every passing minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's not gonna happen for me, but it's what I think about because I am the person you're describing who encounters the software and thinks, why is this making me work this way? Why am I learning some metaphor that the expense software wants me to learn just to say I bought dinner for my team? I don't care about any of this. I just need you to pay me back for the dinner I bought for the team.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And it feels like those metaphors are like really what is getting sold over and over again, both in the productivity software zone and then in the your company needs to function zone. And it feels to me very much like you sell the metaphor because that is the promise. That's the exciting thing. Hey, if everybody just worked this way, you'd be so much more productive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
These tools are all usually lumped together in a big bucket we call enterprise software, but there are often meaningful overlaps with the popular productivity tools many of us use in our regular lives as well. So first, I wanted David's help in just defining it all. Then I wanted to talk about how it's designed, and how that design shapes how we work every day in subtle and powerful ways.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Let's talk about this in the context of some pieces of software. So it doesn't matter if you run a newsroom like we run at The Verge or you run a small legal practice or you run a Fortune 500 corporation. You've got some set of needs, right? People need to talk to each other, whether it's an email or Slacks. You probably need to make something, hopefully, at your business.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Unless you're just making fraud, in which case, call me. I would love to do an episode of Decoder with you. But, you know, you've got to take something in. You've got to put something out, right? Most businesses operate on this principle.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
So you need some software that helps you make the thing that you're making, whether that is the software that's running your 3D printer or, for us, it's the software that makes the website. If you work at a legal practice, it might be Microsoft Word. Some software where you're productive, where you're making something. And then there's just the, I'm operating my business piece of it. Right.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Which is usually Microsoft Excel, right? Like you've got your, I'm doing my financial modeling. I've. HR software, I'm tracking my employees, I'm running my payroll. All that is another set of software. There's a few ways to think about just buying that stuff, right? You can buy a big bundle from some enterprise provider or not.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
We have a lot of CEOs come on the show and the CEO of MailChimp was like, what I do is I sell you the software to email your customers. And then I sell you the entire back office solution that runs your website and your billing and everything else as well. That's a CEO of Squarespace said that to us. CEO of Wix said that to us.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They want to set up the website for the yoga studio and then run the entire yoga studio's business so the yoga people can teach the yoga. That's one big bundle of software you can buy. Or you can piece together all of the best in class competitors, the ones that work best for you from all the independent providers and hope they work together. Which approach is winning right now do you think?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That's everything from the big familiar bundles like Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workplace all the way down to familiar single tools like Slack. But as you'll hear David explain, we're starting to see scores of new apps crop up to handle very specific use cases built around clever metaphors and interesting new interfaces that try and rewire our brains to make us work differently.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Disney is now back in the office four days a week. But some CEOs don't buy it, and they are equally candid about it. Earlier this year, I chatted with Zoom CEO Eric Heon. Zoom was obviously one of the big winners in the shift to remote during the pandemic. This business basically exploded overnight from 10 million users at the end of 2019 to more than 300 million just four months later.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But Zoom, as a company, eventually went hybrid too. Here's what Eric had to say about return to office and how companies should focus instead on fostering connection among employees with off-sites and other team-building exercises, which echoes a lot of what I heard from Stefan and Jessica.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
One conversation I've been thinking about a lot in this context is the one I had in 2020 with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, right as the pandemic was in full swing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
At the time, Google was fully remote, and Sundar made a similar argument about creative work, like brainstorming, and how important it might be for Google to reconsider its approach to remote down the line, when the roadmaps were less clear.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
This is how The Verge runs, and I quite like it. But it's not perfect. Like so many people who work in a hybrid environment, there are days where I go into a mostly empty office and then sit on a video call. And then there are days where I realize I'm the only one at home because everyone else has gone into the office.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Here in 2024, it seems like Google is thinking about that dynamic more than ever. According to a report from Business Insider, when employees asked about the Amazon return to office mandate at a recent all-hands meeting, Google's VP of Global Compensation and Benefits, John Casey, said hybrid wasn't going anywhere for now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
And Sundar himself chimed in to remind employees to be productive on the days they were working from home. The implication, of course, is that Google has the power to take away hybrid and remote flexibility if it wants to. All right, so that's what some big tech and media executives are saying about remote versus hybrid versus in-office work. But can we trust them?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Is what they're saying really true? Here's Stefan and Jessica on whether it's actually the case that we're more creative or productive in person.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Figuring out how to make hybrid work is a long-term cultural project that we only really started in 2020. And while there are some obvious benefits, it's not clear if anyone's really cracked it in a way that scales across different kinds of companies. And now some companies have decided that the effort just isn't worth it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Jessica makes a really important point there. A lot of the tension in the remote versus in-office debate comes from a lack of managerial effort and coordination. Companies just aren't trying hard enough to figure out whether there's a better approach to hybrid that doesn't result in people sitting alone in the office on Zoom calls.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Instead, as Stefan told me, we need to really start thinking both about the type of work we're doing and the context in which that work is done.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other props. Today we're talking about work, specifically where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they're on the verge of changing yet again.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
In September, Amazon mandated that all employees have to return to the office for five days a week starting in January.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
There's still one really big question that's been looming over this whole discussion. One we hinted at right at the beginning. Layoffs. Are these return to office mandates really about headcount reduction? To hear Jessica tell it, the answer is yes, at least partially. But companies will never say that out loud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
And while it may not be the primary reason these companies are requiring employees to come back in, it is certainly a beneficial side effect if you're a company that's looking to cut costs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
In the memo announcing the change, CEO Andy Jassy argued that the company had observed that it's easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture, that collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective, and that teams tend to be better connected to one another when everyone was in the office. And Amazon isn't alone wanting employees back at their desks.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
So where does that put Amazon? As I mentioned at the top of the episode, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had a response to claims from employees that his company's return to office mandate was a, quote, backdoor layoff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
According to CNBC, Jassy told Amazon employees at an all-hands meeting that it was simply not true that the company wanted to reduce headcount or that it had made any deals with city governments to help boost local economies by bringing workers back into offices. Instead, Jassy said, quote, this was not a cost play for us. This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
That echoes what Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said at a separate all-hands meeting last month. CNBC also reported that at that time, Garman said, quote, we want to be in an environment where we are working together and we feel that collaborative environment is incredibly important for our innovation and our culture.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Garmin claimed that 9 out of 10 employees were excited about the return to work, and that one key part of office culture that he was trying to revive was the ability to disagree and debate. In a pretty funny quote for anyone who has ever had to use Amazon's internal video conferencing tool, Garmin said, quote, I don't know if you guys have tried to disagree via a chime call. It's very hard.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We're back with Professor Stephen Meyer and workplace culture expert Jessica Krieger, discussing why companies want people back in the office and what's next for hybrid and remote work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Before the break, you heard Jessica say that some companies are indeed looking at headcount reduction as one of the many reasons to push employees back into the office, and that there's still just a lot of frustration and poor management leading companies to think they need to pull back from hybrid and remote work. So how is this going to play out?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
I often look at this debate and get frustrated by the extremes. It's either people telling me that full remote is the future, or it's companies like Amazon and others saying you have to come in five days a week. The choice is always presented as a binary.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Companies like Disney and Salesforce have made similar arguments in pushing for employees to come back to the office for at least four days a week. Apple has been steadily pressuring people to come back to the office for a while now. That beautiful spaceship office in Cupertino wasn't built to stay empty.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But Stefan thinks that ultimately hybrid is the way to go, even if it leads to some painful tradeoffs, like having to make tough decisions about when and for how long to bring employees together for offsites. Stefan thinks most companies will choose hybrid to get access to a larger, more distributed pool of talent.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
One of the big promises of being fully remote is that you have access to a larger talent pool. You can hire people wherever they are, across the country, maybe even across the world, and they can all come work for you. And that's now every company is globally competitive in a way that was really hard to be before.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But if you're talking about hybrid and you're talking about coming in two or three days a week and being flexible and having these moments where you can just pull people in because you need them, everyone still has to be in a range, right? You have to be somewhat available, if not completely available.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Is that pushing back against this notion that we'll just have a totally distributed workforce and pull talent from all these sort of non-traditional tech cities?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But is the return to office really about building company culture and being more creative and productive? I have to tell you, there's a huge chunk of the Verge and Decoder audience that is absolutely convinced that any return to office announcement is actually just a layoff in disguise. We get emails and comments making this case every time one of these moves is announced.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Those trade-offs are why Jessica ultimately disagrees.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
What does seem very clear to me, and what I heard from both Jessica and Stefan, is that the idea that we can just turn back the clock to before the pandemic and do what we did before because it was easier, that's not going to happen. The world is a different place now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Before the pandemic, remote work was treated either as a luxury or something only a small handful of companies or startups could successfully pull off. But after 2020, we all saw that it worked. And as you'll hear both Stefan and Jessica say, this isn't just a new way of doing things. This is an entirely new reality, one that can't just be undone.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Jassy even addressed this directly just a few days ago in an All Hands meeting. Responding to claims that the return to work mandate is a, quote, backdoor layoff, he told employees that that is simply not true. We'll come back to that later on. So I wanted to know what's going on and what the real reasons behind return to office might be. And honestly, where this is all going next.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
So where does that leave Amazon? Jessica says she thinks of any of the companies that are requiring people to come back to the office, Amazon is the one that will move the needle the most. But in what direction, we're going to have to wait and see. She also says that Amazon is the kind of company that, when it really comes down to it, will adapt to whatever situation best suits the business.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
I'd like to thank Stefan and Jessica for joining me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have thoughts about this episode, and I'm sure you do, you can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads. I'm at Reckless1280. We also have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Virgin, 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
To explain it, I caught up with two experts on the subject, Stephen Meyer, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School, and Jessica Kriegel, the chief strategy officer at workplace culture consultancy, Culture Partners. We dove into what's been happening to the nature of work today, and you'll hear both of them lay out some of the key reasons behind the return to office push.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We also tried to figure out if Amazon is just an outlier, or, as you'll hear Jessica say, the tip of the spear in what could be something much bigger. Okay, return to office and what it's really all about. Here we go. Let's start by zooming out for a bit. The pandemic dramatically changed office culture in the beginning of 2020. We put our laptops in the stack of books.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We bought the Logitech webcam, or at least we tried to buy a Logitech webcam, and we adjusted. It was hard. It was not even really that long ago. Here at The Verge, we went full remote. And apart from a few of us that sometimes go into our New York office, we haven't really gone back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But fast forward a few years after the pandemic lockdowns lifted, and a lot of companies were really yearning for a return to normal. In quick succession, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all announced that employees had to stop moving around, settle in a big city with a local office, and be at their desks for something like three days a week, with a lot of flexibility and exceptions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
And all along, Amazon has been moving towards a full return to office. The company had a flexible policy it put in place in 2021, where managers could mostly decide how and under what circumstances teams could work remotely. But in 2023, the company went hybrid, requiring people to come in three days a week. And now in 2024, Amazon is back at five days a week in the office.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
For many people, the pendulum has swung wildly between working fully remote and now a push to return to office from their bosses. And there are a lot of theories about what might be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But how has all of this played out across the workforce? Both Stephan and Jessica told me that remote work, which made up about 5% of how U.S. employees spent their work days before the pandemic, jumped to nearly 70% in 2020. Since that peak, however, it has been dropping fast, and it's plateaued now that hybrid has become the norm. Here's Jessica.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
When I talked to Stefan, he was also pretty unconvinced that this is going to pan out well for employers. And he agreed that Amazon's mandate does seem to be a major volley in something he's calling the war for the return to office.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But why do we have to go back to the office? That question, it turns out, is pretty complicated. Because there are the stated reasons, what a company will put in a press release, and there are what you might call the implicit reasons, the kind of conventional wisdom we all think is true. Those overlap quite a bit in sometimes pretty obvious ways. We've heard them before.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Here on Decoder, I've talked to lots of CEOs about the benefits of working fully remote versus hybrid or having everyone back in the office over the past several years. And I've heard the full spectrum of responses. Some executives are adamant that people need to be in the office and others are equally adamant that fully remote is the way to go.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
All right. So those are the sanitized reasons. The things that go into press releases, the big companies and bosses will put their names on. But according to both Jessica and Stefan, while the productivity and culture angles are good enough excuses, return to office mandates are often about something few, if any, employers would ever really say out loud. Control.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We'll play some of those answers for you in this episode so you can get a sense of the enormous range of opinions here. If you look at the surveys, it's basically 50-50. Quite a lot of people want to work remotely, and they can be pretty loud online. But there are a lot of people, who are often quieter, who want to go back to the office for pretty good reasons.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
So what companies are actually leading the charge here? Amazon is the obvious one, of course. It's one of the biggest employers in the country, and it has a huge workforce of fulfillment and delivery workers who have been back at work in warehouses and delivery vans for years now. They simply can't do their jobs from home.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But according to Jessica, it's more about leverage, whether a company believes there are enough people out there that want to work there more than they prioritize the flexibility of being remote.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Now, some of this can feel like it's limited to the tech industry or a specific set of what you might call laptop jobs. There are tons of people out there who simply have no choice but to be at work in retail and restaurants and entertainment. And a lot of people with white collar jobs who've been back in the office since well before hybrid was a thing. Doctors have to be in the office after all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
And big law firms and companies in the finance industry long ago told their teams they get paid a lot of money and they need to be in the office five days a week because that's how it was going to be.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
But tech companies are locked into ferocious battles for talented people who can pick up and leave at a moment's notice to go work down the street for someone else for just as much, if not more, money.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Some folks just don't have the space to work at home, or they're simply tired of making video calls in sweatpants all day and never really leaving the house. I know some people who really like being able to just leave work at the office when they head home from the day.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
We're back with Professor Stephen Meyer and workplace culture expert Jessica Krieger discussing return to office mandates. Before the break, you heard a few of the stated reasons why some big companies are pushing so hard to bring people back to the office. It's about productivity, it's about preserving culture, and it's probably also quite a bit about control.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
And I've heard all of this when talking to CEOs on Decoder. A lot of them seem to agree that flexibility around remote work was key for the first couple of years of the pandemic, and while adjusting was difficult, it was doable. We made it work. But some execs just don't think it's a great long-term strategy, not for their business and not for their culture.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
For example, we recently had Duolingo CEO Luis Van On on the show, and he explained that Duolingo, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, has workers back at the office three days a week, without exceptions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
And I've heard from a lot of younger people who are struggling to get face time with the more senior and experienced people at their companies in order to build relationships and grow their networks. The messy middle of all this is what quite a few companies have settled on. Hybrid work. Which allows some people to be in the office while others work remotely. This can work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
That line about creative work is something we've heard from other big names in the industry. Disney CEO Bob Iger used it last year when he said, "...in a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together, nor the opportunity to grow professionally by learning from leaders and mentors."
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Welcome back. I'm talking with the Internet Archive's Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, about the actual structure of it all. Inside of the Internet Archive, how is the Wayback Machine structured? Is that just the front-facing service? Is that also the digitization of the Internet? How does that work?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
That's more than a third of the collected media, knowledge, and online culture from just a decade ago gone. Pew calls it digital decay, but for decades, many of us have simply called this phenomenon link rot. And lately, link rot has meant a bunch of really meaningful journalism has gone away as well, as various news outlets have failed to make it through the platform era.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
That's just a lot of storage and a lot of ongoing storage because you're not just taking the changes, right? You're storing the history. I actually have gone to go look at our old designs on the Verge on the Wayback Machine because it's the easiest way for me to just go remember what the site looked like 10 years ago. So you've got the long history. So you're adding storage every day.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Do you just buy hard drives every day? Are you a new egg?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Are you buying platters? Are you buying SSDs?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
So 60 terabytes a day, let's say, 20 terabytes spinning disk hard drives, that's three a day, if my math is correct. Oh, it's more than that. Yeah, it's more than that because- I'm just envisioning somebody going to plug in between three and five hard drives a day and then- More than that because we at least double everything up because- Sure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
So I have a SimCity map in my head where you're just an ever-expanding physical footprint. Is there an outer limit? Are you going to take over a city? Is there a desert mountain cave? How does this work?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
The list is virtually endless. Sites like MTV News, Gawker, Twice, Protocol, The Messenger, and most recently Game Informer are all just gone. Some of these were short-lived, but some were outlets that were live for literal decades, and their entire archives vanished overnight. But it's not all grim.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
We're talking about preserving a very digital, somewhat ephemeral medium on the internet. The actual process of it is extraordinarily physical. You just have to take up space. run wires and have power and all that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
How is this all funded? How much does it cost to run and where does the money come from?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
And is that mix changing over time? As I think about the broader piece of link rot and the ever-expanding nature of the problem, it seems like that funding mix might have to change over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
For nearly as long as we've had a consumer internet, we've had the Internet Archive, a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. It was founded in 1996, and in 2001 it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
So it seems like money is not the biggest challenge with Wayback Machine, and that's a good place to be. But then what are the challenges?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
We've been talking about it with the web, right? The Wayback Machine is centered on the web. There's reasons that websites have gone out of favor. MTV News is a great example. They just couldn't make money running MTV News on the web. It just wasn't happening for them. They shut it down. That's more or less the case for media on the web, probably.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
That's why so many news websites are going out of business. That's why local news on the web is going out of business. That's not the case for video platforms.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
right if you're an independent creator and you're on youtube maybe you're making a lot of money maybe you're a tick tocker making a lot of money you're inside of that ecosystem and that's where the money and that's where the advertising is going none of that has the same ideals or norms of the web right which is that it is available which is what so much of the internet has been built on is the norms and ideals of the web that availability is the key
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
There's three, four million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. I'm assuming TikTok and the others all have similar amounts. It's a massive amount of information. Are you collecting that as well?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
I wanted to know more about how this all works, so I asked Mark Graham, director of The Wayback Machine, to join me on the show this week to explain both how and why the organization tries to keep the web from disappearing. The answers are fascinating. You'll hear Mark explain how many hard drives the Internet Archive adds to its system every single day.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
What I'm getting at is this is all pretty based in the web, right? If you capture a web page and it has a YouTube video on it, maybe you'll capture the YouTube video too. But there's a growing body of information that lives on more closed platforms, even if they are exposed to the web. Like Instagram is exposed to the web, but it's not the web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Does the shift to people doing more and more of their publishing on closed platforms threaten the nature of what you're doing? If all the information is going from the open web to Discord channels, I'm guessing you're not able to archive all that. And that seems like a big problem for the information landscape.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
And then there's the choices that go into preservation. Not necessarily everything on the Internet merits preserving, and not everything is technically accessible. especially now as more of the online world moves to private platforms. Making those choices, not just preserving the internet, but curating it, is a complicated proposition that hits on basically every decoder theme there is.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
We have to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Welcome back. I'm talking with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, about the challenges of preserving the internet when everything is not only ephemeral, but also more and more closed off. Mark just mentioned the concept of the public web, meaning anything you can get to without an ID and a password. And that brings us to a new challenge for preservation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Up until a year or so ago, maybe two, the idea that the Wayback Machine would just cycle through the internet to read and preserve websites was more or less seen as a universal good. But now there's a new crop of players scraping websites, and it's a lot more contentious. All the generative AI companies are scraping the entire web and using it to train their LLMs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
And that has made a lot of people very upset and very litigious. We've had some of them on the show. The New York Times and a bunch of artists and organizations have filed plenty of lawsuits over this practice.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
That's made a lot of people suddenly aware of something called robots.txt, the file which dictates which web pages third-party crawlers and other automated tools are allowed to visit on a website. Lots of websites are now making changes to block these scrapers, and it's called into question one of the oldest and most widely used practices on the open web, one that's vital for preservation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
The idea of running a library that stores the internet's history? That's a puzzle worth solving. One quick note before we start. The Internet Archive just lost an appeal on a lawsuit over a short-lived book lending initiative it launched at the start of the pandemic.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Has that affected your work at the Internet Archive?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
What's interesting about that is Reddit's kind of an old company. It's like an old web company, and there's a bunch of web people there who understand what the Internet Archive is and why it's valuable, and they probably use it. And then you've got a bunch of new companies who might have new leaders who don't understand the ideals of the web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
And then you've got the AI companies who I think a lot of people woke up last year and said, there's something called robots.txt, and it It should maybe pay us money. And now everyone's confused, right? Is that meaningfully changed what you do, that the idea that this should be a set of business agreements or a set of legal agreements? But do you get to just run around saying you're a library?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
We don't get into the details of that in this episode because we recorded before the court issued its decision, but I did want to mention the news. We'll link to a couple of Verge stories about it in the show notes. Okay, the Wayback Machine and internet preservation. Here we go. Mark Graham, you are the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Much more directly, my question is, a bunch of companies took advantage of the open web to build AI models, and now the rest of the open web might get ornerier or more closed down even. Is that making your job harder?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Let's talk about some solutions for all of these changes kind of broadly. I'm thinking about just the amount of culture that is uploaded to TikTok every day. It is where the culture is happening right now. That is the most ephemeral of all. It doesn't even feel searchable in a real way. It comes, it goes. Obviously, the algorithm creates an infinite array of filter bubbles for people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Is it even possible to capture all of that or organize it or make it understandable? Because I'm thinking about historians 20 years from now trying to understand a meme today, and I have no idea how they're going to do it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
When you think about all of those opportunities, you're going to have to prioritize somehow, right? Six hard drives a day, or you can go to 12 hard drives a day. How do you make those kinds of prioritization decisions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Preservation is a high, noble goal. I work in the media. It's fine for you to preserve everything that we make. Some people want stuff deleted. How do you balance preservation and privacy?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
You've made some content moderation decisions along the way as well. Two years ago, you removed Kiwi Farms for sort of a notorious forum for people who don't behave very well. How do you make that kind of decision?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Really glad to be here today. Quickly for the audience, explain what the Wayback Machine is and how it fits into the Internet Archive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Obviously, there's a lot of systems at play here. You sometimes partner with organizations. Entire websites also come and go with the whim of corporations beyond most people's control. But there is a personal element. How should individuals think about all of this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Sounds good. Thank you so much, Mark. I really appreciate it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Thanks again to Mark Graham for joining me on the show, and thanks again to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. We depend on their work all the time here at The Verge. If you have thoughts about this episode or what you'd like to hear more of, you can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads. I'm at reckless1280.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
We also have a TikTok, which you should check out. While there's a TikTok, it's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe or read your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
The Internet Archive is the organization, the Wayback Machine is the service. How do those two things relate? What are the other things the Internet Archive does?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
You're talking a lot about URLs that is inherently web-focused. I think a lot about the web. I run a web-based business. Watching the web change, especially with things like Google search changing, AI changing the web in different ways. You obviously have the longest view, right? You have the widest view of the web as it's changed. Do you see an acceleration of the web's decline?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Do you see the web changing in any significant way that other people might be missing? What do you think is happening right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Well, I'm hoping that you're going to say things are getting better. I'm worried you're going to- No, they're getting worse.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
The most optimistic take of all is they're getting different. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We've been talking a lot about the future of the web on Decoder and across The Verge lately. And one big problem keeps coming up. Huge chunks of it keep going offline. In a lot of meaningful ways, large portions of the web are just dying.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
I feel like every person who's ever worked in product at a media company is experiencing second order body horror right now because of what you're describing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
We've spoken about why internet preservation is necessary. We have to take a quick break, but when we come back, Mark's going to get into how the Wayback Machine works. We'll be back in just a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot
Servers go offline, software upgrades break links and pages, companies go out of business. The web isn't static, and that means sometimes parts of it simply vanish. And it's not just the really old internet from the 90s or early 2000s that's at risk. A recent study from Pew found that 38% of all links from 2013 are no longer accessible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
The studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch is more than 30 years old, and it's achieved a kind of legendary status. At the same time, Blizzard has become emblematic of many of the video game industry's worst tendencies. From shareholder pressures to prioritized monetization over creativity, to the deep sexism that still pervades so much of gaming today.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
We're back with Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier talking about his book Play Nice and the evolution of the gaming giant Blizzard. Before the break, we covered Blizzard's beginnings in the 90s and how its work culture was deeply rooted in the sexist boys club atmosphere of the game industry at the time. That, in turn, promoted a pretty poor work-life balance dominated by excessive crunch.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
It also ensured the only people who ever got promoted to positions of leadership were men in their 20s, who hung out, ate, and even slept in the office at virtually all hours of the day. These issues would prove very difficult to fix, and they would only continue to fester as Blizzard became larger and more diverse. We'll get to that in a little bit.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Jason and I also talked about Blizzard's ill-fated ownership saga, as the company had to survive under a series of increasingly bizarre M&A deals with businesses that had almost nothing to do with making art. As you're about to hear Jason explain, those early years of Blizzard, when it was owned by the makers of Math Blaster, were a blessing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
And perhaps the only and last time in the history of the company where it wasn't constantly under pressure to compromise on its creative ideals to make a set of new owners more money. So Activision shows up. Why sell to Activision?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Jason's book is out on October 8th, and it is an incredible, detailed accounting of how Blizzard started, grew into one of the most beloved and most controversial companies in the world of video games, and then eventually became a victim of its own mismanagement.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Oh, and there are a series of chaotic, deeply culture-clashing acquisitions along the way, culminating with Microsoft closing its deal to buy a combined company known as Activision Blizzard last year in the biggest acquisition in Microsoft's history. As you'll hear Jason say, the story of Blizzard really revolves around two central themes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
One is the inherent tension that exists between art and commerce, particularly commerce at scale. Blizzard's journey from small startup in California to subsidiary of Microsoft with thousands of employees? Well, that's been about as close to M&A hell as you can imagine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
So there's this culture clash between Activision and Blizzard. It seems like Activision sort of wins. Along the way, they buy King, which makes Candy Crush. Once you have that diversification, shouldn't the pressure come down? Like literally Candy Crush whales exist. That is the biggest piece of Apple services revenue outside of the Google search deal is
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Shouldn't that bring down the temperature and say, okay, you can make some art?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
So you've got this company that's at war with itself that goes on for quite some time. And then the culture issues come to a real head, right? In 2021, state of California sues Activision Blizzard. They alleged a culture of, quote, constant sexual harassment. Everyone's lawyers will remind you that that case was eventually dismissed in large chunks and modified. It was settled.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
In particular, Jason goes into detail about how merging with Activision, the company behind Call of Duty, set Blizzard on a collision course that would rob it of so much of the creative agency that allowed it to flourish in the 90s.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
It was settled for $55 million. It was settled for $55 million. The Wall Street Journal had an article saying that Bobby Kotick knew what was going on. He would tell you that he did not and that reporting was misplaced. There were petitions to have executives changed. And then Microsoft basically swoops into this mess. Right. All that stuff is happening in 2021, late 2021, early 2022.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Microsoft is like, we're just going to buy this and fix it. All the reporting at the time made it seem like they saw this huge, important game publisher in turmoil. And they're like, oh, this is our in. Is that basically what happened?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
The other big theme is how industries and intensely insular fandoms, like gaming, often have deeply problematic workplace cultures that take root from the very beginning and refuse to let go. That makes these companies almost impossible to change without industry shaking upheaval.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Also, this is like middle pandemic, everyone's inside. And for whatever reason, the American business leaders decided no one would ever go back outside. Right. So we're spending a lot of money on inside stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
We're going to come to that. At the time, Phil Spencer was on the show, and he basically made the case that they wanted to buy King. Because all the regulators were looking at Call of Duty, and are you going to make Call of Duty exclusive to the Xbox? Microsoft was like, no. And Phil, pretty loudly, was like, we need the Candy Crush money. That's what I want. We have no presence in mobile.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
We've already lost this generation. We don't know what's going to happen in the next one. We need a presence in mobile. I'm buying King. Did that ever hold water with you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
The reason I ask that question is Microsoft felt for a minute like it was going to make a big bet on game streaming, a cloud service for games. It would show up on TVs, on phones, whatever. They ran into whatever Apple App Store problems they ran into. We'll see how those regulatory fights play out. But that bet seems to have diminished significantly.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
The state of California filed a massive sexism and discrimination lawsuit against Activision Blizzard in 2021, a moment that would change the course of the company and precipitate its sale to Microsoft the next year. Activision Blizzard in California settled that suit in 2023, shortly after the Microsoft deal closed. There's a lot going on here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
And so now owning all the big studios for the big bet on how distribution will change seems like you're just holding the bag on a bunch of big studios and the second place console. Do you think that bet's going to pay off? Do you think they walked away from it? Are they just biding their time?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
One dart that is constantly getting thrown at the board is layoffs, right? The way that they're making the revenue pay for itself is by making sure the costs are increasingly low. Even as we're talking, there's Warnack notices being filed earlier this week. It's like 400 more people across three Activision Blizzard offices are going to be laid off.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Is that going to slow down as this industry reached the end of this layoff cycle or are we going to see more of them?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
As you'll hear Jason say, the story of Blizzard is a quintessential tale about the perils of capitalism. about what growth and scale will do to a business, especially those in the business of making art, and the compromises that have to be made along the way to keep all that money flowing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
It's also a cautionary tale about a fundamentally creative industry that has, at many times in its history, utterly failed to make room for more diverse voices, creating a ticking time bomb at the heart of even the most beloved institutions. Jason Schreier, you are an investigative journalist who covers the video game industry for Bloomberg.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
We're back with Bloomberg journalist and PlayNice author Jason Schreier discussing the circumstances under which Blizzard became a division of Microsoft after nearly three decades of shuffling corporate ownership. We just talked about how a major instigating factor for the game industry's biggest ever acquisition was Activision Blizzard's toxic culture.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
That included years of alleged sexism, discrimination, and harassment inside of Blizzard itself. So that's something I wanted to talk to Jason about. Has Activision Blizzard fixed any of these issues since that big California lawsuit? Has Microsoft? And how far might the industry at large still have to go? Have they solved the culture problems, the sexism problems? Have they cleaned that up?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
One of the things that I think about a lot when it comes to games and game companies is the tension between we are a bunch of artists who make culture. The culture impacts people. It makes people feel feelings. It's art. We're going to act like artists and rock stars. Oh, by the way, this is also a software company. And these things, these projects take six years, seven years.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
You have a book out next week called Plain Ice, The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Taylor Swift is a billion-dollar corporation, but she gets to make all the decisions. But that's not the case for a company like Blizzard or Activision. It feels like the video game industry has just been reckoning with that tension for a long time. Blizzard is sort of a paradigmatic example of that tension. Has that changed? Have we built systems to deal with it yet?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Because it doesn't seem like anyone's figured it out. But I'm curious from your perspective.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
I am very excited to talk to you. I don't know if you've caught this, but in our coverage of whatever is going on with Activision, Blizzard, and Microsoft, it feels like Microsoft accidentally caught not the right prize. They worked very hard to make a mistake. That is my feeling. And it's exciting to talk to you because your book is just incredible detailed explanation of this problem.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
This criticism of the games industry is a long one. It has been around for a while. It has been loud for a while. The industry has reacted in different ways. Gamers, for whatever it's worth, have reacted in different ways at different times. Have things changed? Are we making new companies that have learned lessons? Or are we still making companies in the mold of Blizzard?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
There's Microsoft's corporate culture. There's Activision's corporate culture. There's Blizzard's corporate culture. There's the mashup of all of them. There's a desire to improve. There's the employees wanting it to improve. What to make of this at the end of this all?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Is there still a Blizzard?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
giant merger company that just got an even bigger merger, and the culture class within it, it's perfect. It doesn't seem a year into it like anyone has had a good time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
So let's end where we started. Microsoft bought this thing, this chaos ball. Why? What was it for?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
I mean, that is the through line of the book, I have to say, is Blizzard gets sold.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Speaking of which, the book is Play Nice, The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. Jason, it's a great book. Thank you so much for joining the show.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
I'd like to thank Jason Schreier for taking time to join me on Decoder today, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. His new book, Play Nice, The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment is out on October 8th. If you are at all interested in games or giant companies buying each other, you should pick it up.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
It is the definitive account of the wild history of Blizzard, and it really just tells a fascinating story about the modern video game industry. You'll learn a lot. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else about Decoder, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Or you can hit me up directly on threads. I'm at reckless1280. We also have a TikTok account for as long as there is TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you can help me out, leave us some five-star reviews in those podcast apps. It's been a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Decoder is a production of Urge 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 Sound. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
I want to come back to Microsoft and what happens now and the rationale for that big acquisition and whether that has played out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
But it just occurred to me as I was reading the book that it's hard to talk about all of that unless you actually take the time to understand what Blizzard was, its culture, what you just mentioned, its big fight with Activision's culture after those companies merged, and then how that whole – ball of chaos rolled itself into Microsoft.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
So let's start with Blizzard, which is now a division of Microsoft, never shrinking division of Microsoft, but it used to be a behemoth. How did this company start?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
One of the tensions that is just very clear, even from that description, but fleshed out in the you have a bunch of nerds who are just excited to make games. You have a bunch of creatives and they are seemingly uninterested in what it means to run a good company. So then they just bring in some people or they sell themselves to someone else who will be interested in that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
And then there's a culture war, right? Like you should make great product on schedule. We should make fun products that we want to make. You should make sequels, all this stuff. And that is kind of just expressed in these early years through crunch, right? From 94 to 2000, it's Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo 2. And your book, you have all kinds of reporting.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
This is just excessive crunch. They are just working all the time, and it's their company, so it's fine. But this stays – the culture. My reading of it is like, they're just a bunch of kids who want to have fun making video games. And so they work themselves to death. And then the suits are like, oh, this is how it should work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
This is the thing that I'm focused on is it feels like you start a company. It's a bunch of people who want to work together. Your first hundred or your first thousand employees, that's their whole lives. And then you build a culture around working 24-7 with your friends. And that thing is inherently unscalable. Your next hundred or your next thousand employees might have their own lives.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
And so then demanding that they work as hard as that initial wave of people who chose this life leads just sort of inexorably to weird labor issues and weird culture issues. Is that your read on Blizzard?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
You have a lot of hints about this in sort of the early chapters of the book. There's stories about looking at porn in the office and it being a boys club and basically men being men in an office unchecked by the cultural norms.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
In the 90s. It was not a great time. Is that all just the – this is the 90s and this is what it was like? Is this something specific to Blizzard in that moment? Is it a combination of the two?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg journalist and author of the new book, The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. If you don't know Blizzard, you know it's games.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Matt actually spent almost two decades at Comcast proper, working on its cable products before switching over to NBCU. And I was really interested in his view on how the economics of the TV business will shake out as almost everyone moves over to streaming. Matt also oversees what's called the Global Streaming Platform, which Peacock and other services at Comcast run on.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And I wanted to know if that big tech investment is generating the kind of economies of scale that really pay off over time. Stuff that tech companies think about all the time, but which media companies have had to learn. And one thing that I really wanted to talk to Matt about was how Peacock handled the Olympics this year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
It really felt like things clicked for that platform and Peacock in Paris over the summer. And the idea that all of the coverage from the Olympics could be served up in multiple different formats on demand and live really came together. It turns out that a lot of these ideas have been brewing inside of NBC for a long time, for a decade or more in some cases.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Welcome back. I'm talking to NBCUniversal's Matt Strauss, who's described live sports as foundational to Peacock since it launched in 2020. Can I just unpack the phrase wholesale economics in a slightly more Machiavellian way? What you're describing is you're going to have the sports that everybody wants.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
So when the bundles go out to market, you will charge a higher rate or take a higher percentage of the rate people pay inside the bundle. This is classically ESPN and the cable companies. ESPN got the highest carriage rate of any of the cable companies, right? This is what you're describing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And you'll hear Matt describe how some early efforts didn't really go so well. There's a lot going on in this one. Tech, media, sports, culture, all at once. It's quite a ride. Our usual disclosure before we start, NBCU is an investor in the Verge's parent company, Vox Media, but they have no control over our newsroom, and I remain free to demand NFL games and 4K HDR whenever I want.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
You described the different segments of the audience, right? There are some people who still have traditional MVPD subscriptions and they're just – they've got a satellite box or a cable box or whatever. And there's other people who are watching TikTok all day. I would segment them differently. I think you've got older customers and younger customers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And the younger customers will almost certainly never sign up for a traditional – multi-channel cable bundle type thing, right? When you think about that split, that has a timeline on it, right? You're going to lose older customers at some rate and hopefully gain younger customers at a faster rate. Are those lines going to sync up on time?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Do you see the growth in the younger customer offsetting the decline in the older customer? Because what's happened lately is, right, when you talk about the decline of pay TV, traditional pay TV, it's getting faster is what everybody tells me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
You're on the hook now, Matt. Okay, Matt Strauss, head of direct-to-consumer at NBCUniversal. Here we go. Matt Strauss, you are the chairman of direct consumer at NBC Universal. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Yeah. Two things. One, I appreciate that you won't name your competitors. Very good. You're talking about Netflix. Two, I could talk to you for the rest of our time about Yellowstone and whether the Dutton family is rich or not, which is deeply confusing as that show goes on. I just want to be clear. They have a helicopter, but then they need to sell the – it's very confusing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
They can't pay for the gas. It's so confusing. It's a great show. One son is just a Call of Duty character. I really could just talk about Yellowstone for the rest of the time. You've talked a lot about being the place where the customer goes every day, opening the app every day, having the relationship. A lot of what you're talking about is being the interface for television.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
But Peacock has to run on devices from Apple and Roku and Google and whoever else on Samsung TVs. All of those companies, they want a piece of your ad sales. They want a piece of your subscription revenue. What are those relationships like? Are they in your way? Are they something that you're just handling? Are they not on your mind?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Let me ask you some of the decoder questions, Zach, because I think we've led up to them pretty directly. NBCUniversal is a big company. You've got a broadcast division. You've got a sports division. These are old, famous groups inside the company. How is your group organized within NBCUniversal?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
That is a very formal title. It sounds like you sit in a leather chair in a boardroom and just sort of issue edicts. What it means to me is that you oversee Peacock. Is that really the scope of it? Well, it's a little bit broader than that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
This is what the coder is all about. I'm ready for it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Does that product team report to you? Is that part of your group?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Yeah. One of the things that's really interesting about what you're describing is you have a core platform and then the platform is expressed through various products, right? Peacock, the Now service, whatever you're doing in Africa. Do you ever find yourself just looking at the Trello board and like litigating people's priorities?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Like the Peacock team wants this feature, but the Now team wants another feature, and the platform has to make a decision about what goes first? Because that, like every tech company looks like that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
A lot of companies that build big, expensive core infrastructure like you're describing, once they've built it, they want to sell it, right? They want to go monetize it, white label it, give it to other people, get some more value out of the investment. Do you have enough scale with your own products and your own partnerships to support the ongoing investment here?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Or would you go white label it to one of your partners?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
You've described the core platform as a shared service a few times. You've described how Peacock went from being inside of an incubator at NBCUniversal to now being part of the broader portfolio. Do you think of what you're doing as the sort of tip of the spear to get new customers, younger customers?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Do you think eventually you'll become the center of gravity instead of a shared service, or is it always just going to be part of the portfolio?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
We need to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Welcome back. I'm talking with NBCUniversal's Matt Strauss about the way Peacock really fits into the global Comcast organization. This leads right into the other decoder question. You're obviously a change agent inside of NBC, right? You're going around to these groups, getting them to participate. when you were on the cable side, I'm assuming you had a different attitude towards making change.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
How do you make decisions now? What's your framework and how has it changed?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And we've got— Are you profitable now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
How do you make decisions inside of that framework?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Wait, can I actually ask you about that real quick? Because I've been very curious about this. That strategy has been tried by some of your larger competitors. Disney notably tried this. Max has tried this in different ways.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And one of the issues there is your studio doesn't get to go to market and say, how much do you want to pay for Twisters in the first window after the pay window and get bids from Netflix and Max and Peacock? Do you have to bid? Do you win? How are those economics accounted for?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
I do like that we keep treating Netflix like Voldemort and we won't say its name. It's very good.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
You are not our first executives who will not name the competitors. We just had Greg on the show. Netflix is a public company. We can look at their economics. They're profitable. They're doing well. We can see also inside of the business, they're investing in essentially cheaper programming, right? Lots of live comedy specials, lots of reality shows.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
They're not doing the big premium dramas the way they used to be doing. You've got the big catalog from NBC, right? Does that give you the ability to say, okay, we're going to make the money again? Friends is long paid for. That is pure margin for Peacock. We're going to invest in paying more for Universal's catalog because that'll keep people here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Yeah. Let's talk about sports and the Olympics and the NFL a little bit just to wrap up. The Olympics were a big hit on Peacock. The app was ready. The features were incredible. I'm curious. There was a lot of stuff going on in Peacock. You had the Gold Zone. You had live highlights. There was an AI Al Michaels situation. There were replays. There were multiple channels.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
How did you integrate the product and programming teams there? Was that a single team? Did the Olympics team from NBC come and say, we're going to do the Gold Zone, get it ready? How did that work?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
You had a big influx of subscribers for the Olympics. How many have you retained? We've talked about this a lot. Have you held on to a lot of those subscribers?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Sports rights are getting more and more expensive over time. Producing the Olympics, obviously not cheap. NBC can do all this because it can monetize that in several different ways, right? You have broadcast, which is lucrative. You've got cable, which is still lucrative. And now you have Peacock.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Will Peacock ever get to a place where it can support one of these large sports rights deals all by itself?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
All right. You've walked into my trap by talking about the product and talking about sports. What do I have to do to get a true 4K NFL game on Peacock? I will pay you directly.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Just say yes. In your heart, just say yes. You know you want to.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
I talked to Neil at YouTube, like, what's keeping you? And he's like, millions of partnerships and broadcasters. NBC owns the whole chain. You've got the broadcast booth, you've got the production, you've got the rights directly, you've got the platform. What's stopping you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
But I'm your partner, and I want you to know that I want 4K.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
This is the thing that I worry about, is that people pick convenience over quality all the time. And the demand for 4K or high bitrate, it just isn't there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
All right, Matt, this has been great. You got to come back when you have 4K football because that's the only thing I wanted. I did this whole conversation. I waited until the end. I want to point that out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
I'd like to thank Matt Strauss for taking time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads. I'm at reckless1280. We also have a TikTok. Check it out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Well, you're on Decoder, so I'm absolutely going to ask you about how all of that is structured and how all of those individual P&Ls fight for resources. But I want to just take one step back and focus on the transition you mentioned from Comcast to NBC to Direct-to-Consumer.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Broadly, in the TV world, we're going from a place where big cable companies like Comcast or Spectrum or whatever had big regional physical infrastructure monopolies, right? You had these natural monopolies because you had wires in the ground going to everyone's houses. You were the distributor. The video providers would come to you and you would resell those services.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And that was a pretty good business for everyone, right? Now we're at a place where there's multiple ways to get programming over the internet, whether it's wireless, whether it's fiber in the ground, whether it's still the cable network, whether it's other forms of broadband with Starlink.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And the distributors don't have as much power over the suppliers because the suppliers can get to consumers in lots of different ways. That's the transition that you're mentioning, and it has really disrupted the whole industry. How do you see Peacock fitting into this at the end? Is it going to be as good of a business as the cable business was once upon a time?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Because it feels like everyone is searching for a business that good.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Matt Strauss, who is chairman of Direct-to-Consumer at NBCUniversal. That's a fancy title. It means he's in charge of Peacock and all of NBCUniversal's other consumer products.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Yeah. The last time I was a Comcast customer was 15 years ago. I lived in Chicago, and everyone I knew was a Comcast customer. That was the choice in my building and most of the neighborhoods that my friends lived in. And then we all also got internet from Comcast because of what you're describing, the bundle. There was not another thing. It was just the easiest next thing to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
When you describe direct to consumer, that's another distribution method, right? You're going literally directly to the consumer and charging them money and then giving them services directly and you manage the customer relationship.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Is that the part that's going to grow versus the experience I had when I was a Comcast customer and I would watch NBC5 in Chicago, but Comcast owned the relationship with me?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
That includes everything from Fandango and its Fandango at Home video service, which used to be Vudu, to Rotten Tomatoes, to the core platforms that powers the Now TV service run by Sky in Europe. That's a lot, and all of that is under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition as the traditional cable TV business fades away.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
Are you seeing the growth in the bundling? And are you able to maintain the customer relationship as the bundles grow? I'm thinking specifically of my customer relationship with your competitor, Max, which is somehow, to this day, still mediated by my AT&T account because I'm an AT&T subscriber. And I don't think they remembered that they spun the company out. So I still have Max through AT&T.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
And it's actually quite confusing, right? Because... I can't adjust that account and whatever, I'm just going to leave it alone. Are you seeing that sort of thing play out as you bundle, as you go out to market, that someone else is owning the customer for you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
One of the reasons I like the frame of it's a platform when I chat with you is I can just come up with ways that I would game any other platform and ask them how you would solve those problems. So how would I game TikTok or how would I game YouTube or how do bad actors use those platforms? And it seems like you have a lot of
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
The reason I brought that up in the context of co-host network is it seems like professionalizing or certifying that class of user on Airbnb goes a long way towards ending some of the gamification that occurs in the platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, who is only the second person to be on Decoder three times. The other is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
It's a rare company, and what made this one particularly good is that Brian and I were together in our New York City studio for the first time. It's pretty easy to hear how much looser and more fun the conversation was because we were in the same room.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
We're back with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky discussing how the similarities and differences between a product like Airbnb and other big social platforms influence the moderation tools and design decisions that go into it. Let me put that right next to the platforms and forgive me, but we're however many days away from the election.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And the thing I see of all of the major social networks right now is they're doing less moderation. Yes. They are less interested in verifying things are true or false or even that people are real people and not AI. Like you just see it all over the place. They've taken their hands off. Airbnb's platform, you're saying we're doing more. We're certifying more things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
When you sign up and you want to rent the room in your house while you're gone on vacation, here's a list of approved co-hosts. Here's experiences we're designing with professional designers. Why the difference? Why is it all the other platforms are letting go and you're grabbing on tighter?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Now, Brian made a lot of waves a couple months ago when he started talking about something called Founder Mode, or at least when well-known investor Paul Graham wrote a blog post about Brian's approach to running Airbnb that gave it that name.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Founder Mode has since become a little bit of a meme that means basically what anyone wants it to mean, and I was excited to have Brian back on the show to talk about it and what specifically he meant. After all, one of the reasons I love talking to Brian is because he spends so much time obsessing over company structure and decision making. Pure decoder bait.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
quite a long history of debate about anonymity. We can set that aside in the context of Airbnb. But it's interesting how the platforms as expressed in Atoms for you and Bits for them result in very different incentives. And the part where you're taking more and more control of the experience because you think that's perfectly aligned with the customer.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
At some point, do you just end up with a front desk? Are you just running the hotel? That's the farthest end of that journey, it seems like.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Yeah, where's the last step of that? Is it just owning the property? Is it taking the booking directly?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
In fact, if you've listened to Brian's previous appearances on Decoder, you've already gotten a pretty good preview of Founder Mode, because Brian radically restructured Airbnb after the pandemic to get away from its previous divisional structure and into a functional organization that all works from a single roadmap and allows him to have input on many more decisions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
This idea that you'll have some set of people who will apply, I just keep coming back to the history of various platforms. YouTube, for a while, had these things called MCNs. They were like big companies, multi-channel networks. And they would buy a bunch of popular YouTube channels. And they wanted to be preferred suppliers to YouTube. And YouTube basically decided this was too big of a risk.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
They didn't want anyone to have that level of control over YouTube. So they basically killed all the MCNs. There's books about it now that you can go read. Do you ever foresee yourself as having that kind of supplier on the Airbnb platform? This is a hosting provider that provides this kind of experience at this level that we can trust to build something out with.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And they're going to own and operate the actual property.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Yeah. I'm interested to see how that plays out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
I'll give you another really dumb example. Like BuzzFeed designed its entire business on being the best at Facebook. And one day Facebook was like, well, we don't need you. An army of teenagers will just make Instagram for us every day. And now BuzzFeed is whatever business it is. And you can see how whatever your tier is, call it the A tier in Nashville.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Someone's like, we're just going to dominate the A tier in Nashville and Airbnb will have to deal with us. Is that an eventuality you've thought about?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
That's really what he's been talking about with Founder Mode, that good leaders need to be in the details. You'll hear him say that very clearly and also express some disappointment in the idea that founder mode is about pure swagger or micromanagement. But leaders being in all the details and helping make all the decisions is not how most companies run.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, I'm very interested to see how co-host network plays out on your fourth time. We'll check in on that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Well, get ready because it's coming.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
So I said I think the founder mode conversation and the decoder questions are just a pure overlap.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
The last time you were on the show, you described re-orging Airbnb. You restructured the company. You went on to this roadmap where you ship twice a year in big deliveries. And you said, I got rid of all of these middle managers. Yes. And I'm the product manager and everyone rolls up to me. And I thought, oh, this is a cheap product officer. Cheap product officer. And I thought, this is great.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
This is what I want out of a decoder conversation. And then a year passes, and you give a talk. And I was like, I've seen that talk before. That's the we don't have PMs. Let the designers. I've heard this from Brian before. And then Paul Graham goes and writes a blog post called Founder Mode. And everyone is reacting to it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Is there something meaningfully different than the way you have structured Airbnb and Founder Mode? Am I missing something? Has something changed in that chronology?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And of course, we went back and forth on how much good leaders should delegate and trust their teams to make independent decisions. If you're a Decoder fan, this is the good stuff. Brian and I really got into it. You'll hear him talk about a wide range of management styles, what they're good for, and why he still considers himself a student of Steve Jobs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
You gave the first version of this talk at a Figma conference.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Actually, Steve Jobs comes up a lot in this one, as does Johnny Ive, whose new company Love From does design work for Airbnb. Don't worry, I asked about that too. On top of all that, we actually started the show by talking about some big Airbnb news.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
The company just launched something called the CoHost Network, which is a directory of experienced Airbnb hosts that can run listings for people who just want to make a little extra money renting out their homes without all the hassle. It's a big change, which effectively creates a new role on Airbnb's platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And it gave me a great opportunity to talk to Brian about some of the authority issues surrounding Airbnb and what it's like to run a platform that has all of the same issues as any other platform like YouTube or TikTok, but which deals in literal physical housing. All of that in an hour, plus even more. There's assessments of Tim Cook and Satya Nadella in here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
We have to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Talking to Brian is a ride, but I think I held my own, and I think you'll really like this one. Okay, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Here we go. Brian Chesky, you're the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Welcome back to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
We're back with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky talking about founder mode, what its origins are inside Airbnb, and how the phrase has helped clarify some of Brian's big thinking on management philosophy. So I think the branding of founder mode has offered you some narrative clarity. It's very clear from the last time we had a very similar kind of conversation. If I had to pull all of that back,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Into what are we really describing here in the sort of decoder framework? I would say what you are describing is fundamentally be a functional organization, not a divisional organization. And that was the big change that you made the last time you were on the show. You've since made other changes, right? You just created this new role in the C-suite chief business officer.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
You promoted your CFO into that role. Walk me through that, right? You're obviously evolving how you're thinking of the company and the roles within the company inside of this framework. How'd you make that decision?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
You're only our second, third time guest.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
The other one is Mark Zuckerberg.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And you are in the studio with me. If your people are listening, we're together, which is amazing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Yeah. Actually, the last time you were on, it was such a good conversation. We were both in New York, and my brain reinterpreted it as we were together because it was a good conversation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
It's funny that you say all this. If you ask my CEO, he will tell you that I scream that we should be divisional all the time because I think tech journalism is different than video game journalism is different than sports is different than New York Magazine. But at the end of the day, we all make one kind of thing, and there's reasons to have central teams, and there's reasons to share costs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Do you ever find yourself thinking, okay, if I was in the other kind of organization, something else would be faster? That there would be another kind of – I would make this tradeoff, but there would be a benefit to being in the more divisional structure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Yeah. But you're here today. It's great. There's a lot to talk about. Airbnb just had its winter release, which a bunch of features we should talk about. I'm actually very curious about how you were thinking about Hosting and professionalizing hosting and what that means for a platform. And then if you're a decoder listener, you got to know I'm going to talk to Brian about founder mode. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
I feel like you're setting aside one topic. I'm just setting aside Elon.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
I want to talk about micromanagement real quick and then I want to end with decisions, which is the other big decoder question that I always like talking to you about. You mentioned that it's toxic. People don't like it. You mentioned that founder mode as a brand means people are just acting like jerks to their companies.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And I actually think it is mostly for worse. I don't think it is for better in most cases. You're obviously outlining a very deep level of management thinking. You've thought about these companies a lot. You've thought about your own company a lot. You've thought about these tradeoffs a lot. Yeah. The general sense that – You should be in the details.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
You should not just hire smart people and let them do whatever they want. I talked to a lot of CEOs in the show and they're like, my secret is that I hire smart people and I let them do whatever they want. I ask a lot of CEOs, how do you make decisions? And I would say one of the most common answers we get is it would be best if I wasn't making so many decisions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
The thesis of our show is basically right up the Venn diagram of decoder and founder mode and what those ideas are basically a circle. And then I just want to talk about Airbnb generally, how the company's going, and you've made some org chart changes of your own. Let's start with the news, the winter release.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
If my team was empowered and all I was doing was breaking the hardest ties or making the biggest, riskiest investment decisions so they weren't feeling that pressure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
The last time you were on, you actually talked about staggering Airbnb's releases on one timeline for the whole company, so you had a summer release, a winter release. What's the big news in the winter release?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Let's talk about decisions, actually. This is the other Carter question you've been on several times. I've asked you how you make decisions several times. I went back and looked. And the one that struck me was the last time you were on. I said, how do you make decisions? You said, let me tell you a long story. And it was about various Airbnb controversies where you had to make big decisions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And you said, really, I'm going to have to make so many decisions that I went to all my team and I said, here are our principles. Trust me to use these principles. And this is how I'm going to make decisions. Is that still the framework that everyone just agrees on the core principles?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Yeah. Does the company know the principles that you use to make decisions? Is that published? Is that a thing that you talk about?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
We got to wrap up, but I need to ask you one very important question. I've been thinking about this entire time. You've mentioned Apple and Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive a bunch of times. I know that Airbnb works closely with Love From, which is Johnny Ive's company. There's a New York Times article. I'm looking at it. It says the clients pay Love From as much as $200 million.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
You're not paying Johnny Ive $200 million a year?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Okay. And the other question I have is you've talked about Apple a lot. They don't have Steve Jobs anymore. They don't have Johnny Ive anymore. They have started a bunch of divisions to do all kinds of other things. Do you think that's sustainable for them?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
You're one of the closest watchers of this company I can think of, and I'm very curious what you think.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Would you do that job?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Fair enough. Brian, it is always a pleasure talking to you. We've got to have you back sooner than a year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
I'd like to thank Brian Chesky for taking the time to join me on Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. And I would like to say thank you to everyone who emailed us about the Intuit episode.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
You can also hit me up directly on threads. I'm at reckless1280. And we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
Yeah. And when I come back to the product development cycle, you all do do it very differently. But I want to stay on the co-host network for one second. That is professionalizing a huge portion of Airbnb. I know some professional hosts who are management companies who do other properties. Yeah. Their point of view is you got to find us.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
We'll market to people who own properties and then we'll put you on every platform. You're going to do all of the discovery of finding a co-host and then negotiate a cut and then handling the splits on your platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
And is that to just bring a more professional class of management companies directly into Airbnb?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on what founder mode really means
One of the reasons I always like talking to you is that Airbnb has all of the challenges of an internet video platform. It's a platform of suppliers and audiences, but then you're managing this very physical thing that seems very challenging to get through.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
We actually talk about Disney all the time on Decoder. You can tell a whole lot about the future of the entertainment industry by watching what Disney is up to, whether it's major management shakeups or streaming strategy pivots. Disney as a company is many things at once, and this season of Land of the Giants takes a deep dive into each of Disney's identities every episode.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
For instance, is Disney a TV company? Is it a theme park's company? Is it an animation company? Is it Bob Iger's company? After all, he stepped down as CEO in 2021, only to return just a year later. The episode we're sharing here is the finale of this season's Land of the Giants, where host Joe Adelian explores perhaps the most important question looming over Disney.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
Can it turn itself into a tech company? It's the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney+. It also tells us where the company needs to go in the future to compete with Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Okay, land of the giants on whether Disney can be a tech company. Here we go.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
Hey everybody, it's Nilay. Decoder is off this week for a short end of summer break. We'll be back with both the interview and explainer episodes after Labor Day. I'm pretty excited about what we have on the schedule. But while we're out, we wanted to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season for a deep dive into Disney.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There are some AI tools built into the desktop Arc browser, but the company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of web pages. That puts it in competition with OpenAI's forthcoming SearchGPT product and Google's new AI overviews in its search results. At the same time, it also puts Arc right in the middle of one of the fiercest debates in tech and media today.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There's a little bit of attention here, right? You described Arc as being an operating system. You obviously want, in some end state, for application vendors to be talking to Arc as an operating system and maybe leveraging some of your capabilities. You talked about end users making their lives better. But you live on another operating system.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
the applications inside Arc or whatever other browser are doing whatever they're going to do. How do you balance that role? It feels like there's only one stakeholder whose experience you can actually improve or adjust, and Apple might just make it much harder for you because you run out of Mac, or Microsoft is going to put Edge pop-ups all over Windows.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Figma is going to strike a deal with Chrome to use some cutting edge API that you don't have access to. There's a lot of dependencies there. How are you balancing all that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Whether AI companies and products are boosting content from the open web and then turning around and selling it to consumers without paying the people who produce that work anything at all. We've been talking about these topics pretty much non-stop for the last year here on Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We're back with browser company CEO Josh Miller to talk about how he structured the company and how he plans to make money. I want to talk about the web in detail, but I think this brings me to the decoder questions. This is a big ambition. How big is the browser company now? 80 people. And how is that structured?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explore why he built ArcSearch, what he hopes it will accomplish, and what might happen to browsers, search engines, and the web itself as these trends evolve. I also wanted to know how Josh is thinking about competing with Chrome on the desktop and Safari on mobile, and especially how he plans to monetize Arc.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
When you have a prompt like that, do you say, OK, you came back, you have an answer. We're going to go find a bunch of Shopify sellers and try to market ARK to them specifically. Or is it we're going to abstract the solution to a bunch of other use cases and market the abstract version? product that you invented?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You've got kind of an interesting challenge there, right? Because mass paste seems like a pretty abstract. I've got two tabs. I've got two sources of data. I just need to move them over. Maybe Chrome will build that feature. Maybe they won't. At least you're competing with another. browser entirely.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
With something like a GitHub notification, it seems likely that GitHub might build that feature and send you a notification to a mobile app or send you a notification to whatever web-based notification system that the industry will eventually adopt. How do you think about that? Your features might get adopted by the very applications that you're trying to support.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Chrome and Safari are a lot of things, but mostly they're developed by some of the richest companies in the world and given away for free. Josh says the plan is to keep the basics of Arc free, but monetize a mix of customization, automation, and productivity tools that will make users' lives so much easier that they, the company they work for, pay a subscription fee.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You're really describing the browser as an application layer. This is the model for apps going forward. And you're drawing a pretty stark contrast to Google, which is search for some stuff, and we'll show you some documents. The web is in a moment of pretty intense tension between these ideas. You mentioned AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
All the AI applications are deployed to the web because they want to skip the app stores in one way or the other. Crypto, for better or worse, was mostly a web phenomenon because they didn't want to pay app store taxes. Do you think the web is headed towards being more of an application system as opposed to a document storage system? I'm curious. What do you think?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think that, well, I have a lot of feelings about the web as a publishing medium, but I think the pressures on the web as a publishing medium are not insurmountable, but unavoidable, and certainly changing the economics of the business there, whereas the pressures of app stores, on mobile phones in particular, are potentially devastating, and that's why you see so many applications on the web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So it feels like unless someone actively stops it, Documents will move off the web and applications will move off the phone. But I'm not 100% sure it's actually happening. You have a vantage point. I'm curious if you see it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It's a big idea to bring competition back to the browser market, and the early reception to Arc has been positive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Do you think the mix is shifting? If I were to start a tech website today, I probably actually wouldn't start a website. I would almost certainly start a TikTok channel and show people whatever I was covering. I see that as some amount of platform economics, but also a lot of web economics. The desire to put new information on the web first is fading.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Whereas the desire to deploy applications to the web is rising. Yes. And that mix is shifting. Yes. And maybe it feels like your entire company is a response to that mix shifting. But I'm wondering if you actually see it day to day and how people are using the browser.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But you'll hear Josh and I go over some of the major challenges the browser company has faced so far, like having to teach people all new sets of metaphors and design languages around what browsers should be doing, and why you'd even want to use a web browser to run apps the way Arc is suggesting. let alone use a new web browser at all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I agree on the diagnosis. I'm not sure what the cure is. But I asked you that question because if the browser is the operating system and you control that, well, you could be the Apple that introduces a payments layer to the web. Famously, Marc Andreessen thought the web would be powered by micropayments when he did Netscape, and it just never occurred.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And then crypto arrived, and we had to listen to it. Probably not the right idea, but the idea is cyclical, right? The idea that we'll have payments on the web in some way is cyclical. And if you are controlling the browser, I'm wondering if that's something you could introduce to fix the document side model of it, or if you're staying focused on the application side.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Of course, Josh and I also got into the controversy swirling around generative AI and whether the web as an information distribution platform will survive plundering all of its pages. Josh was pretty candid here about what he does and does not know about how this all might play out. And I gotta say, he was more open to changing his mind than arguably any tech CEO I've talked to about this subject.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah. How does Browser Company make money today?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So a subscription. A subscription browser is where we're going.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah. Other CEOs have gotten lots of trouble on the show suggesting that they will make something that was previously free into a subscription product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It was a good back and forth. I'm very curious for your feedback on it. One quick note before we start. After we recorded this conversation, the browser company disclosed a pretty severe security vulnerability in Arc that could have let attackers insert code into other users' browser sessions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
That's why we bring people to the office. No, I just want to stick on it a little bit longer. So you've got products today. You've got ArcSearch in the Arc browser. Will ArcSearch be paid on the phone?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
ArcSearch is an AI product. I want to talk about that a little bit, but the economics of AI products are pretty simple. Someone does a search. In ArcSearch, you have to go talk to a cloud provider, do some inference, and come back. That costs you money. If you intend to keep it free, how much money can you spend before you have to change your mind?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah, and so the goal is you make useful free versions and people convert to the paid.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You're obviously competing with Google. Google loves to give things away for free. That search ad revenue is a cash machine for them. How do you think about competing against a competitor that will undercut you in price in the most ruthless way possible, which is giving it away for free?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It was patched a day after a researcher made the company aware of it in late August, and the company says no users were affected. But it's still a significant issue, and in a statement released last week, the company says it marks, quote, "...the first serious security incident in Arc's lifetime."
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There's the crumb of it. There's also the safari of it. Right. Apple really wants people to use its integrated applications, particularly on mobile. Do you find that trying to ship a new browser on an iPhone is a lost cause? Do you think that that is a market you can actually get into, or is that just close off to you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
MARK MIRCHANDANI- This brings me to the other decoder question. You have a lot of challenges. You've got a huge browser competitor that gives away its product for free. You've got operating systems that will and will not let you do certain things. You've got the changing nature of the browser itself. You've got pricing to figure out. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We tried to get Josh back on the show to talk about it, but he was unavailable the day the flaw was disclosed to the public. The company did tell us it's making a lot of big security improvements, and in a separate statement on X, co-founder Hirsch Agarwal said, a heartfelt thanks to all the concern and even outrage you've expressed about this incident and for holding us to a high standard.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
He went on to say the browser company will, quote, be using this opportunity to grow as a company, as an engineering organization, and personally as a founder. Okay, the browser company CEO Josh Miller. Here we go. Josh Miller, you're the co-founder and the CEO of The Browser Company. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. We're in the studio together in New York.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Welcome back. I'm talking with the browser company CEO Josh Miller about competing with Google and what AI is doing to both search and the open web. One of the comparisons you made was to Google. You said it's not just as easy as bolting on an AI chat box to the side of the browser. I could be pretty reductive, and I could say, you've just described Google shipping its org chart.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There's a Chrome PM. There's a Gemini PM. Just be next to each other. Don't integrate the product. That sounds like you're betting on Google not figuring it out to some extent. The Google product culture will ship and kill things in the way the Google product culture does, and it will never make the turn towards integrating the AI products. You can feel however you want about that bet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I'm sure the people at Google feel some way about that bet. Is that why you're thinking that they're big and slow and you can actually just be more nimble?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Because people were no longer doing navigational searches for Twitter?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Google's in a state of what I would call regulatory scrutiny. They just lost the antitrust case against the United States Department of Justice that said there was an illegal monopoly in search in a certain part of its ad business. The ad tech part of its business is going to an antitrust trial very shortly here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
As part of the search trial, we found out that Google's paying Apple $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine. This stuff feels like it's coming apart. That there are opportunities here. Which of those opportunities is most ripe for the browser companies, and how are you going to attack them?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yes. How would you break up Google?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Well, there's an obvious answer here, which is split out Chrome, which has been floated. Do you think you would have a better chance against an independent Chrome company? I am not a lawyer. I have no idea. I'm asking you competitively. If Chrome did not have the pressure of Google search, you can put in the Twitter icon or whatever application icon without hurting the search revenue.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Do you think you'd have a better shot at competing with an independent Chrome? Honestly, hard to say. I'm not trying to be evasive. I honestly don't know. Do you think that the deals Google has been making to make search default in different places, if they came to you and said, we'll pay you $20 billion a year to set Google search as the default in ARC, would you take the money?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
This is a rare occurrence on Decoder. Thank you so much for being in person with me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
$20 billion was an unfair number to pick.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Do you take money to set a default and search an art? No.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Oh, no. When you're in person, it's even harsher because I can smile at you while coming in.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
One of the things we've seen a lot with AI in general, and you're certainly talking about it now, is the idea that that text box command T is actually the user interface of your computer. You're going to just tell the computer what you want. The computer is going to go off and do it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And if you have the entire web behind you, you can do a lot of things, especially if you can take actions on web applications. Yes. Are you trying to build that kind of automation layer where you say, hey, just go to my calendar and bring all the dates out and put them over here?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
The studio is as nice as you said it was. It is. We have a fancy new upgraded studio. I'm happy you're here. There's a lot to talk about. The browser company runs a browser called Arc. You run a mobile app called Arc Search, which is browser adjacent, I would say. It lets you browse the web in a new and different way. You're obviously competing with Google.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
This idea that a robot's going to go clicking around the web for you is very popular. We've seen a number of startups say they can do it. I don't think they're actually doing it, but they say they're going to take AI and do it. Then there's just a set of follow-on problems to this, right? The browser has to see everything and all of the websites. It has to see my data. It has to read that data.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It has to interpret it, presumably using an AI system in a cloud somewhere. It has to click on things for me without getting anything wrong, and then it has to not hallucinate. That's a lot of steps. How do you protect people's data and actually hit the level of essentially 100% reliability that people are going to demand from products like this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah. Do you think that that is a separate –
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Google appears to be in a moment of change. regulatory change, self-imposed change, and then there's AI. Obviously, Ark Search is built as an AI product. Let's start at the very beginning. What is the browser company?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah, the I want to make chimichurri sauce is a great example, right? Because what ArcSearch will do is it'll go read a bunch of web pages. It'll summarize them. It'll show you the answer with some links. That is a very controversial move across the web right now. When I say there's a lot of pressure on the web as a document or consumption medium, that's the pressure, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
In particular, a bunch of AI companies are scraping the hell out of the web, remixing the web, and the people who actually made the information are getting nothing for it. Ark Search is right in the middle of that. That is the thing you are doing. Do you think that that is a sustainable thing to do?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
In February, my friend Casey Newton wrote about Ark Search. He said he felt a rare emotion. End quote. A kind of revulsion at the app's mere existence and what it portends. Because it's taking the value from the people who write the recipe website. And I could do a full hour on why there's a story at the top of every recipe website. That is the way that the money is made.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It's the incentives of the system. Absolutely. And you can't sell the recipes for a variety of reasons. So you've got to sell something else. You need to sell added inventory around the recipes. Do you understand why Casey felt the revulsion? I know he talked to you for that piece. Yes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
He talked to you, and the quote is, Miller had not put much thought into the second-order implications of a world where search queries no longer result in outbound clicks. That was February. It's September. Have you thought about it since?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Happily, my role in the newsroom is to spend money. I don't make any money. It's a real problem for this whole company. We've had Nick Thompson talk about his deal from The Atlantic on the show. His view is, we need to get this money, and OpenAI is offering us a bunch of stuff in exchange for this money, including tokens and credits to use their systems to build new products. What I see...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And maybe it'll work out. But what I see is we are absolutely hastening the demise of the web as a publishing platform because we're making it easier and easier and easier to extract value without any payment or compensation going in the other direction. And eventually, all those people are just going to say, well, at least there's a creator fund on TikTok. At least there's YouTube payments.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
At least there's other platforms with some built-in way to compensate me for my work. Whereas on the web, everyone just takes everything away. Big publishers left and right are saying, well, at least Apple News exists. We'll just take that money. I don't know if that's good or bad, but... The theme of this conversation is the web is increasingly an application platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We can tailor the browser to it being an application platform. And over here, the part where people browse the web for information, maybe we can extract value from that, and that will go away. Or maybe it'll just be a handful of preferred providers that OpenAI pays or Perplexity pays or UPay.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But that open web, the part where there's just information on the web for people to click around and look at, That seems like there's nothing here that indicates it can make a resurgence.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Let me ask you a question about that. So if you are somebody who makes money on a laptop, you're presumably using a lot of applications, not looking at a lot of content. I would love to be a person who made a lot of money on my laptop just by looking at a lot of other people's content. But I suspect what you're getting at is this is a productivity application.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
That's great. But I look at the platforms and I have the extraordinary privilege of getting to say that I'm a precious journalist and I have no idea what's happening with the ads and I won't read them. And we still get to sit in a fancy studio because I have a whole company.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And the platform, the economics of social platforms, are not great for that. You have individual creators who cannot support a giant company who are in bed with the companies they cover. I'm not even naming names. Just broadly, they do the brand deals. They read the ads. They mix the commerce and the content in a way that journalists do not do or should not do. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And I say, well, the web supported the other model for a minute. And now maybe the flight to quality is a bunch of paywalls. And what we're going to be left with is a bunch of free content on platforms that is corrupted in some way by the commercialization of the work because the rates aren't high enough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And somewhere in there is, well, we're just going to let it happen because the web is an application platform and not a document platform. And we never figured out how to actually sustainably distribute this information in a way that works for everyone. And it feels like... Yeah, there's a lot of opportunity to make the web a better application platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But it feels like if you turn that all the way, you do end up with a bunch of weird ads on TikTok and a bunch of paywalls on the web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
At a moment where you all have- And you think that technology is AI, to be clear.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
That is a good and optimistic place to end it, so I'm going to ask one more question. The idea that the web will come into balance, the web will endure. I want to believe. I'm a web person at heart. I continue to run a website in 2024. That is just a personal decision that I've made.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
What is the chance that the web actually turns all the way to an application platform, that that dominates the next generation of the web?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I started using Arc in preparation for this episode. I just kind of use them more. I mean, I think I am, unlike my VergeCast co-hosts, I am reticent to actually depend on software. I think there's a danger in being dependent on software or workflow. And maybe that's because I've had a lot of software in my life go away. I'm a very manual, brute force kind of person.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And the idea that I'll give up some part of my workflow or my process to a tool has always scared me. But I'll keep trying. Which browser do you use? I obviously use Chrome and Safari, and now I'm using Arc. Oh, you can't use Chrome?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Come on. We are a Google Docs company. We are a Riverside company. Okay. I'll do my best.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It's going to be great. I promise you that's the other side of the house, so I'll make the introduction for you. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Eli. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, Josh. This was great. I'd like to thank Josh Miller for joining Decoder today. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails and we've gotten some very nice ones lately. Or you can hit me up directly on threads. I'm at reckless1280. We also have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
MARK MIRCHANDANI, So it's an application environment. That's what I'm getting at. And one of the things we talk about in Decoder all the time is the application model moved from
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
windows to the web to mobile maybe back to the web there's something happening there that seems big and it's kind of landed on the web like most people they want to deploy a desktop application they turn to the web first yes i don't think a lot of people are deploying win 32 first anymore um do you see your browser is having a meaningful impact on that class of developers
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Because if you're an operating system, you have a lot of power, right? You're like, here's some APIs. Here's some capabilities of my operating system that you, developer, can use. This is what all the major operating system vendors say to their developers all the time. You're saying my browser is an operating system, and people are deploying applications to the web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Are you in conversation with those applications? Do you offer those developers new capabilities? Or is it really just about the end user?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
One of the big questions when you're starting a new browser company is, one, how will you take share from Google and Microsoft and Safari, particularly on iOS? And then, two... What engine are you using? Because you're not going to write a new browser engine. That seems like a massive undertaking. You've landed on Chromium. It seems like the whole industry is headed towards Chromium.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Microsoft famously uses Chromium now. Was that a big decision or was that a little decision?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
MARK MANDELMANN, So you've got Chromium as a rendering engine that's the same as Chrome. Arc itself is the Chrome around Chromium. This is just the language. So you built a wraparound Chrome. That's a pretty familiar idea. And then the idea is all of those things will make productivity, particularly productivity for knowledge workers, better on the web. You've invented a lot of terminology.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There are new metaphors. There's new words in here. How did you go about this task?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There's a sidebar. There are spaces. There's just metaphors after metaphors in Arc that are different than Chrome. There's boosts. There's just a lot of words and concepts in this browser, which are interesting. But a lot of them are, we have to teach people a new metaphor for using the web or thinking about this browser as an application layer in their computer as opposed to just a web browser.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Where did the genesis of this come from? And how did you go about, honestly, just picking all these names?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
My VergeCast co-host and Verge editor at large, David Pierce, is a big fan of Arc, and he's written about it quite a bit for us. We'll link his review and other coverage of the product in the show notes. Basically, Arc is a ground-up rethink of the web browser. Most modern browsers started out as document viewers, and they grew to support running complex applications.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
MARK MANDELBACHER- Well, this seems like the challenge, right? I've identified one set of users that already knows they're using a web browser. as a productivity platform that already knows that all their apps are in a web browser. And then there's another class of users that is just using Safari because it's what came on their Mac.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And you've got to get more of those people in order to grow your user base. How do you balance the two?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I feel like web apps in general require people to understand new metaphors. We often write and talk about how Younger people are not as aware of file systems as a concept, because they grow up on iPhones and iPads and Chrome OS devices. Using something like Figma requires a bunch of people to accept a bunch of new metaphors.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And then you're trying to change the metaphor around all of those metaphors. Is that going better or worse than you expected?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Well, you started this whole conversation by saying you... We're distraught that an election had been lost and computers were maybe responsible or not. And the operating system is where the leverage is. How do you turn all of that into the leverage you're seeking? Is it we're not going to show you some websites? Is it we're going to make you have a healthier relationship with Instagram?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You just pop up a warning that's like you're on Instagram. How do you actually use the leverage of owning something that feels like an operating system?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Arc's main conceit is that it's designed to make running and using all those apps as simple as possible. You'll hear Josh describe it as an operating system several times. Which is a pretty big claim to make, and he and I got into what that actually means for a web browser.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
In 2022, a coalition of all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141 million settlement that required the company to refund low-income Americans who were eligible for free filing, but were redirected to Intuit's paid products. And in 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax's, quote, free marketing was willfully deceptive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
So one of the things that's really interesting there is these component platforms are still divisions, right? MailChimp has a CEO. Credit Karma was a big company that you acquired. Usually when companies like Intuit acquire something like Credit Karma, you promise the people who work there a measure of independence. But you're talking about stitching it together into a platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
There's some technical stuff there that I definitely want to talk about, but there is just the operational side of saying, okay, now you're part of a bigger thing while still keeping the walls up and still saying, okay, we have different CEOs. That's very different than most other tech companies. How have you made that choice, and is that durable over the long term?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Rania hinted that that change was coming when she was on the show. So I wanted to ask you about it. Tell me about that. One of the things I always ask everybody is how they make decisions. Tell me about that decision. Right. Obviously, she knew it was coming when she was on the show. You've since made that call. What does that look like to walk up to someone and say, hey, you were the CEO.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
We're changing it. We're not doing this anymore. How did that unfold for you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
And after the agency won an appeal earlier this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing it. So I asked about taxes, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It's Decoder. We have exchanges like this on the show all the time, and in the moment, I didn't think anything of it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Tell me how Intuit is structured now then. How is the company broadly organized?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer into it, who called that line of questioning, and my tone, inappropriate, egregious, and disappointing, and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally, he wrote a long email that ended with, quote, at the very least, the end portion of your interview should be deleted.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
If you've got the two platform leaders, I'm assuming they report to you, and then you've got a CTO who's making technology decisions, I'm assuming you tie-break a lot there, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
If you're responsible for the success of the consumer platform, for example, and you really think you need some technology built or built in a different way than the company currently has, and the answer is no, I'm guessing that comes to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today's episode, it's a ride. I'm talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Ghadarzi, who's built Intuit into a juggernaut business software company through a series of major acquisitions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Welcome back. I'm talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Godarzi about the big decoder question, how he makes decisions. When we left off, he was talking about building a company through acquisitions. The other challenge of building a company through acquisitions that you then have to integrate is the technical foundations of all those companies are different.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
The data storage requirements of those companies are different. databases, the customer databases, all that stuff has to be integrated at technical level. How are you managing that? I mean, that seems like the biggest problem you have to buy a company the size of MailChimp and say, okay, we're plugging you into QuickBooks. Those are very different products. How does that work?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
We don't do that here at The Verge. As many of our listeners and readers know, we have a very explicit and very strict ethics policy. We'll link to it in the show notes. The most important thing here is that we never allow anyone to preview or approve our interview questions, and we certainly do not allow anyone to review or alter the work that we publish.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Yeah. That is a strategy, right? That is an acquisition strategy. We're going to depend on technical interoperability. We can build data pipes between different cloud providers. It seems like that strategy has been working. There have to be downsides of that strategy. What are the downsides?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
I told this to Rick, and he came back and asked that we, quote, delete that which takes away from the conversation, which he defined as raised voices, or us speaking over each other. So, quote, listeners can understand your question and the answer Sasan gave. I gotta be honest with you, that is one of the weirdest requests I've ever gotten. So here's what we're going to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Do you ever have broader questions about the strategy overall? Do you ever have, I'm guessing the person who goes and negotiates with AWS would love a little bit more demand from whatever's on Google Cloud to say, look, we've got more scale, lower the rate, right? I mean, those are the kinds of trade-offs that are made.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Do you ever have those conversations where actually increasing scale or concentrating further would be the benefit versus interoperability?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Interoperability is really interesting, especially for a company built through acquisition. Regulators around the world right now, not so hot on acquisitions. I'm assuming you have some thoughts about that. But the other thing they're really into is interoperability, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
In the spirit of fairness, we're going to run that whole part of the interview first, unedited, so you all can tell me. It's about five minutes long, and you can decide for yourself. Then we'll come out of it, and we'll run the rest of the interview, which, like I said, is an otherwise fascinating episode of Decoder. Okay, so here I am talking about taxes with Sasonga Darzi, the CEO of Intuit.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
They are saying to various companies, you have to make your products and services interoperable with each other so you can lower switching costs so consumers and businesses can go have a vibrant market to pick and choose their vendors from. If you've built the company through acquisition and interoperability,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Do you think some regulator is going to come to you and say, okay, all of the interop that you built for Credit Karma and QuickBooks, you got to open that up to another financial accounting vendor?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Would you let your competitors use the interoperability hooks that you've built for your own company to interface with theirs?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Let me ask you the key decoder question, which we have been circling around this whole time. How do you make decisions? You've been there a long time, you've grown with the company, you've made a bunch of big decisions. What's your framework?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Intuit is legendary for running TurboTax, also legendary for lobbying against free direct federal e-filing. How much of your budget is allocated to lobbyists?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
There's one key decision I have to ask you about since we're here, and you mentioned things fitting into the Intuit operating system. I was a very loyal Mint user. You decided to shut that whole service down. What was your thinking there?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
We need to stop for another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute. Welcome back. I'm talking with Intuit CEO Sasan Ghadarzi. Before the break, we started to get into one of the harder decisions that CEOs have to make, layoffs. When Intuit fired 10% of its workforce earlier this year, Sasan sent a memo saying the majority of the folks let go were underperforming.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
So I really wanted to know, how did he measure that? How many people are working at Intuit today?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
And growing. So the interesting thing about growing is you just laid off about 10% of your folks this year, 1,800 people. You said you're going to hire another 1,800 people to focus on AI. Inside of that decision, and this is the one I really want to press on, inside of that decision, I think the company announced 1,000 plus of those 1,800 people were low performers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
How did you decide which one of 18 people was a low performer?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
I feel like a lot of people spend some time every year using enterprise software to rate their employees. I certainly do it. My bosses do it to me. Do you feel like that data is good? Do you feel like that data was actually telling you something? Because various companies that I've worked with, I can tell you that data meant nothing. And at some companies, it means a lot.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Do you think that shows up in the products? I will tell you, a lot of Decoder listeners have asked to have you on the show, basically for feature requests and bug reports. And then there's other stuff that a lot of people ask us to ask you about. But in particular, right, the software isn't as good as it should be.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
You're moving me from my desktop client to a web client because that's where the platform is. And the web client is not nearly feature complete for things like keyboard commands. Do you think that this process is going to make the products better?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Wait, the simplest version of taxes is the government just sends you a return and it's done. Yeah. And Intuit has lobbied against that. Would you support the government just doing the taxes for people and then sending the refunds?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Do you anticipate supporting the desktop clients forever?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Your goal is to move everybody to the cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Many countries in the world do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
All right, let's talk about AI, and then I'm not going to let you get out of here unless we talk about tax filing. You know it's coming. Are the AI features going to be in the cloud only, or are they going to come to the desktop platform as well?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
You just announced a bunch of AI features at your investor day. It's on the order of when people log into QuickBooks, they're going to see a feed with new insights on cash flow and other opportunities to use AI. Let me just ask you a threshold question that I'm asking every CEO about their AI products. Can the AI technology you have now do all the things you want it to do?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
So if we change the tax system, we're going to – Are you going to lobby to change the tax system to let the government do the filing for you and send people checks?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Because I'm not 100% sure that the LLM technology can do all the things that everybody wants it to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
You're spending the dollars. Would you lobby for it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
LLMs are somewhat notoriously bad at math. You run a financial platform for a lot of people. Do you trust it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
The simplest version of the tax system would be to just have the government do it and send people their refunds or ask people for money.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Are you getting economies of scale from other AI companies investing in the space? I'm thinking particularly about Meta is doing a lot of open source models, right? And they're pushing far ahead on generative AI. On knowledge engineering, are you getting the same kind of economies of scale from the industry? Or is everyone focused on LWABs?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
You've got a lot of small business owners using your products. They're looking for insight. They are probably not financial experts. The LLM or whatever systems you build tells them something. It's a hallucination. It's wrong. Have you worried about the liability of that, of giving bad financial advice to a small business owner?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
But you have lobbied against that. That's what I'm saying. That reporting is clear. Intuit has lobbied against that very specifically.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
But that's a lot of responsibility to accept. We're going to do this for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Do you think over time as you integrate AI into more and more of the platform and that becomes something more customers are paying for, the free Intuit TurboTax products will remain as big of a mix as you have today?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
You're probably familiar with Quicken and QuickBooks, which are incredibly well-known as personal finance and small business accounting software, but nearly everything else, TurboTax, MailChimp, Credit Karma, loads more, were acquisitions of some kind along the way. That leads to a lot of challenging structure questions that Sasan and I really got into.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Well, Sasan, I could keep talking to you forever, I think, as you can tell, but we got to wrap this up. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
That's the episode. I'd like to thank Sasan Godarzi for taking the time to join me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, the deletion request at the beginning, or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
You can also hit me up directly on threads. I'm at Reckless1280. And we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
When you see free direct federal e-filing arrive, I think today, literally today, just before we started speaking, the government announced it would be available in half the states, which is about 60% of the population. Does that have a revenue impact on you? Do you get an email saying we project TurboTax revenue will go down by X?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
I'm going to ask you this question. I can already tell you that you're going to tell me you disagree with my premise, but I ask it anyway. Broadly speaking, I would say the criticism of Intuit's free products when it comes to taxes is that it says it's free, and then somewhere along the line, they slide you into paying. The government has complained about this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
That is a reputation damager for the company. Again, I get the emails from Decoder listeners asking me what questions to ask you. And it's that. It's that sort of dark pattern feeling inside of, in particular, the free tax product. Is that something you want to fix? Do you worry about that damage to the reputation?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Integrating all of those companies and their different approaches to software requires big decisions, and Intuit made a big decision of handling it all by betting on interoperability that I found fascinating. So far, that sounds like normal decoder stuff, right? Here's where it got weird. I couldn't have the CEO of Intuit on the show without asking about tax reform in the United States.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
All right, so what do you think? Was that contentious? Should we have deleted it? You let me know. I'm open to the feedback. Right now, I'm mostly just amused and a little befuddled. Here's the rest of that episode, which, as I keep saying, was a good episode of Decoder, with some very interesting ideas about how to integrate big acquisitions into a single tech platform inside of it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Also, I asked why Sasan shut down Mint, which honestly is a thing I should have been the most outraged about. Okay, Sasan Ghadarzi, the CEO of Intuit. Sasan Guzarzi, you are the CEO of Intuit. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
I am very excited to talk to you. You just announced a bunch of AI products that are interesting. You've been changing the company around. Let's start at the very beginning. Intuit is 40 years old. A lot of people are familiar with your various products like TurboTax or MailChimp. What is Intuit now? What do you think of what the company is?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Individual income taxes are more complicated in the US than in almost any other developed economy, and Intuit has been lobbying hard since the 1990s to keep it that way in order to protect TurboTax. The company spent nearly $3.8 million lobbying in 2023 alone. There's extensive reporting about all this. We'll link to it in the show notes. That lobbying has had mixed results.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
That's really interesting that you mentioned you started with AI six years ago. Obviously, Transformers only really burst on the scene a couple years ago in the way that they are now, and that's really accelerating a lot of stuff. So I want to spend some time talking about the differences between the AI technologies you were betting on before and what's happening now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
But before we get to that, I just want to talk about how the company is structured and built individually. This is a company that is kind of built through acquisitions, maybe entirely built through acquisitions, starting with buying TurboTax in 1993. And then it's a combined, I think, $19 billion on MailChimp and Credit Karma just in the last four years.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
How do you think about integrating all those disparate parts? The example of TurboTax for me is particularly interesting. That became the company. You acquired a company that sort of became the company. Are you thinking that way with MailChimp and Credit Karma as well?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
So let me ask about that for a little bit. Everyone says they can do that. Most companies, they succeed and they fail, right? That's an inconsistent process. MailChimp in particular was a big company. It had its own culture. That integration was a little messy. We had the new CEO of MailChimp, Rania, on a while back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
Truly free online direct filing with the IRS began as a pilot program this year, and it's expanding to be available for more than half of the US population in 2025. But it's not just lobbying.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode
We talked about that integration, how's it going, how she's changing the culture because she's Intuit's CEO. She's not the founder CEO that they had before. You're the CEO of the Umbrella Corporation. How do you think about having all these companies and all of their CEOs under you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The reason I said it is, you know, Duolingo is instantiated for most people as a mascot. We should talk about the mascot's personality and its social media presence. But it's fairly abstracted from a person teaching you the language, right? There's not someone on the other side that's like, here's, I'm teaching you this. Here's the culture that comes with it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You might have other teachers who might teach you another way. There is an abstraction there that just feels interesting, especially as we're obviously going to talk about AI and how you're using that and how you're expanding the platform. I just want to push on that a little bit.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
That abstraction, do you think it's resulting in people who've learned a language or people who've learned how to communicate?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Luis Van An, the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, the popular app that teaches languages. It's an interesting time to be in the business of languages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I want to ask about all this because it I have been asking a lot of people on this show, what good are these large language models? What are the products you're going to make? I understand you're making the models. And it feels like Duolingo has a very natural solution, which is you can just talk to it, and it'll talk back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And it kind of doesn't matter if everyone is hallucinating, because all you're doing is practicing talking.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
How much investment into AI are you making? This is a new product. It's very costly. Everyone is telling me about how much the NVIDIA GPUs cost all the time. We're only just profitable, you said. This feels like the thing that will immediately make you not profitable again as you invest in AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
After all, if there's anything the current state of AI tech can do, it's babble away in different languages with people who can't quite understand what they're hearing. So there are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Let me dive into the economics of that, because I'm really fascinated by, in general, whether any of this will result in profitable, sustainable companies. There's a lot of money flowing into this. So you charge twice the price to run inference, I'm assuming, on someone else's large language model. You haven't trained one of your own.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
To use OpenAI. So you're buying some capacity from OpenAI. You're buying some tokens from them. You're reselling them to users for twice the price of your standard plan. What's your margin on that resale?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, that's the thing that I'm curious. I don't know if it's good for open AI. It's all the way at the bottom of that chain. I don't know if that's profitable for them. But as you build products on this stuff, it seems like your economics depend on their economics in some way because you need to add a margin to that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
That all seems very complicated and tenuous, especially if the AI features are what brings you new users. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And Luis and I talked about the new features in something called Duolingo Max, which now offers AI chat conversations with some characters and even video calls with an AI avatar called Lily. I was obviously curious about all that, but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning generally. If you're like me, you've started and stopped Duolingo several times.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. Do you think the models are somewhat interchangeable? This is a thing that I've been hearing more and more is the model business isn't the thing that product business is the thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. When you think about just this investment over time, does it feel like you need to put the money in up front and you'll get more efficient on the back end? Or does it feel like, oh, this is going to be the future of the company. So we need to rebuild around the capabilities of a large language model.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
If you're an overachiever, you've gotten a streak going. You might even have a streak to maintain today. And it's that streak that's key. You'll hear Luis come back to a big idea here several times. Engagement is the thing, he says, because simply showing up is the cornerstone of making progress with language learning over time. His point is that you can't teach someone who isn't there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We need to take a short break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And so over time, Duolingo has become more and more of a game because people like to play games. But there are some real conflicts between games and actual learning. As you'll hear, Luis is happy to admit that that conflict exists, and he's given it a lot of thought.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Welcome back. I'm talking with Duolingo CEO Luis Fontan about why he sees the game of Duolingo as the foundation of the education it's meant to provide. You actually have a long history in gamification, right? Your first project that I think you sold to Google was a gamified thing. You did Recaptcha, which is essentially gamifying training data in a particular way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Do you think there's an evolution in Duolingo that the first thing that you worked on was the engagement and the bringing the people back and having the character – And then the underlying content was language lessons. There was a part of Duolingo when I started using it several years ago. I was like, oh, this is very familiar. It's just that this bird won't leave me alone.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And that's why I'm back again. And now you're talking about this whole other spectrum of things. We're going to use AI. We're going to have these natural language conversations. We're going to expand to mathematics. When did you feel like you were making the transition from we're gamifying this very familiar thing, we're using this new engagement mechanism, to this is now a wholly new thing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
For him, the gamification is the most important thing, because not only does it bring you back to Duolingo, keeping the business humming along nicely, but he says it also produces the results in language proficiency that Duolingo is aiming for. We talked about this in detail. I think you're going to find it really interesting.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And is that the core of it still? When you say always, primarily... There's a thing where everyone starts to take the initial innovation for granted and then you focus on the rest of it. It's still the core. I'm going to end up asking you about founder mode, but you're the founder. How do you keep the focus on that part instead of everything else?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. How big is it doing now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And it's everywhere? Is it all in New York?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. Why is that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We also talked about the money in detail, and we just got pretty deep into explaining where it comes from. As you might guess, the people who spend the most money on Duolingo are iPhone users in wealthier countries like the United States. And some technical decisions that Duolingo made very early on means the iOS version takes priority.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Sundar Pichai at Google told me at the very beginning of the pandemic that he was worried that the company would run out of ideas if they stayed remote too long. He said, we know what we need to do for the next turn. I'm worried about what happens the next turn. Did you have a controversy when you re-implemented return to office?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Do you think that the markets you're in help you with that, being in Pittsburgh and Detroit? If you were in San Francisco, I think a lot of people would say, screw you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Do you find that people are demanding more flexibility even with a full return to office?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It can take a year or more for features to roll out in the Android version of the app. But here's the hard part. Duolingo is a global product. And the biggest chunk of learners on the platform are actually trying to learn English in poor countries. And those users are way more likely to have an Android phone and to want or need a free version of Duolingo. That's a lot of tensions to balance out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We are talking on a Friday.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. One of the other pieces of the pandemic puzzle, return to office, is there was a suppression of demand to travel and explore. And I have friends who, at least from our Instagram, they just haven't set foot back in the United States in like two or three years. Have you connected to that group of people who want to learn languages on the go?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Has the re-explosion of travel had an impact on your business?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. When you think about the structure of a company, an opportunity like that, we started talking about what is the latent demand, what are people coming to you for, and then there's growth, which is how do we go create some demand. Would you ever set up like, okay, we've got to go do marketing to make travel happen, or is that just not how you think about it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. Actually, I feel like I have yet to ask you the decoder question. So as long as we're talking about your marketing spend, how is the company structured?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And you'll hear Luis talk about his own childhood in a poorer country and how that informs his decisions. I've got to say, this is one of my favorite Decoder conversations in quite a while. Luis is the co-founder, and he has seen the company through from being a startup to going public and now embracing a pretty big technology shift in AI that has a direct impact on the product he makes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
This sounds, one, like a reaction to working at Google, where teams do own things like the login screen, and they endlessly communicate how they're going to change the login screen. But it also seems like it might work for a small company where one person can see the whole product or understand the whole product and how it all works together
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And then you're going to get inevitable collisions as two people try to change something to increase two different metrics in different directions. How do you resolve those collisions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And we talked about all of that in a pretty direct way, with only a handful of jokes about founder mode. And of course, I asked him whether he approves of all the unhinged things the Duolingo owl says on social media. Okay, Duolingo co-founder and CEO, Luis Fanon. Here we go. Luis Fanon, you are the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. How often do these collisions come all the way up to you? How often do you have to make a trade-off?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, you started the show, you were joking about founder mode because I call you the co-founder. That's Brian Chesky. He's been on the show. He's talked a lot about how he refactored Airbnb. So he was the conductor of the orchestra.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
But do you see yourself in that kind of role that you're the person who can see the whole app, that you are the person who understands how all these trade-offs are getting made now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
How do you, when the three of you disagree, how do you resolve those?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
That might be the most succinct definition of founder mode I've heard yet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Just do what I say is really the answer to what FounderBot is.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So here's the decoder question. This is a good foundation for it. How do you make decisions? What's your framework to make decisions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I'm actually curious. Some people don't think they're different, and some people think they are very different. So answer whichever way you want.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
That obviously works for a startup founder, for a private company. You've been a public company CEO for three years now, three and a half years? Yeah. Is that working for you as a public company CEO?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I think a lot of people know what Duolingo is. I often start by asking CEOs, what is Duolingo? But I feel like everybody knows what Duolingo is. How do you define Duolingo?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
But did this change the way you communicate? I've heard this from a handful of CEOs now who've taken their companies public, and now they're on the quarterly reports cadence. And they have investors. Elliott Capital Management might show up on their doorstep and be unhappy that you're not marketing to more Chinese speakers or whatever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Like, have you had to change that attitude now that you run a public company?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, it's time to get out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The other thing I hear from public company CEOs – and I'm very curious because it relates to your emphasis on quality first, right? You have a lot of metrics. That means your investors can see probably a lot of your metrics or demand a lot of your metrics in different ways. quality is not measurable in that way, right? It's not.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And so if you're saying, okay, we're going to invest a bunch of money in AI, right? And we think in this use case, it's going to be really successful for us, or we can charge more for it. But we have to spend a bunch of money up front, and we have to wait to make it good. That's not, at least in the current market, like a great story for investors. How are you managing that now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I honestly think more companies should spend more time talking about how much time they spend making things good. That would be, I think, a significant upgrade to American capitalism.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Welcome back. I'm talking with Duolingo CEO Luis Fanon. Right before the break, we were chatting about Duolingo's goal of product quality over quick revenue and how the, quote, inordinate amount of time they spend on things like perfecting animation is something they don't necessarily focus shareholder attention on. But now we need to talk about some other important metrics.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
One thing that also seems hard to measure or a metric that might lead you in different directions is performance. how successful Duolingo is? Like maybe the most important metric of all is, are people getting good at Spanish? Like are they leaving this experience with the ability to communicate in Spanish? Not just know the language, but actually communicate.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You have big announcements coming up at Duocon that'll be public by the time this airs. One of them is chatting with characters like Lily and others.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
How does that work? Is that just more open AI technology? How are you making that happen?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, this is where you veer right into lengthy society-level debates about education and how we measure performance of schools and teachers. Do you feel like you're participating in that system? Like you're using their measurements, right? This is how schools do it. They test you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. Do you think that there's a conflict between gamification and engagement, the things that you're historically successful at, and education?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
How do you manage that conflict?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, presumably you've heard both sides of the argument. Why have you made this decision?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's clear that you have thought about this a lot.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So I want to round this out a little bit because you have a very clear answer and a very clear point of view. What do you think the specific tension between gamification and education is? What are you losing when you always pick gamification?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So efficiency, I understand that one. I had some pretty strict teachers in my time. But I was really good at taking the tests. Like my wife and I went to college together. She's much smarter than me. And she was always- But you're a good tester. But I was very clearly, she was always mad at me because I could just show up at the end and take the test.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
This is like truly probably why she didn't date me for years because of that core frustration, right? This is what I mean by education, right? That human teacher can evaluate whether or not you're good at taking a test or whether you've actually learned something. And that's the trade-off that I was actually getting at, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Is if it's all gamification engagement, people might just learn to play the game. They might not have learned anything.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I want to try to tie all of these kind of themes and ideas together. You have a big vision for Duolingo. You've talked about it a lot, right? Being available to teach everybody languages around the world, being in a number of countries. And then there's the fact that you're a public company. You've got to make money. You're still showing up in t-shirts.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The first thing that comes immediately to my mind is you're launching new things like math and music, and they're not available on Android, which is the single most popular operating system in the world. It's used by the majority of lower income people in the world. That feels like an immediate tension. that the best experience of Duolingo is on the platform that wealthier people use.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
How do you resolve that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Easy choice, I have to say.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. When you think about growing the company, right, supporting multiple platforms, that's just double the effort all the time. Yeah. Is that on your mind? Okay, we're going to intentionally slow down development here so we can keep this team smaller.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Your premium subscription tier, the max tier, only just arrived on Android.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. One thing I've heard over and over again since the dawn of the modern smartphone is that iOS users spend more money.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So it's four times as much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The majority of your money is coming from iOS users is what I'm getting from this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Wait, is that demographically they have 4X the income or demographically iOS users are spending four times the money?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So when you think about expansion, again, a public company, if most of your users are on Android, and Android is the biggest operating system in the world, but all of your money is on iOS, How do you resolve that tension, right? Is it just we're going to make our money on iOS and not? Because the big mission is to bring free language education to all of those other people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So the iOS user is subsidizing the free mission?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. The animations and stuff, are those stock animations? Are they loops? How does this work?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. Do you think that that is the next logical place for you to grow? For sure. As you think about English education?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No, I meant, like, is it in real time?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. I feel like I have to ask you about the OWL. It's very important to everyone to ask you about the OWL. The OWL is like a very, at least it's expressed in this country, is like a very online platform very culturally defined character. If you took the owl outside of United States social networks and dropped it anywhere else, it wouldn't make any sense.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Is the owl expressed culturally in all the different markets or is it just one owl?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Wait, hold on. The owl doesn't do anything. How big is the team that writes and performs the owl?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Okay. And they work at Duolingo? Yes. I'm assuming they're in New York City.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Okay. I didn't realize Pittsburgh had this many terminally online people. Godspeed. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And this is the same five people localizing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. What's the hiring process like to be the writer for the Duolingo Owl? Do you just read people's Twitter accounts and say you're… You're unhinged enough to do this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
MARK MANDELMANN- And you measure everything, it sounds like. Is this working? Are you getting lots of new users because of the app?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
When you think about that investment, right? We're going to start building rigs and animations for characters. We're going to do it all in real time. I'm just coming back to cost, right? You've got a, that's a big investment. Do you think that's going to make your existing users pay more money or is it going to get you new users?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. Have you ever told the team to pump the brakes? Have you ever looked at something they've made and said, we just can't do this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
What's the last one the CMO was like, I don't know, Luis has to approve this one?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
What's the last one they convinced you to do even though you were skeptical?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The world context of that one needs to be substantially improved, I think. All right, I've got to end with a feature request. You've given us a lot of time, and then I'll let you get out of here. We talked a lot about India. We talked a lot about emerging languages. Can you put Gujarati in this app?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
This is the language that I can understand and speak like a baby, but I can't read or write, and I would love to just close the loop.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
All right, that's a hard no. It's one of the first times the CEO has given me a hard no. That's the, again, founder mode.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Have you ever cut languages?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Do you think AI is going to help you add languages or keep the quality high?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. The reason I ask that in this context specifically, it's just the economics of AI are so, it's just a series of question marks right now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. AI is notoriously bad at math. Is it going to help you? Or at least the current LLMs are pretty bad at math. Are they going to help you with that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It is funny how many times I ask this question, someone fails to bring up the idea that there's a computer.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. All right. Well, Luis, you've given us a lot of time. Thank you so much for being a decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I'd like to thank Louise Fanon for taking the time to join me on Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads. I'm at Reckless1280. We also have a TikTok.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So everybody who's making the investments, I'm curious, where do you see, how do you see it coming out on the other end?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The other big announcement you have is called Adventures. It sounds like a video game.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. I played with Duolingo this morning. I have a long and complicated history with trying to learn Hindi. It's free. I was using it for free today. How does it make money?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The majority of the revenue comes from the subscription. Is Duolingo profitable as a company?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Well, I'm curious about this. I hear about this split from almost everyone we talk to that we start, we want to grow our base of users. Ads help us do that. It helps us keep the product free. And then the real money is going to come when we add value and we add pain.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Particularly with advertising lately, with app tracking transparency on Apple platforms, with the massive influx of inventory from all the other platforms in the world with the desire to do all this stuff, it seems like ads are even harder to make money on. than ever. Has that been the case for you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And all of that revenue is in languages, or is math growing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. What languages are the most popular?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. And are the majority of your users, I'm guessing, outside the United States, or are they inside the United States?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And so 80% of your users are trying to learn English?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It seems like there's a lot of languages offered in the app, and it seems like one way you could allocate resources is by saying English is the most popular. We're going to put the most resources there. But that doesn't feel like how the app works. How do you think about it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Mandarin or Cantonese?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
How do you think about just that kind of demand, right? I open Duolingo, I look at it, I'm like, I should probably learn some Cantonese. Like that is a real thing that I've thought many times in my life. But I don't know if everybody feels that way. I open Duolingo, I think, man, I should be much better at Hindi than I am. That's a real thing that I think all the time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I imagine there's a lot of people in my particular diaspora who feel the same way. But that's like latent demand. Do you ever go out and say to people, you should learn some Spanish?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We should market Spanish in the south of the United States.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
In the U.S., you should probably learn Spanish. That is a marketing message.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Maybe not inside the app, but as a way to grow, right? As a way to capture new users. I'm just curious because that, it seems like a lot of what Duolingo is right now is people know they should be multilingual or bilingual at least. And so Duolingo is there. But there's also a huge portion of the population that's like, at least in this country, that's like, screw it, I'm speaking English.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And the idea that there's value in learning a second language is foreign to them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. One of the things I think about just in terms of learning languages, I think back to learning French when I was in high school in Wisconsin, was there's learning the language and then there's all of the culture that comes with a language, particularly some of the regional languages. High school French is a lot of like, look at a picture of a baguette.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's totally foreign to whatever you're doing. Do you think about that inside of Duolingo, that there's a huge cultural component here? That's more investment, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
How do you manage the tension between you have a professional organization that creates the awards, you have professional members who vote on the awards, and then you're making the Grammys for maybe the most mainstream possible audience on CBS, which is maybe the most mainstream of the broadcast networks, and all anybody really wants to see is Taylor Swift or Beyonce win every award.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
And there's a mismatch, right, between fandom culture on the one side, particularly in music, and Stan culture on it, like to put a more precise name on it. And then a bunch of music professionals saying actually. this John Batiste album is the best album of the year, right? There's a real balance there that seems hard to manage.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
How do you think about that in the context of the criticism that the Grammys often gets from the larger public or from listeners? For example, Beyonce just doesn't win Album of the Year, Record of the Year. These are the awards people want her to win as one of the major artists in our space, one of the cultural icons of our time. She doesn't win them. I don't know what else to say.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
We're heading into nomination season. I think this conversation is going to open up again. How do you think about that? That's what a huge, loud set of consumers wants from you from this show.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilan Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Harvey Mason Jr. He's the CEO of The Recording Academy, the nonprofit organization that puts on the Grammy Awards, the most prestigious awards in music, and which runs the Music Cares charity, which helps artists in need.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
That voting body, right, that's the thing you turned over. That's this year's big project. You announced the change. You said earlier you requalified 100% of the members. That's one way to change the outcome, right? It's to change the voters.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Well, the other way is to change the awards themselves, right? Which I'll come to. I think we can pursue that on two tracks. But we're going to change who's voting is one way to change them. Did you actively think, OK, we're getting to some of the wrong answers in who wins these awards? We got to change the membership?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
You're at the end of the process now. You've requalified 100% of people. You've added new members. Do you think you're there? Do you think you have room to grow and change the wall further, to fiddle some more?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Harvey is a fascinating guy. As a musician and producer, he's worked on projects with Destiny's Child, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Girls' Generation, tons more. as well as produced the music in movies like Pitch Perfect and Straight Outta Compton. As CEO of the Academy, Harvey's had a lot of work to do since he started in January 2020.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
We have to take a short break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
His predecessor was ousted after just five months in the role in a swirl of scandals, and the Grammys, along with the Emmys and the Oscars at that time, were facing a reckoning with massive race and gender inequality in the awards. On top of all that, the music industry itself came to a crashing halt during the pandemic as live concerts and award shows stopped happening.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Welcome back. I'm talking with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. about his flagship product, the Grammy Awards. Right before the break, he was talking about how the Academy has shaken up its membership to better reflect the music industry of today. But now I'm dying to know how he's handling one of the hardest parts of this genre.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
So the other way that at least comes to mind for me is the awards themselves. And maybe you'll disagree. There's the Halo Awards. There's record, song, album. Underneath that, there's just a bunch of categorizations. Best rap album versus best rock album. That implies that those genres exist and you can neatly sort albums into them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
The Grammys only just got rid of best urban album recently, right? That is a category with a long and loaded history. Maybe we don't need that one anymore. But what the internet has done to music broadly is –
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
really blur genre yeah completely endlessly blur genre in ways that are exciting and ways that are frankly confusing and maybe the only genre left is country which is why everyone's making a country album this year because you can just go there and say it's different than what you were doing before you could change those awards right you could just re-qualify all the genres too and say here are some hard lines do you ever think about that
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
which made music cares more important than ever. So he's been busy these past few years, and now the world of music is having a moment with some of the biggest tours ever and an entirely new crop of emerging major artists. The 2025 Grammy nominations were just announced, and you can see it in the list.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Can you just do me a favor and try to define pop music in 2024?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Because I feel like I could define hip hop. I feel like I could take a run at defining rock. I don't know that I could define pop music.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I just think there's something so interesting happening with genre because of the rise of the internet. And we're well into it now. I think Taylor Swift wrote a piece about the death of genre like 10 years ago. I think for the Wall Street Journal. And there just seems to be a chaos in the industry that maybe fans have figured out. But the industry itself is still struggling with.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Whether that's Lil Nas X. ages ago, whether that's Cowboy Carter and Beyonce this year, it feels like we don't quite want to draw these lines anymore, but we need them in order to have things like the Grammy Awards or have enough awards to give out instead of one award for song. All music. Is that something you're actively talking about?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Does that come up with your members, with the staff of the Recording Academy? Where do these arguments really come from? Where do these arguments land?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Chapel Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are nominated for Album of the Year, right alongside Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Now, if you're a Decoder listener, you know that I'm always saying that watching how tech changes the music industry is is a preview into how tech will change everything else five years from now. And the Grammys and the Recording Academy are no exception.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Do you ever think about just doing random microgenres like we're just going to have a drill award this year? Like how do you think about that? Because that's another way you could do it and you could get more artists in the theater. You could sell more tickets. You could get more ratings. Drill music, it was a moment. It's now kind of everywhere. You can hear it in fact all of hip-hop.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
So it has kind of devolved into not being a micro-genre but just being a sound that's going to come and go, like sound's going to go. But last year you could have just been like, we're going to have a drill category and here's the best drill artist of the year. And then next year maybe we won't have that category and we'll have something else. Is that something that comes up?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Is that an option that you've thought about? Because it's something I've heard proposed.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Yeah. Let me ask you the big decoder question, and then I want to talk about that question in practice. You obviously have a lot of decisions to make. What awards are we going to give and to who is some of the biggest decisions there? What's your framework for making those decisions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
See, the way it's worked for the past 50 years is that CBS pays a huge fee to the Recording Academy to broadcast the Grammys, and the Recording Academy takes that money and uses it to fund things like music cares and lobbying for legislation that protects artists' rights. This isn't a secret. You'll hear Harvey lay it out bluntly and say the Grammys is where all the money comes from.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I feel like a lot of the other CEOs I talk to would be well-served. They spend some time trying to make some music as opposed to just trying to make AI. Everyone would. We'll come to that, though. Let me put that into practice. This week, you announced that you're going to leave CBS. You're going to take the Grammys to Disney and stream across Disney Plus, Hulu, and ABC. You've said it already.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
CBS represents almost 100% of the revenue of the organization. You've been on CBS for 50 years?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
That's a big change. That's a big decision to go to a new partner and to new platforms and new distribution. Why make that decision and how did you make it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
This all worked great in an era where traditional TV networks had tons of money to spend and commanded a huge amount of attention because so many people watched traditional TV. But that era is over, and Harvey recently decided to move the Grammys to Disney starting in 2027, which will bring the show to ABC, yes, but also potentially to Disney Plus and Hulu.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
You had to decide though, right? You're in a four-year – you come onto the job. You're renegotiating four years. The deal is up. You got to stick with CBS or you got to go find a new partner. After 50 years, it feels like maybe the default was to say to CBS and the first decision was to say, actually, I'm going to open this up.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
How did you come to that just moment where you thought, I've got to make sure I know what my options are?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Was there a bidding war? Did Disney just show up and say, we're going to pay more than everybody else? Did you have other options?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
When I think about the value that CBS brought over that sweep of 50 plus years, they are one of the three big broadcast networks in the United States that They have a Tiffany network. They actually broadcast in slightly higher quality than some of the other networks, which I always appreciate about CBS. But they had a distribution monopoly.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
They were just a nationally broadcast TV network that came into everyone's homes. They were on every cable system. That's how TV used to work. That is broken, right? Cord cutting is all over the place. People aren't even using over-the-air antennas anymore. That's just not how it works. And the big distribution is in streaming. Right. CBS does have some streaming in the mix, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
There's a whole complicated story to be told about Paramount and all that over there. But Disney's a little more, it's very complicated. There's literally the plot of succession is embedded in me just mentioning Paramount. Disney obviously has Disney Plus. They've got Hulu. Was that what you were looking at? Like this is better distribution to a younger audience. It's more stable.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
This is the future of how people are going to watch TV. Because it does sound like I need to make a lucrative TV show is the heart of everything your organization does.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
If you've been paying attention to the TV industry, live TV is increasingly driven by sports and award shows like the Grammys.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
When I talk to the CEOs of streaming platforms or other kinds of video platforms, The idea that the big catalog isn't as valuable as things that are live comes up over and over again. You can see it right now in the battles over how much to pay for sports rights. ferocious battles because people will tune into sports and they will make appointments to watch your service, to watch sports.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
So I wanted to know how Harvey was thinking about this deal, what the possibility of streaming distribution would mean for the show itself, and how much he thought the Grammys needed the prestige and brand power of a company like Disney versus the wider distribution of something like YouTube.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Award shows are right up there in the mix, right? People will watch award shows. But award shows need something a little different than sports. Like they need some prestige. They need some institutional heft. And it feels like putting the Grammys on YouTube is just not as fancy as being anywhere near ABC and Disney.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Maybe even putting the Grammys on Netflix is not as fancy as being somewhere near Disney and ABC. Did that factor into your decision making?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But let me push on that just a little bit because there's a tension there. The biggest distribution you could have is YouTube. Everybody has it. Maybe you don't even have a choice to have it anymore. It's just there. YouTube is just there. Everybody has it. If you wanted the biggest reach for your award show, you would just put it on YouTube.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
It wouldn't give you as much revenue and it probably wouldn't give you as much brand halo versus Disney, which is Disney. Is that an actual tradeoff you made? I could get more audience on YouTube, but I get more brand halo and perhaps revenue from Disney.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Yeah. When you think about moving to more internet-native distribution, is it just a bunch of other stuff you can do? You can make it more interactive. You can cut up different pieces. Is that stuff you're thinking about to reinvent the concept of an award show in that way?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
We also talked about the Grammy Awards themselves, what the categories are, how the winners are chosen, and who those winners get to be. That's actually been Harvey's biggest project. The Academy just completely re-qualified its pool of voting members for the Grammys as part of a years-long effort to bring in younger voters and more women and people of color.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Yeah, that was my other question. Broadcast television imposed a kind of discipline on TV production, whether it's we're going to have 30-minute sitcoms instead of sort of like endless you can look at your phone streaming shows, or whether it's, boy, this award show has gone on for a long time and it's time to wrap it up. There is a discipline that was imposed by the distribution.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Streaming just doesn't have that. You really could have 10 Grammy Award shows a year. You could have an all-day-long Grammy Award show and show people highlights later. But the compactness and the discipline of this is a show and it begins and ends, that lends some tension to it. It lends some stakes to it. I know you're saying that's kind of open and you're thinking about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But that seems important to preserve.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
At the same time, the internet means the very idea of genre in music has been getting blurrier and blurrier for over a decade. I asked Harvey to define pop music, and you will hear him think through the answer.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
The internet has also created massive fandoms and stan culture, and I wanted to know how Harvey was thinking about that in the context of awards, which are supposed to be about recognizing art, not just popularity. Of course, Harvey and I also talked about AI, which has posed to disrupt almost every creative industry and which has already caused major lawsuits and controversy in music.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Welcome back. I'm talking with Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, about the absolute biggest elephant in the room right now, the disruptive potential of generative AI on the music industry. Let's talk about what's going on with music and technology. Where the money comes from in this industry. Because that seems under a lot of pressure as well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
You'll hear Harvey explain that he's not a reflexive AI hater and that he thinks there's a place for some of these tools in music production. In fact, he made the major decision to allow music made with AI to be eligible for the Grammys. But like so many other folks we've talked to, you'll hear him tout the irreplaceable, irrepressible benefits of human creativity.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
And it doesn't seem like anyone knows the answer, which is why I like paying so much attention to the music industry. We went through the Napster revolution. We're at what feels like a plateau in streaming. Everyone has moved to streaming. We understand how the economics work. That seems stable for a minute. Oops, here comes AI. And that might upend everything once again.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
There's a lot of work in AI in music right now. There's a lot of controversy. There's some pretty good diss tracks made with AI. Last year, Reservoir Media's Gulnar Khoashawi came on Decoder and she said, AI is on a collision course in the music industry. And she's buying catalogs left and right. She's doing it. And she says, this is a collision course.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
You last year said music with AI-generated elements would be Grammy eligible. All right. So this is an important checkmark. OK. We're going to allow some of this in here. Where do you think we are right now? We've gone through BBL Drizzy. We've gone through some AI-generated beats. There's a handful of pieces of legislation maybe that we should talk about.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But where do you think the state of play is right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
And you'll also hear him admit that he's nervous about it all, and that sorting it all out is just going to be complex. I'll be honest with you, this is one of my favorite Decoder conversations in a while. As you can probably tell, I love talking about the music industry, and Harvey was open to thinking through a lot of these issues out loud on the show.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
So I look at the industry right now. I brought up BBL Drizzy. I think that beat was made with Udeo, which is one of the AI song generation tools. Udeo and then its competitor, Suno. were sued by a bunch of record labels because they've just ingested a vast catalog of music in order to build those tools and train on, that seems like a comet that's gonna hit the earth, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
That lawsuit will get resolved one way or the other, and then we'll all live inside of that framework. Why let the people using those tools When no one knows how the money works or even if they're appropriate or legal, be eligible for Grammys now before the industry has sorted out the morality or economics of those tools.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Okay, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr., here we go. Harvey Mason, Jr., you're the CEO of The Recording Academy. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
You are a songwriter. I'm confident that some of your work is in some of these training databases. How do you feel about that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just looking at your list of credits. I mean, you've got Destiny's Child, you've got Britney Spears. It's all in here. Do you think that that stuff should be compensated if Suno and UDO are using it to train their models?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
By the way, for the listener, you should just go look at Harvey's Wikipedia page because I named two out of like 500. Brand name artist that you have worked with is an incredible list. I should have just been asking about that the whole time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
The way that you would solve this problem economically in a framework of the law that we have right now is you would assign ownership to something like your voice or the way you sound or your likeness. The Recording Academy was in support of a bill that passed in Tennessee called the Elvis Act, which is a great name that adds voices to likeness protections.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I read some of the coverage of that bill and it says, hey, there's no carve out in here for Elvis impersonators, right? We're going to solve the AI problem and we might have just made Elvis impersonators illegal in Tennessee. How do you see that balance? That's tough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But that's dangerous to make Elvis impersonators federally legal.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I know, but how would you write that law to say a robot can't sound like Elvis, but this guy can?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But even those two things you said, right? We don't want to stop Elvis impersonators. We don't want people to use artists' voices without compensation. Yeah, that means the Elvis impersonators have to pay. Like just that little basic thing. Don't use my voice for that impersonation. Does it matter to you whether it's AI or whether it's an Elvis impersonator or a Britney Spears impersonator?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
As the money moves around in the music industry, we've tried to solve that problem in different ways. So streaming rates went down, and now we all argue about songwriting credits to make sure some of the pennies come back to the original artists because the streaming isn't paying those artists. I'll give you an example.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I'm excited to talk to you. As you might know, I'm obsessed with the music industry. I think paying attention to the music industry is the best way to predict what happens to every other creative industry five years from now. You obviously have a deep amount of insight into that. And on top of that, we're talking a week before Grammy nominations come out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Only just because Olivia Rodrigo's Guts tour movie just hit Netflix, so I saw a bunch of coverage of this again. Taylor Swift came and took a credit on Deja Vu. I'm already playing with fire now. The two fandoms are going to come for me. But that's the thing that happened. It's very controversial.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
And then Elvis Costello, who's one of my favorite artists ages ago, came out and said, OK, I agree that Olivia's song Brutal sounds a lot like Pump It Up. And then his quote was, this is fine by me. That's how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That's what I did.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that because I think it would be ludicrous. Other people clearly felt differently about songs on that record. So we've now created a scenario where it's like the artist's choice, whether they go after other artists for using things like chord progressions or loud bridges. Like how do you see that resolving in the world of AI?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Like it's already chaos without AI. And now we're using AI tools when we're saying the answer to AI is to create more ownership of things like voices and chord progressions and sounds.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
By the way, can I just say that is one of the most candid answers to that question.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
So I'm always interested in how that works, how you're thinking about that process. That's such an important part of the cultural calendar every year. And we got to talk about AI. There's just an infinite amount of AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But those understandings come from litigation, right? I mean that's – we're going to have to go fight this out. Someone is going to have to sue the copyright office. Someone is going to have to sue – one artist is going to have to sue another.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Can I actually just make the comparison to sampling and how that played out? Because you lived it very directly. I watched it as a young copyright lawyer, and it seemed like the thing that got us through that was this is a pretty closed ecosystem, right? There's only so many producers. There's only so many labels and the number of labels is just getting smaller.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
There's only so many clearing houses and there's really fundamentally only so many artists that are going to try to clear a sample, right? There are only so many managers and lawyers. So all those people could talk. And you could say, I need to clear the sample or in the case of some very famous songs, forget.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
And then someone could show up and get all the money, which has happened more times than not. But it's a closed ecosystem.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Right. And AI is just like massive open ecosystem. And then at the top of it is Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai at Google and Sam Altman who just don't seem to give a shit. Like if you're some lawyer for some artist and you try to roll up on Sam Altman, he's going to – look, I stole Scarlett Johansson's voice. Like what are you going to do to me?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Is that going to play out the same way or is it going to be messier? Because it seems like no one has any leverage over these companies.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Yeah, I feel like I might get – like the readers might throw me off a ledge if every decoder is about AI. Or alternatively, if I keep going, they might throw me off a ledge. We'll find out. Let's start with the basics. You've been in this job as CEO since 2020. There was a big shakeup in the recording academy. There was lockdown, the music industry collapsed. went into hibernation for a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
The theme of this conversation for me is the tension you have between your members who are professional musicians and part of that community and their audience of consumers and fans. Whenever we write about AI, the parts of our audience that are professional creatives are furious, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I'm pretty sure that we got more responses to my interview with the CEO of Adobe that basically added up to, you should have arrested him than any other episode of Decoder we've ever done. Because people were just mad that there's generative AI in Photoshop. What do your members say about this? Are they as upset? Are they as furious?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
We all did a lot of zoom recordings. Now we're back into massive tours. There's a new era of stars emerging. Let's start with the very basics though. Tell people what the recording academy is and how it participates in the music industry.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Harvey, I've got to let you go, but I can't let you go without asking one question I've been dying to ask you the whole time. Who's a young artist on the come up that people should be paying attention to? Because I know you have a full view of this industry.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
All right. I did my best. That was the hardest question I could think of, which I saved it for the end. I'm going to have to find you. We're going to have to talk about music some other time, just for an hour. But thank you so much for coming, Dakota.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I'd like to thank Harvey Mason Jr. for taking the time to join me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails, as many of you have discovered recently. You can also hit me up on threads.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
I'm at Reckless1280. And we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod, and it's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox, Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
So that's really interesting to me. You described some very important philanthropic work. You described some very important work. Music cares, I think, is a stabilizing force in the music industry. There isn't a great social service net in the United States. So touring musicians don't have regular jobs. That provides an essential stability for those folks.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
There's a lot there that I think is important. But you're very open that the revenue comes from the show and from the licensing deal with CBS. We'll talk a little bit about where that deal is going and how it's changing because you all just announced that you're leaving CBS in a couple of years. But stick with the present day for a minute. Do you think the incentives are aligned there? Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Like if I look at that in the most broad possible way, it's CBS is paying for a TV show and that TV show is paying to provide essential stability to touring recording artists. And that might be a little weird. Do you ever, does it ever strike you that that's not all perfectly aligned?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Yeah, and that's part of the reason I asked the question that way. I realized it was pretty blunt. But that idea that the show, which is a defining broadcast television production, is the thing that stabilizes the music industry in the way that it stabilizes the music industry, I think is a little opaque to most people. It sounds like it's opaque to some of your members.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But it also seems like a thing you can poke at and say, is this how it should be structured? Yeah. And so I'm curious. You're new in the role. Obviously, you've been through a lot of change. I want to ask you about the TV side of it, right? Because the idea that broadcast television is a rich source of revenue, I imagine you have some perspective on that as that is changing as well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
But is this how it should be structured? If you could change that, would you want to diversify that revenue at all?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Let's come back to that in a minute. Let's just continue on just how the organization is structured for one second. How many people are the Record Academy? What does the business look like?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Those 300 people, they're distributed equally. How many people work on Music Cares versus the show itself, for example?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
And how many people are spending all of their time just working on the Grammy Awards every year?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
It's interesting. I interview so many tech CEOs on a show and ask them what their products are and how they're structured to make those products. They give me answers that are broadly familiar. We have a design team. We have an engineering team. We've got a go-to-market team. Your product is the awards. It seems very clear just in talking to you just for the first five minutes here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
You're very focused on the Grammy Awards as a product, and what you're describing is we need the right members to vote on those awards, and then we need the right team members – deciding what those awards should be so that at the end when we put on a TV show, it's the right list of awards and we come to the outcomes that people want. How much fiddling do you do with that year to year?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Because part of the – I think the value of the Grammys is that it is an institution, right? So that some things have to stay the same and some things obviously have to change as you're describing. How much do you think about that balance?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Were they the best bidder? Was the decision Yahoo will deploy this to the most people at scale? Was it they're offering us the most money? How did you choose?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
This sounds like the dream. You can just have this. I'm going to walk away. It's a bunch of money. Okay.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Makes sense. I was just wondering if that was it or whether it was like, it wasn't as much money, but they had the biggest platform and you wanted to, because Yahoo is deceptively still huge.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
On top of that, Mike has a pretty fascinating history. If you're a longtime tech fan, you likely know him as the co-founder of Instagram. a company he started with Kevin Systrom before selling it to Facebook, now Meta, for a billion dollars back in 2012. That was an eye-popping amount of money back then, and the deal turned Mike into founder royalty basically overnight.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We're back with Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger. All right, so that's that chapter. The next chapter is you show up as the Chief Product Officer at Anthropic. What was that conversation like? Because in terms of big commitments, hairy problems, are we going to destroy the web? It's all right there. Maybe it's a lot more work. How did you make the decision to go to Anthropic?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Mike left Meta in 2018, and a few years later he started to dabble in AI, but not quite the type of AI we talk about all the time on Decoder. Instead, Mike and Kevin launched Artifact, an AI-powered newsreader that did some very interesting things with recommendation algorithms and aggregation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I'm excited for the inevitable Beatles documentaries about how you're the fifth Beatle, and we can argue about that forever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
In 2024 with our audience as young as it is, that might be a deep cut, but I encourage everybody to go search for Pete Best and how much of an argument that is. Let me ask you just two big picture questions about working in AI generally. You started Instagram. You're deep with creatives. You built a platform of creatives. You care about design, obviously.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I was a big fan of Artifact, but ultimately it didn't take off like anyone wanted, and Mike and Kevin shut it down earlier this year. They sold the underlying tech to Yahoo. We talk a lot about decisions here on Decoder, so I wanted to know more about the decision to shut Artifact down, and then the decision to sell it to Yahoo.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
With that community, AI is a moral dilemma. People are upset about it. I'm sure they will be upset that I even talked to you. We had the CEO of Adobe on to talk about Firefly, and that is some of the most upset emails we've ever gotten. How did you evaluate that? I'm going to go work in this technology that is built on training against all this stuff on the internet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And people have really, really hot emotions about that. And there's a lot, we've got to talk about lawsuits. There's lawsuits. There's copyright lawsuits. How are you thinking about that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
There's so much controversy about where the training data comes from. Where does Anthropix training data for Cloud come from? Are you scraping the web like everybody else?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Were you respecting robots.txt before everyone realized that you had to start respecting robots.txt?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
What about YouTube, Instagram?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And then, of course, I wanted to know why Mike decided to join Anthropic and work in AI. An industry with a lot of investment, but very few consumer products to justify it. Really, what is all of this for? What products does Mike see in the future that make all of the turmoil around AI worth it? How is he thinking about building them?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
You don't have a spare key to the metadata center, the Instagram servers?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
When you think about that general dynamic, there's a lot of creatives out there who perceive the IATB a risk to their jobs or perceive that there's been a big taking. I'll just ask about the lawsuit. There's a lawsuit against Anthropic. It's a bunch of authors who say that the model, that Claude is legally trained against their books. Do you think there's a product answer to this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It's going to lead into my second question, but I'll just ask broadly. Do you think you can make a product so good that people overcome these objections? Because that is kind of the vague argument I hear from the industry, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Like right now we're seeing a bunch of chatbots and you can make the chatbot fire off a bunch of copyright information, but there's going to come a turn when that goes away because the product will be so good and so useful that people will think it has been worth it. And I don't see that yet. I think that's a lot of the heart of –
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
the copyright lawsuits, beyond just the legal pieces of it, is that the tools are not so useful that anyone can see that the trade is worth it. Do you think there's going to be a product where it is obvious that the trade is worth it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I've always enjoyed talking product with Mike, and this conversation is no different, even if I'm still not really sure anyone's described what the future is going to look like. Okay, Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger, here we go. Mike Krieger, you are the new chief product officer at Anthropic. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Great to see you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Let me ground that question in a more specific example. both in order to ask you a more specific question and also to calm the people who are already drafting me angry emails. TikTok exists. TikTok is maybe the purest garden of innovative copyright infringement that the world has ever created.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I've watched entire movies on TikTok, and it's just because people have found ways to bypass their content filters. I do not perceive the same outrage at TikTok for copyright infringement as I do with AI. Maybe there's someone who's really mad. I watched entire like 1980s episodes of This Old House on TikTok accounts that are literally labeled like best of old This Old House.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I don't think Bob Vila is getting royalties for that. But it seems to be fine because TikTok as a whole has so much utility and people perceive even the utility of watching like old 1980s episodes of This Old House.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And there's something about that dynamic between this platform is going to be loaded full of other people's work and we're going to get value of it that seems to be rooted in the fact that mostly I'm looking at the actual work. I'm not looking at some 15th derivative of this whole house as expressed by an AI chatbot. I'm actually just looking at a 1980s version of this whole house.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Do you think that AI chatbots can ever get to a place where it feels like that? Where I'm actually just looking at the work or I'm providing my attention or time or money to the actual person who made the underlying work as opposed to we trained it on the open internet and now we're charging you 20 bucks and the... 15 steps back, that person gets nothing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That's the end of the economy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Anthropic started, it was probably the original, we're all quitting OpenAI to build a safer AI company. Now there's a lot of them. My friend Casey makes a joke that every week someone quits to start yet another safer AI company.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Is that expressed in the company? I mean, obviously, Instagram had big moderation policies. You thought about it a lot. It is not perfect as a platform or a company, but it's certainly at the core of the platform. Is that at the core of Anthropic in the same way that there are things you will not do?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about products. The last time I talked to you, I was trying to convince you to come to the Code Conference. I didn't actually get to interview you at Code, but I was trying to convince you to come. And I was like, I just want to talk about products with someone as opposed to regulation. And you're like, yes, here's my product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I warn the audience, we're definitely going to talk a little bit about AI regulation. It's going to happen. It seems part of the puzzle. But you're building the actual products. And I have a lot of questions about what those products could be, what the products are now, where they're going.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think this brings me to the decoder questions. Anthropic is what's called a public benefit corporation. There's a trust underlying it. You are the first head of product. You've described the product and research teams as being different than there's a safety culture. How does that all work? How is Anthropic structured?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And is that all just, that's the product side. The research side, is that the side that works on the actual models?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But I want to start sort of at the beginning of your Anthropic story, which is also the end of your Artifact story. So people know you. You started Instagram. You were at Meta for a while. You left Meta. And then you and Kevin Systrom started Artifact, which was a really fun newsreader. It had some really interesting ideas about how to surface the web and have comments and all that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
How big is Anthropic? How many people?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And what's the split between that research function and the product function?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah. Tony Fidel, who did the iPod, he's been on Dakota before, but when we were starting The Verge, he was basically like, look, you're going to go from, I don't remember what the actual numbers were, but he said something like, you're going to go from like 15 or 20 people to 50 or 100, and then nothing will ever be the same.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I've thought about that every day since, because we're always right in the middle of that range. And I'm like, when is the tipping point? Where does moderation live in this structure? You mentioned safety on the model side, but you're out in the market building products. You've got what sounds like a very horny golden great bridge people can talk to. And you're running tests there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Sorry, that's just my every conversation has one joke about how horny the models are. Where does moderation live, right? At Instagram, there's the big centralized meta trust and safety function. At YouTube, it's in the product org under Neil Mohan there. Where does it live for you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And then you decided to shut it down. I think of the show as a show for builders and we don't often talk about shutting things down. Walk me through that because it's as important as starting things up sometimes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think I'm very worried about AI-generated fakery across the internet. This morning, I was looking at a Denver Post article about a fake news story about a murder that people are calling the Denver Post to find out why they hadn't reported on it, which is in its own way the correct outcome, right? They heard a fake story, they called a trusted source.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
At the same time, the Denver Post had to go run down this fake murder, true crime story Because an AI had just generated it and put it on YouTube. That all seems very dangerous to me. There's the death of the photograph. We talk about it all the time. Are we going to believe what we see anymore? Where do you sit on that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Anthropic is obviously very safety-minded, but we are still generating content that can go haywire in all kinds of ways.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We're back with Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger to discuss where he thinks generative AI is going next and whether it's somewhat dangerous. With apologies to my friends at Hard Fork, Casey and Kevin, they ask everybody what their P-Doom is. So I'm going to ask you that. But that question is rooted in AGI. What is the chances we think that they'll become self-aware and kill us all?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Let me ask you a variation of that first, which is what if all of this just hastens our own information apocalypse and we end up just taking ourselves out? Do we need the AGI to kill us all, or are we headed towards information apocalypse first?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But let me bring this a little background. We started talking about recommendation algorithms, and now we're talking about classifiers and having filters on social media to help you see stuff. You're on one side of it now, right? Claude just makes the things, and you try not to make bad things. The other companies, Google and Meta, are on both sides of the equation, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We're racing forward with Gemini. We're racing forward with Lama. And then we have to make the filtering systems on the other side to keep the bad stuff out. And it feels like those companies are at decided cross-purposes with themselves.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Now from your seat at Anthropic, knowing how the other side works, is there anything you're doing to make the filtering easier? Is there anything you're doing to make it more semantic, make it more understandable what you're looking at to make it so that the systems that sort the content have an easier job of understanding what's real and what's fake?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Instagram filters are kind of an interesting comparison here. Instagram started as photo sharing, Silicon Valley nerds, and it became Instagram. It is a dominant part of our culture, and the filters had real effects on people's self-image, had real negative effects, particularly on teenage girls and how they felt about themselves.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
There are some studies that say teenage boys are starting to have self-image issues and body image issues at higher and higher rates because of what they perceive on Instagram. That's bad, right? And it's bad... weighed against the general good of Instagram, which many more people get to express themselves. We build different kinds of communities.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
How are you thinking about those risks with Anthropix products?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
This is the second decoder question. How do you make decisions? What's the framework?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Wait, what was the tradeoff and what was the pain?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think this brings me to a question that I've sort of been dying to ask the whole time. You're talking about next generation models. You're new to Anthropic. You're building products on top of these models. I am not convinced that LLMs as a technology can do all the things people are saying they will do. Like my personal PDoom is like, I don't know how you get from here to there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I don't know how you get from LLM to AGI. I see it being good at language. I don't see it being good at thinking. Do you think LLMs can do all the things people want them to do?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
There are two things about Artifact I want to ask about. And I definitely want to ask about what it's like to sell something to Yahoo in 2024, which is unusual. It's not a thing that's been happening a lot. The first is that Artifact was very much designed to surface web pages. It was predicated on a very rich web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Well, let me ask you in a more numeric way. I'm looking at some numbers here. Anthropic, $7 billion worth of funding as of last year. Anthropic has taken more than $7 billion of funding over the last year. You're one of the few people in the world who has ever built a product that has delivered a return on $7 billion worth of funding, right, at scale.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And if there's one thing I'm worried about in the age of AI is that the web is getting less rich, right? More and more things are moving to closed platforms for more creators. They want to start something new. They end up on a YouTube or a TikTok or I don't know if there's like dedicated threads creators yet, but they're coming.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
You can probably imagine some products that might return on that investment. Can the LLMs you have today build those products?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So what actually, let me ask a threshold question. What are those products that can deliver that much value?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That's all at what, 20 bucks a month, enterprise subscription product?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And it seemed like that product was chasing a dream that might be under pressure from AI specifically, but also just like the rise of creator platforms more broadly. Was that a real problem or is that just something I saw from the outside?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So I'm going to bring this all the way back around. We started by talking on distribution and whether things can get so tailored for their distribution that they don't work in other contexts. I look around and I see Google distributing Gemini on its phones. I look at Apple distributing Apple intelligence on its phones.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
They've talked about maybe having some model interchangeability in there between right now it's open AI, but Maybe Gemini will be there. Maybe Cloud will be there. That feels like the big distribution. They're just going to take it and these are the experiences people will have unless they pay some other money to someone else.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
In the history of computing, the free thing that comes with your operating system tends to be very successful. How are you thinking about that problem? Because if you're just like, I don't think OpenAI is getting any money to be an Apple intelligence. I think Apple just thinks some people will convert for 20 bucks and they're Apple and that's going to be as good as it gets.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
How are you thinking about this problem? How are you thinking about widening that distribution, not optimizing for other people's ideas?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Are there consumer-scalable $7 billion worth of consumer products that don't rely on being built into your phone?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah. OpenAI's answer to this appears to be search. I feel like I need to disclose, like every other media company, Vox Media has taken the money. I have nothing to do with this deal. I'm just letting people know that we took the money, too. It feels like their answer is search, right? If you can claw off some percentage of Google, you've got a pretty good business.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That's basically what Satya Nadella told me about Bing when they launched ChatGPT-powered Bing. Like, any half a percent of Google is a huge boost to Bing. Would you build a search product like that? We've talked about recommendations a lot. The line between recommendations and search is like right there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So it sounds like right now the focus is on work, right? You described a lot of work products that you're thinking about, maybe not so much on consumer. I would say the danger in the enterprise is it's bad if your enterprise software is hallucinating, just broadly. It seems risky.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It seems like those folks might be more inclined to sue you if you send some business haywire because the software is hallucinating. Is this something you can solve? I've had a lot of people tell me that LLMs are always hallucinating and we're just controlling the hallucinations. And I should stop asking people if they can stop hallucinating because the question doesn't make any sense.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Is that how you're thinking about it? Can you control it so that you can build reliable enterprise products?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
This all just adds up to my feeling that prompt engineering and then teaching a model to behave itself feels non-deterministic in a way. The future of computing is this misbehaving toddler, and we just have to contain it, and then we'll be able to talk to computers like real people, and they'll be able to talk to us like real people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That just seems wild to me, that even if you're going to release the system prompts, I read the system prompts, and I'm like, this is how we're going to do it? Apple system prompt is, do not hallucinate. This is how we're doing it. Does that feel right to you? Does that feel like a stable foundation for the future of computing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
You're building out the product infrastructure. You're obviously thinking a lot about the big products and how you might build them. What should people be looking for from Anthropic? What's the major point of product emphasis we should be looking for?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Well, Mike, this has been great. I could talk to you forever and ever about this stuff. Thank you so much for joining Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I'd like to thank Mike Krieger for taking the time to join Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about the show or anything else you'd like us to cover, please drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up on threads on that reckless 1280. We also have a TikTok.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
You said media properties. Some media properties have apps. Some are expressed only as newsletters. But I think what I'm asking about is the web. This is just me doing therapy about the web. What I'm worried about is the web, right? The creators aren't on the web. We're not making websites and Artifact was predicated on there being a rich web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Search products in general are sort of predicated on there being a rich and searchable web that will deliver good answers. To some extent, AI products require there to be a new web because that's where we're training all our models. Did you see that? That, okay, this promise of the web is kind of under pressure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
If all the new stuff is breaking on a closed platform, you can't search like a TikTok or an X or something else, or you can't index or surfacing old tweets is not really a great user experience. Actually building products on the web might be getting more constrained and not a good idea anymore. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the entire industry.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, the way that we talk about that thesis on Decoder most often is that people build media products for the distribution. And so podcasts famously have open distribution. It's just an RSS feed. Well, it's like an RSS feed, but there's like Spotify's ad server in the middle. I'm sorry to everybody who gets whatever ads that we put in here. But it's core. It's an RSS product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Newsletter is still at its core an IMAP product, an open mail protocol product. The web is like search distribution. So we've optimized to one thing. And the reason I'm asking this, and I'm going to come back to this theme a few times, it felt like Artifact was trying to build a new kind of distribution.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But the product it was trying to distribute was web pages, which were already overtly optimized for something else.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Okay, so that's one. I want to come back to that theme. I really wanted to start with Artifact in that way because it feels like you had an experience in one version of the Internet that is maybe under pressure. The other thing I wanted to ask about Artifact, you and Kevin, your co-founder, both once told me that you had big ideas, like scale ideas for Artifact.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Anthropic was started in 2021 by former OpenAI executives and researchers who wanted to build a more safety-minded AI company, which I have to point out is a real theme among people who leave OpenAI. Something to think about. Anthropic's main product right now is Claude, which is the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And you had this big idea, and you wouldn't tell me what it was. It's over now. What was it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
All right, last artifact question. You shut it down, and then there was a wave of interest. And then I think publicly, one of you said, oh, there's a wave of interest. We might flip it. And then it was Yahoo. Tell me about that process.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Like other major AI companies, Anthropic has billions in funding from some of the biggest names in tech, primarily Amazon. But at the same time, Anthropic does have a distinct and intense safety culture. The company is notable for employing some people who legitimately worry that AI might destroy mankind. And I wanted to ask Mike how that tension plays out in product design.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
JOHN MUELLER, Let's talk about what that product is today. So right now, you have the R1. You can buy it. It's a beautiful piece of hardware. It is orange. It is very striking. It has a screen. It has a scroll dial. And then it has a connection to your service in the cloud, which goes and does stuff for you. That costs $199. Are you making money on the sale of each individual R1 unit right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
What's the margin? What's your profit on R1?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
To make it over 40% on the hardware margin of the R1.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I can draw that line for you. So it's $1.99. You're making over 40%. So that's between $80 and $90, right? It's not 50%, which would be $100. So it's a little less. So between $80 and $90 in margin. That margin has to, you do have to pay your cloud bills, right? So is that margin all being fed into your cloud bills?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's a lot of companies that like to make a lot of money. They're not cheap to partner with all those companies.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So if I buy an R1 from you, you take $90 of margin or $80 of margin. At what point, how much do I have to use my R1 to turn that negative for you? Because everything I do with an AI, that's a token. That token costs money. It costs multiple services. Your bandwidth costs money. It all costs money. How much does a single R1 user have to use their R1 to take up $90 a margin or $80 a margin from you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Jesse Liu, the founder and CEO of Rabbit. It's a startup company that makes the adorable R1 AI gadget. It's a little handheld designed by superstar design firm Teenage Engineering. It's meant to be how you talk to Rabbit's AI agent.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We're going to have to pause for a quick break here. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
which then goes off onto the internet and does things for you, from playing music on Spotify to ordering an Uber and even buying things from Amazon. Rabbit launched with a lot of hype at CES and then a big party in New York, but early reviews of the R1 device itself were universally bad.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Welcome back. I'm talking to Rabbit founder and CEO Jesse Liu. Right before the break, I was asking him how many AI tokens a user would have to use in order to cost Rabbit more money than the device brought in. His response was that Rabbit had done the math and it was fine. Then he started calling out his competitors and others in the space. Let's get back into it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So, one, I don't think anybody has ever linked criticism of Humane to criticism of Marquez's wallpaper app on our show before. Well done. I think Marquez has a very different view of where his expertise is and what went wrong with that app. And maybe one day we'll talk to him about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But my question for you when you talk about growth and you talk about the unit economics of the rabbit is on some curve – the hardware becomes unprofitable for you. Just me having a rabbit for longer than 18 months becomes unprofitable for you. That's the moment that you would charge a subscription. You would say, to continue using this thing, it can't be negative for our company.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And that's the thing that I'm pushing on here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Our own David Pearce gave it a three out of 10 back in May, saying most of the features don't work or don't even exist. And the core feature that didn't seem to exist was the most important of all, Rabbit's Large Action Model, or LAM, which is meant to allow the system to open a web browser in the cloud and browse for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So I'm just curious, just as I've played with R1s and looked at the device, I've always wondered, how on earth are we making money at $1.99? So that makes sense to me. When you think about what the rabbit is actually doing, I asked it a query. It shows me a beautiful animation on the screen, which is adorable.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And it goes off into the web and uses a bunch of APIs and now the new large action model, which is the news, right? Yesterday, you announced the large action model playground. People can watch it work. I've seen the lamb click around on the Verge website just to read headlines, which is neat. Is that the back end of this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I ask the rabbit to do something and in the cloud, it goes and clicks around on the web for me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The LAM is supposed to intelligently understand what it's looking at on those websites, and then literally click around to accomplish tasks on your behalf.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
There have been a lot of questions over the past 10 months about just how real Rabbit Slam was, but the day before Jesse and I spoke, the company launched what it calls LAM Playgrounds, which lets people actually use a bare-bones version of the system. And it does indeed appear to be clicking around on the web, although it is obviously very early and it is very slow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. So I want to make the marker between yesterday and the day before it, right? You announced the Rabbit at CS in January with the LAM, but it wasn't there. Why announce it without its fundamental enabling feature?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So I wanted to know how Jesse planned to invest in the LAM and compete with all the other AI agents being announced that also promise to do things for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The apps you started with, Spotify, DoorDash, there are a few others. Those are APIs, right? You were using their APIs. You were actually opening Spotify on the web in Chrome and clicking on it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's the most brittle way to use Spotify I can think of.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
You made a smart speaker. Spotify can run on smart speakers and other kinds of devices.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So Spotify right now on the R1, when I ask to play a song, it goes and opens Spotify on the web somewhere.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yes. And then you're restreaming the audio to my device through your service? Correct. Correct. Does Spotify know that you're doing this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And they're okay with that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
For example, Microsoft just announced a new agent-y version of Copilot, and Apple's vision for the next generation of Siri is an AI agent, one that will run on the phone that you already have and have direct access to your phone apps and the data inside them. It's the same with Google and Android and Gemini, and even Amazon's rumored next generation of Alexa.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I've always been very curious about this. I've been dying to ask you these questions. So I ask my R1 to play a song. Somewhere in AWS, a virtual machine fires up, opens a web browser, opens Spotify, logs into my Spotify account using my credentials, clicks around on Spotify, pushes a button to play a song, and then you capture that audio and restream it to me? On my R1?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But the part where you are restreaming audio that Spotify is playing to your virtual machine to me, you're doing that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Okay, but where does the song, where do the bits go? The bits come to the virtual machine and then they come from the virtual machine to MyRabbit.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So you are re-streaming the song to me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Wait, explain how that works. Maybe I'm not technical enough to understand how that works. You're presenting the VNC to my R1.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So it's running locally on my computer?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
With no, okay, I see what you mean. So I'm logged into a cloud computer. The R1 is the client to a cloud computer. And Spotify is playing on that cloud computer and the R1 is taking that audio. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that raises like a million extra questions, right? Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Right, but I just want to be clear. That's a choice those companies have made to prevent companies like Rabbit from automating their services and disintermediating their services from the user.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So as you think about these agent models going out onto the web, however they're expressed, whether it's the LAN, whether it's whatever you're doing before the LAN playground hit, all of those companies are going to have a point of view on whether agents can use their services in this way. That's pretty unsettled. And I'm curious, you know, you have a few services.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
This is major competition for a startup, and Jesse talked about wanting to get out ahead of it. But what I really wanted to talk about is how Rabbit's system works, and whether or not it's durable. Not just technically, which is challenging, but also from a business and legal perspective.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
They might have just said, okay, let's see how this goes. But over time, you're going to enter into a much more complicated set of negotiations that will actually be probably determined by the big companies making deals, right? You can see how OpenAI or Microsoft or Amazon would make a deal to have DoorDash accessible by agents. And DoorDash would say, we've made this deal. You can't be accessible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
How do you solve that problem?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And so then when you have Uber on the R1 now, that's opening the Uber desktop app?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's what I'm asking. Sorry, what I meant by desktop app is in the web browser you're calling an Uber. If you're running on Android, why not open an Android virtual machine and use the Android app?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Is there a possibility they can detect the fact that these are not human users, but in fact, agent users?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
After all, if Rabbit's idea works and the lamb really does go out and browse websites for you, what's stopping companies like Spotify and DoorDash from blocking it? You might have a strong point of view here, Jesse certainly does, but at some point there's going to be a fight about this, and it is not clear what's going to happen.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Here, give me just a second to put this in historical context with an example. About a decade ago, a handful of startups all tried to stream broadcast television without permission or licenses by putting a bunch of TV antennas in a single location and then building apps to let people access them. This felt technically legal.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Well, let me ask you about that difference between the first generation of LAM and the Playground. The Playground sounds like the thing you've always wanted to build, right? You actually have an agent that can look at web pages, understand them, take action on them. The first one, the first – it might have been a LAM in the broader definition.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But as technology, it was expressed as like testing software that was moving in an automated way through these interfaces, right? You weren't actually understanding the interfaces. You were able to just navigate them. Well – Because that's like pretty normal robotic process automation stuff. Were you just building on that kind of technology while the LAM came into existence?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But even in the first versions? Yeah. But you could only understand... So, for example, the question I've always had is, what happens if Spotify, before the LAM exists? Because I understand that the claim is that this version can understand every website. But if Spotify changes its interface... Or DoorDash changes interface. Rabbit was kind of getting tripped up, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's a very hard proof.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It's a, but that's a hard proof, but I just take it for what it's worth. I don't, I think that means it's not good enough, right? The Spotify app on my phone never goes down for maintenance. And if the claim is the agent can go take actions for me, I have to rely on that at a hundred percent.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And so I think the question for me that I have, this whole thing is the Delta between what you want to do, which is have agents go and crawl the web for me. And the reality of what we can do now is, Actually, the middle ground is APIs, right? The middle ground is not so brittle. Okay. That makes more sense to me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The agent would, instead of using an interface design for my eyes, use an interface design for computers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
What's the difference between all of your customers having their own antennas and putting all those antennas in a single place and letting your customers access them over the internet? And some of these companies were seriously innovative.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It is not good enough. Where's the curve where it's 100%? Because API is 100 percent.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The most famous was a company called Aereo, which spent a ton of money designing specialized TV antennas the size of a nickel so they could pack as many of them into a data center as possible. I wrote about Aereo back then. I visited their offices in Brooklyn, I saw the antennas, I interviewed the CEO, the whole thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Sure. Well, the promise here is you're going to eventually have a general purpose slam that is just using the web for you, right? So you hand your phone to a buddy, which is why you can make the rabbit device and just talk to it, and it goes off and does stuff in the general case. The enormous –
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Death Star that everyone sees is that Apple has announced substantially the same feature for Siri on the iPhone. And Apple can get the deals. And Apple can pull developers into an API relationship locally on the phone with Siri. And Apple honestly can just burn money until it chooses not to build a car or whatever it wants to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And getting people to buy another device that doesn't just fall back to the Spotify app on iOS when it breaks seems very challenging. How do you overcome that? Because if the technology isn't 100% better 100% of the time, that feels like a challenging sale.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah, Aereo got sued by the TV networks, the case went to the Supreme Court in 2014, and you will note that Aereo no longer exists. I don't know if Rabbit's another area, and I don't know how all these companies will react to having robots browse their websites instead of people. And I certainly don't know how legal systems around the world will handle the inevitable lawsuits to come.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Well, there's one, and they seem like a pretty spectacular failure. Humane launched with a lot of money and a big T-Mobile partnership and a subscription fee and Time magazine and all that stuff. And it doesn't seem like that has gone very well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I asked Jesse about all this, and you'll hear his answer. He thinks Rabbit will be so successful that all these companies will show up and want to make deals. I gotta say, I don't know about that either. I do know that this is a pretty intense and occasionally contentious interview. Jesse didn't back down, and that means we got pretty deep into it. Let me know what you think.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. Let me talk about growth for a second. You mentioned you quadrupled. I'm guessing you mean by employee size.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
You told Fast Company last month the R1 is only being used daily by 5,000 people. Is that higher or lower than you expected?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
No, it's Fast Company. That's what it says. I'm reading. I'm looking at it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'm just going to quote you Fast Company. Lou said right now around 5,000 people use the R1 daily.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Okay, Jesse Liu, the founder and CEO of Rabbit. Here we go. Jesse Liu, you're the founder and CEO of Rabbit. Welcome to Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
What's the daily active number? We'll issue the correction tomorrow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
This is why I like founders on the show. This is, this is why I love having a founder on the show.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Okay. Yesterday. Okay. Yeah. What percentage of your sales is that? Yesterday? Yeah, 33,760 people. What percentage of your total sales is that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'm assuming yesterday, because it was the launch of LAN Playgrounds, this is a big spike.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I don't think I followed. You said numbers, so I don't think I followed them. Past two days, say it again.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Okay. And one day is what the LAN playground wanted to say. Okay. Correct. So you're saying it's 5,000 active users at any time, not daily.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
MATT SULLIVAN- And then you're getting about 20,000 users daily. And then we'll see if that goes up because of the LAN playground.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Well, you tell Fast Company, and then we will update it. But we ran off your quote in the magazine, so we feel good about that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We're going to have to take another short break for a minute here. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'm very excited to talk to you. Rabbit is a fascinating company. The idea for the R1 product is fascinating. I think a lot of people think that something that looks like the R1 is the next evolution of smartphones or products or something. Then there's the company itself, which is really interesting and fascinating.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
You've got a connection to Teenage Engineering, which is one of our favorite companies here at The Verge. And you've got some news to share about opening up Rabbit's large action model so people can play with it. It's kind of an early version. I really want to talk about that. But let's start with Rabbit itself. The company has not been around that long.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Welcome back. So you heard all that back and forth about Rabbit's daily active users and CEO Jesse Liu saying he would get back to us with a better number. Asked the company to clear it up. And it turns out what Jesse actually said to Fast Company was that at any given time, Rabbit has 5,000 users. The Fast Company article has been corrected. We'll correct ours as well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And we'll use Jesse's number of between 20,000 and 34,000 daily active users, which is still substantially less than the 100,000 R1 units sold. That's where we left off. Let's jump back in. Now that we have the number, we'll run it. But my question to you is you've got to sell more R1s. You've got to get more people who've already bought them to continue using it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And you are, in fact, whether or not Apple intelligence has arrived or not, it will arrive in some fashion in the coming weeks. There's a report just a week or so ago that Johnny Ive is working with Sam Altman at OpenAI on a hardware device. Something will happen with Humane. Something will happen with Google. Something will happen with Samsung.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
As that universe of competitors expands, it feels like the core technology you're betting on is being able to – automate a VMC with a large action model, right? You're going to open up user sessions for people in the cloud, and then your lamb is going to go click around in the web for them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And that will get you out of the challenges of needing to strike API deals with various companies with other kinds of deals, copyright deals with various companies, whatever you might need. Is that durable, right? The idea that this will keep rabbit away from needing all of the deals, the big companies will just go pay and get, right? Because that's the thing that I think about the most.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I can think of 10 companies that came up with a technical solution to a legal problem. And even if the technical solution was amazing, the legal problem eventually caught up with them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The R1 just started shipping six months ago. What is Rabbit? How did the company start?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I mean, this feels like the story of the AI industry probably, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Are you building to that goal? I think, again, this is just kind of the big question I'm thinking about with all of these things. Basically, every AI product is a technical solution that is ahead of wherever the legal system is or wherever the business deals are. At some point, Spotify might show up on your doorstop and say, you know what? We're not going to allow agents.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It has to be a human user and we're going to change our terms of service to say it has to be a human user. DoorDash might say it. Whoever might say it. Are you ready for that outcome? Do you have the budget socked away to go lawyer up and fight that fight?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
When do you think the turn hits?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Like... No, I'm just saying, when do you think it's a turn? When do you think that becomes a conversation about whether you can have agent users or human users?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Let me end with two kind of big thinky questions, and I forgot to ask you the decoder questions. Think on the longest timeline you can. Let's assume everything works out and it's all solved. How much time and money is it going to take before the general purpose agent you're trying to build is 100% reliable and can just do all the things that we all imagine them being able to do?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. Yeah. Timeline wise though, again, assuming everything goes your way, is it a year from now that it, that you can build on all the foundation models and all the other investment in this thing just sort of does whatever I ask on the web? Is it five years? What do you think? I,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah, and then I just want to end and ask about form factors. Obviously, the Rabbit is a very distinctive piece of hardware. People really like the design. We've seen just a lot of interesting glasses lately. The idea that we're all going to wear cameras on our face, and someone's going to build the display. Do you think that's correct?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I was wearing the meta Ray-Bans yesterday, and I was like, why would I wear these all the time? I'd rather have a thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The old Google Glass form factor? Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I forgot to ask you the main fucking question. This is my fault. You've had a number of startups. You've done a number of things. You have a big idea here. How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. Does Apple? Because you're opening it on the web.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Jesse, thank you so much for coming on Decoder. It makes no game to answer these questions. I really appreciate it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'd like to thank Rabbit CEO Jesse Liu for taking the time to speak with me, and thank you for listening to Decoder. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'm at Reckless1280, and we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Our editor is Kelly Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The idea that agents are going to be a big part of our life, and in particular, general purpose agents that go take actions for us on the internet. I've heard this idea from all kinds of folks, from startup founders like yourself to the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. I want to come back to that. That's a big idea, but I just want to stay focused on Rabbit for a second.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
How many people work at Rabbit today?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. So CS was a big launch. We were there. Our own David Pierce was at the party. The Rabbit was introduced. You gave demos in a hotel room, I think. And then you had the launch party here at the TWA Hotel at JFK, which is very cool. The things went out, but you've been growing. You said you started 17 people in January at CS and you have 50 now. What are you adding all those people to do?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. How is the whole company structured? As you go from 7 to 17 to 50, you obviously have to decide how to structure Rabbit. How is that structured now? How has it changed?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah, but how are your 50 people you have now, how is that organized inside the company?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Teenage engineering is clearly a big part of the Rabbit story. They designed the R1, and their co-founder, Jesper Kalthuf, is your chief design officer. How much more hardware are you designing right now? Are there iterations to come? Do you have a roadmap of new products?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And is Jesper actively working on those designs, or as chief design officer, is he working on something else?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Okay. How much money have you raised so far?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
When I look at the amount of money that other AI companies are going out to raise, open AI, right as we're speaking, open AI just raised the biggest round ever in history to go build obviously a foundation model, digital god, whatever Sam Altman thinks he's doing. Do you think you can compete at $35 million a round?