Decoder

In case you missed it: Kylie Robison and I were recently on Decoder to talk about the companies and incentives driving the AI boom. We covered a lot of ground, from AI raves in San Francisco to open vs. closed source. Listen wherever you get your podcasts!

On today’s episode of Decoder, Verge editors Alex Heath and Sarah Jeong join me to discuss the lawsuit TikTok filed last week against the US government in response to the divest-or-ban bill.

One reason I wanted to have both Alex and Sarah on here is that there’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law; some of TikTok’s arguments are contradicted by the simple facts of what the company has already promised to do around the world, and some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of attempts to regulate speech and the internet.

TikTok averted a ban once before under the Trump administration. But this time around, the bill is on far more solid footing, and TikTok is arguing that divesting its US business is not possible “commercially, technologically, or legally.” So we walked through each of those arguments one by one.

On today’s Decoder, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I try to figure out Tesla. The company has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks — in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes. With Elon Musk saying he’s going all in on autonomy and announcing a robotaxi event in August, it seems like we’re getting closer to a make-or-break moment for the company.

Between when we recorded this episode and today, there have been more than a half dozen new updates in the Tesla saga, including another wave of layoffs. That is a lot of chaos for a company that is trying to execute a huge pivot to become a very different kind of business than it is today — and do so very quickly. Like I said, Andy and I tried to explain Tesla. You let us know if we succeeded.

Our latest episode of Decoder is about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.

This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next. 

Today’s episode of Decoder is all about Disney, the massive activist investor revolt it just fought off, and what happens next in the world of streaming. Earlier this month, Disney survived an attempted board takeover from businessman Nelson Peltz. While investors overwhelmingly sided with Disney and CEO Bob Iger, the boardroom showdown made something very clear: Disney needs to figure out streaming and get its creative direction back on track. 

To help me better understand what’s happening here, I brought on my friend Julia Alexander, who is VP of strategy at Parrot Analytics, a Puck News news contributor, and, most importantly, a former Verge reporter. She’s a leading expert on all things Disney, and I always learn something important about the state of the entertainment business when I talk to her.

Nilay was on vacation last week, so they let me guest-host Decoder! I spent the show talking with The Verge’s Sean Hollister all about game emulators: why they exist, how they became so popular, and why Nintendo picked a fight with an emulator called Yuzu.

It’s a story about reverse engineering, about the DMCA, and about what we get to do with our hardware and software. It’s a fun episode!

The Justice Department just announced a long-awaited, massive antitrust suit against Apple. Those antitrust suits — big but slow-moving — are the primary way the US is challenging big tech.

But across the Atlantic, the European Union has been hard at work enforcing what’s known as the Digital Markets Act, a sweeping regulation that went into effect earlier this month that’s aimed at leveling the playing field between big tech and smaller competitors. Apple, in particular, has been engaging in what we can only describe as “malicious compliance.”

Verge reporter Jon Porter, who’s been covering EU regulation for years, joined me on Decoder to break down which companies qualify as “gatekeepers,” what new rules they have to follow, and what this means for the future.

This week marks the launch of Decoder’s second episode, which will explain big topics in the news with Verge reporters, experts, and other friends of the show. (The other Decoder you know and love, featuring big interviews with CEOs and others, now publishes every Monday.)

For this episode, I sat down with Verge Transportation Editor Andy Hawkins, to discuss a fantastic article he wrote called, “The EV Transition trips over its own cord.” It’s all about how the momentum for electric cars in America has started to hit serious snags, even as more people than ever before go fully electric. Check it out.