Today, let’s talk about the big Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. This deal could reshape all of media and entertainment if and when it closes. That’s still an if, which we’ll come back to — right now Paramount head David Ellison is very much acting like he’s over the finish line after outbidding Netflix, which walked […]
Today, I’m talking with Jim Lanzone, who is the CEO of Yahoo. It’s basically impossible to sum up the Yahoo story, but the short version of it is that a long time ago Yahoo paid Google to run the search box on its website, and basically everything has gone sideways since. You’ll hear Jim refer […]
Today we’re talking about the messy, fast-moving situation at Anthropic, the maker of Claude that now finds itself in a very ugly legal battle with the Pentagon. The back-and-forth is complicated, but as of a few days ago, the Pentagon had deemed Anthropic a supply chain risk, and Anthropic has filed a lawsuit challenging that […]
Today, I’m talking with Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro. You know, Hasbro — the toy and game company that makes some of the most iconic products in the world, from toy lines like Transformers and My Little Pony to board and tabletop games like Monopoly, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons & Dragons. Chris was last […]
Today on Decoder, let’s talk about prediction markets, which continue to insert themselves into the news cycle and the news itself in increasingly weird, unsettling, and potentially illegal ways. My guest today is Liz Lopatto, senior reporter at The Verge, who owns what we cheerfully call the chaos beat. Liz has been writing a lot […]
Today, I’m talking with Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman. Zillow is one of those apps that really exemplifies what you might call the smartphone era of software: the company built a great mobile app for looking at real estate listings, and it turned into not just entertainment for so many of us, but what has become […]
Today, we’re talking about the future of Xbox. Phil Spencer, a two–time Decoder guest who’s led Xbox for more than a decade, retired last week. But in a shocking twist, his deputy and long-assumed successor, Sarah Bond, is also out too, and the Xbox division is now in the hands of Asha Sharma, one of […]
Today, I’m talking with Hank Green, a longtime friend of Decoder and the cofounder and now former owner of Complexly, an online education company he started with his brother John in 2012. I say former owner because Hank and John have just converted Complexly into a nonprofit and given up their ownership of the company […]
Today on Decoder we’re going to talk about the war for AI talent. Right now, the hottest job market on the planet is for AI researchers. The vast majority of these people are concentrated into a small number of hugely valuable, extremely fast-growing companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nowadays, such companies are paying […]
Today, let’s talk about the camera company Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state. You probably saw this ad during the Super Bowl a couple of weekends ago: Since it aired for a massive audience at the Super Bowl, Ring’s Search Party commercial has become a lightning rod for controversy — it’s easy to see […]