Decoder with Nilay Patel Vox Media Podcast Network

Today, we’re talking about politics and lobbying in America. It’s hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and billionaires didn’t touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didn’t really exist before the 1970s. Now, our political debates about everything from energy, finance, and healthcare are deeply intertwined with corporations and their money — and new big players in tech now spend tons of political money of their own.

To understand the structure of today’s political lobbying and how we go here, I brought Pulitzer Prize winner Brody Mullins on the show. Brody has a new book he co-wrote with his brother Luke Mullins called The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, which came out last month. It’s a definitive history of modern lobbying in America, told through the lens of some of the industry’s most unsavory characters and the influence they’ve exerted on DC politics across decades. 

Links:

If Donald Trump Wins, Paul Manafort Will Be Waiting in the Wings | NYT


Meta had its biggest lobbying quarter ever | The Verge


Apple quietly bankrolled a lobbying group for app developers | The Verge


The Many Reinventions of a Legendary Washington Influence Peddler | Politico 

The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington | The Guardian


Big Tech Has a New Favorite Lobbyist: You | WSJ


SOPA bill shelved after global protests from Google, Wikipedia and others | WashPo


The Russia Inquiry Ended a Democratic Lobbyist’s Career. He Wants It Back. | NYT


The Swamp Builders | WashPo


The Rise and Fall of a K Street Renegade | WSJ



Credits: 
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix. I caught up with Greg while he was at the Cannes Lions festival in France, which is basically the world’s biggest gathering of advertisers and marketers. It’s an increasingly important place for Greg to be, as Netflix’s new ad tier has nearly doubled in six months to more than 40 million subscribers and feels increasingly pivotal to the future of the company. 

On top of that, Netflix is updating its famous culture memo, and I wanted to chat with Greg about the changes he’s making to that document, and how he’s thinking about maintaining that culture as Netflix grows into things like advertising and gaming.

Links: 

Netflix Culture Memo | Netflix


Netflix Culture Memo (2009) | Netflix


Streaming is cable now | The Verge


Netflix’s ad tier hits 40 million users | The Verge


Netflix is different now — and there’s no going back | The Verge 


Netflix just fired the organizer of the trans employee walkout | The Verge


Netflix doesn’t want to hear it anymore | The Verge


It’s hard to believe Samsung’s new, matte The Frame is actually a TV | The Verge



Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23946561

Credits: 
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve got a special episode of the show today – I was traveling last week, so Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and our new senior AI reporter Kylie Robison are filling in for me, with a very different kind of episode about AI. We talk a lot about AI in a broad sense on Decoder — it comes up in basically every single interview I do these days. But we don’t spend a ton of time on the day-to-day happenings of the AI industry itself.

So we thought it would be a good idea to take a beat and have Alex and Kylie actually break down the modern AI boom as it exists today: The companies you need to know, the most important news of the last few months, and what it’s actually like to be fully immersed in this industry every single day.

Links: 

Google defends AI search results after they told us to put glue on pizza | The Verge


Apple is putting ChatGPT in Siri for free later this year | The Verge


AI will make money sooner than you’d think, says Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez | Decoder


Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut | The Verge


2024 is a year of reckoning for AI | The Verge


OpenAI researcher who resigned over safety concerns joins Anthropic | The Verge


Hugging Face is sharing $10M worth of compute to beat big AI companies | The Verge


The AI drama is heating up | Command Line


Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the internet | Command Line


Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT | The Verge



Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tubi is a free and very rapidly growing streaming TV platform — according to Nielsen, it had an average of a million viewers watching every minute in May 2024, beating out Disney Plus, Max, Peacock, and basically everything else, save Netflix and YouTube. All those streaming service price hikes are driving people to free options, and Tubi is right there to catch them.

CEO Anjali Sud joins Decoder to explain why she thinks Tubi's model "could be" profitable, and how Tubi competes not only against the premium streamers, but also against the big competitors for viewers' time: TikTok and Youtube.

Links: 

As streaming becomes more expensive, Tubi cashes in on the value of free | Los Angeles Times

Tubi’s new redesign wants to push you down the rabbit hole | The Verge

Tubi Rabbit AI: ChatGPT can give you better movie recommendations | The Verge

The future of streaming is free ad-supported TV and movies | The Verge

It’s true: people like leaving their TVs on in the background | The Verge

Stubios is the new name of Tubi’s fan-fueled studio program | The Verge

Comcast has a Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV Plus bundle coming | The Verge

A Disney, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is on the way | The Verge


Transcript: 
https://www.theverge.com/e/23942621

Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Private equity is a simple concept — a PE firm uses some combination of money and debt to buy a company, then makes a profit — but the reality of what happens to the companies that get acquired is anything but. It's everywhere, and it's not going away. In this summer remix, we're talking with Brendan Ballou, author of Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, about how we got here and what happens next. 

Links: 

Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys“R”Us — here’s why that matters | The Verge

Private equity and mismanagement: Here's what really killed Red Lobster | Fast Company

Sony and Apollo send letter expressing interest in $26 billion Paramount buyout | NBC News

Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America | Brendan Ballou

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco | Bryan Borrough & John Helyar

Barnes & Noble is going back to its indie roots to compete with Amazon | The Verge


Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.


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

Cohere is one of the buzziest AI startups around right now. It's not making consumer products; it's focused on the enterprise market and making AI products for big companies. And there's a huge tension there: up until recently, computers have been deterministic. If you give computers a certain input, you usually know exactly what output you’re going to get. There’s a logic to it. But if we all start talking to computers with human language and getting human language back, well, human language is messy. And that makes the entire process of knowing what to put in and what exactly we’re going to get out of our computers different than it ever has been before.

Links: 

Attention is all you need

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots

Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing | The Verge

AI isn’t close to becoming sentient | The Conversation

These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney | The Verge

‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work | The Verge

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on Bing’s quest to beat Google | The Verge

Top AI researchers and CEOs warn against ‘risk of extinction’ | The Verge

Google Zero is here — now what? | The Verge

Cara grew from 40k to 650k in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch

How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct | The Verge


Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23937899

Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.


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