How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld

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

The art of video game design is flourishing, but it feels like a really grim time to be in the business of making and distributing games. Huge global publishers and tiny indie studios alike are facing huge financial pressures, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. So where did this enormous pressure come from, if consumer interest is high and sales are great? Verge video game reporter Ash Parrish joins Decoder to explain. Links:  Global games market expected to grow to $189bn in 2024 | GamesIndustry.biz Why the video game industry is seeing so many layoffs | Polygon The tech industry’s layoffs and hiring freezes: all of the news | The Verge Fortnite made more than $9 billion in revenue in its first two years | The Verge Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 Swings Past 10 Million Sold | IGN The future of Netflix games could look like reality TV | 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

Today, I’m talking with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan — and let me tell you, this conversation is nothing like what I expected. It turns out Eric wants Zoom to be much, much more than just a videoconferencing platform. Zoom wants to take on Microsoft and Google and now has a big investment in AI – and Eric’s visions for what that AI will do are pretty wild. See, Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. You’ll hear him describe how he thinks one of the big benefits of AI at work will be letting us all create something he calls a “digital twin," essentially a deepfake of yourself that can go attend meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you. I’ll just warn you: I tried to ask a bunch of the usual Decoder questions during this conversation, but once we got to digital twins going to Zoom meetings for people, well, I had a lot of followup questions.  Links:  Zoom gets its first major overhaul in 10 years, powered by generative AI | ZDNet An interview with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan | Stratechery / Ben Thompson Zoom is cutting about 150 jobs, or close to 2% of its workforce | CNBC Zoom meetings are about to get weirder thanks to the Vision Pro | The Verge Zoom Docs launches in 2024 with built-in AI collaboration features | The Verge Zoom rewrites its policies to make clear that your videos aren’t used to train AI tools | The Verge Zoom says its new AI tools aren’t stealing ownership of your content | The Verge Zoom adds “post-quantum” end-to-end encryption | Zoom Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23932774 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

For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. I think of Decoder as a show for people trying to build things, and a lot of people have built their things on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone else’s platform is: What are you going to do when that platform changes the rules? Links:  How Google is killing independent sites like ours | HouseFresh HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what? | HouseFresh Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites | Retro Dodo Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web | The Verge Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It? | The New York Times Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real |The Verge An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them | SparkToro Mountain Weekly News Telly Visions E-ride Hero That Fit Friend 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 Joseph Cox, one of the best cybersecurity reporters around and a co-founder of the new media site 404 Media. Joseph has a new book coming out in June called Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically a caper, but with the FBI running a phone network. For real.  Joseph walks us through the fascinating world of underground criminal phone networks, and how secure messaging, a tech product beloved by drug traffickers, evolved from the days of BlackBerry Messenger to Signal. Along the way, the FBI got involved with its very own startup, ANOM, as part of one of the most effective trojan horse operations in the history of cybersecurity. Joseph’s book is a great read, but it also touches on a lot of things we talk about a lot here on Decoder. So this conversation was a fun one.  Links:  Dark Wire by Joseph Cox | Hachette Book Group How Vice became ‘a fucking clown show’ | The Verge Cyber Official Speaks Out, Reveals Mobile Network Attacks in US | 404 Media Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI | 404 Media How Secure Phones for Criminals Are Sold on Instagram | Motherboard A Peek Inside the Phone Company Secretly Used in an FBI Honeypot | Motherboard The FBI secretly launched an encrypted messaging system for criminals | The Verge Canadian police have had master key to BlackBerry's encryption since 2010 | 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

Today, I’m talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the big Google I/O developer conference. Google’s focus during the conference was on how it’s building AI into virtually all of its products. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it “Google Zero,” and I’ve been asking a lot of web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero. In a world where AI powers search with overviews and summaries, that’s a real possibility. What then happens to the web?  I’ve talked to Sundar quite a bit over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I’ve ever seen him. I think you can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future — where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, more artistic — and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever, and that he’s wrestling with that tension. Links:  Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the internet — Command Line Google I/O 2024: everything announced — The Verge Google is redesigning its search engine, and it’s AI all the way down — The Verge Project Astra is the future of AI at Google — The Verge Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? — The Verge YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians — The Verge AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh Inside the First 'SEO Heist' of the AI Era — Business Insider Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft — Decoder Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23922415 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