The Vergecast

Stories discussed this week: Tinder CEO Elie Seidman on finding love during the pandemic It’s hard to figure out how often people without symptoms spread COVID-19 Inside Nextdoor’s ‘Karen problem’ Nextdoor tells community leads to allow Black Lives Matter discussions after exposé Contact tracing programs have to work with local communities to be successful Apple launches $100 million Racial Equity...

Tinder and its parent company Match Group have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic relatively well, all things considered. User engagement is up, as is interest around new product features, like video calls. More than six years after its launch, Tinder is finally introducing a one-on-one video calling feature that it says will be heavily moderated for content and safety. At the same time, Tinder CEO E...

Stories from this episode: Blaming protesters for COVID-19 spread ignores the bigger threats to health 5G coronavirus conspiracy theorists are endangering the workers who keep networks running Telehealth wasn’t designed for non-English speakers The pandemic has made it harder to buy a new laptop Byte flight The United States will cut ties with the World Health Organization, says President Trump  F...

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Verge reporter Julia Alexander talk to Otter Media CEO Tony Goncalves on his new project overseeing HBO Max. Goncalves discusses AT&T's strategy for the WarnerMedia streaming service, the dispute with getting the app on Roku and Amazon, HBO Max's place in the streaming wars, and how their data usage works on mobile. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn welcome back Adi Robertson and Casey Newton to the show to discuss Trump's executive order targeting social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Julia Alexander also stops by to discuss the launch of WarnerMedia's new streaming service HBO Max. Stories discussed this week: Google search results will take ‘page experience’ into account next year T-Mobile n...

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield about remote working, competition with Microsoft, and the way technology changes how we communicate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s Friday, which means there’s a new episode of The Vergecast to fill you in on all of the news from this week. Join Nilay, Dieter, and a rotation of other editors for everything that you need to know. The three topics covered this week are: Microsoft’s Build developer conference Elon Musk’s... active month Spotify getting exclusive streaming rights to The Joe Rogan Experience podcast During the...

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and executive editor Dieter Bohn interview Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai disusses Google’s COVID-19 response: the way the company is handling the pandemic and how he’s working with Tim Cook from Apple on exposure tracking. They also talked about how he is running one of the biggest companies in the world remotely and how the company is handling emp...

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn welcome Dan Seifert, Casey Newton, and Julia Alexander to talk about gadget news, Facebook's oversight board, and updates in the streaming world. Stories discussed this week: The doomsday bunker market is thriving amid the coronavirus pandemic Amazon asks Congress to pass a law against price gouging during national crisis Uber’s response to COVID-19: face masks, selfies...

Alex Stamos, former chief security officer of Facebook and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory talks to Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and editor Casey Newton about his role consulting on security for Zoom, disinformation around the pandemic on social media, and the threat of foreign interference in the 2020 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

Stories discussed this week: The disappointing truth about antibody testing Apple is giving $10 million to COVID-19 testing kit company FDA authorizes CRISPR-based test for COVID-19 Sen. Ed Markey wants the FCC to rethink its broadband deployment plans An Amazon warehouse worker in New York has died of COVID-19 An Amazon VP’s resignation has cast a spotlight on the company’s working conditions Eli...

This week we saw Sonos announce several new products, most significantly the Arc, which is the company’s first soundbar to support Dolby Atmos. Other new devices include the Sonos Five speaker and a refreshed Sub, and all three will only work with Sonos’ new S2 app that launches next month. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence sat down virtually with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel for The Vergecast to disc...

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss quarterly earnings from tech companies, the new CEOs of the three biggest mobile carriers, and how Trolls World Tour may be changing the movie theater business. Stories discussed this week: More than 1 million people in the US have tested positive for COVID-19 No one knows when the COVID-19 pandemic will end  It’s impossible to count everyone with COVID-19 Elon Musk...

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel interviews co-director of the Institute for Local Self Reliance Stacy Mitchell about her critique of Amazon's power in America's marketplace. As Amazon becomes more essential infrastructure during the coronavirus pandemic, Nilay and Stacy discuss the increased visibility of Amazon's monopoly power and the way it treats its workers. Is it possible to regulate a com...

Stories discussed this week: Google is now listing COVID-19 testing centers in search results CEOs sticking with Trump’s ‘open the economy’ group after he tweets call to ‘liberate’ states Bill Gates says countries will probably use interviews and databases to track the coronavirus Bill Gates is now the leading target for coronavirus conspiracies, says report Connecticut suburb deploys ‘pandemic dr...

Part of The Verge's Interface Live series, silicon valley editor Casey Newton talks with Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier about her new book No Filter, which delves into the history of Instagram and how the app became what it is today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stories discussed this week: The Interface Live on Zoom: the hidden history of Instagram, with Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier In a self-isolated world, developers are learning to make games from home How GM and Ford switched out pickup trucks for breathing machines The search for COVID-19 treatments shows how messy science can be How Medium became the best and worst place for coronavirus news Unem...

Nilay Patel talks with The Verge's Adi Robertson, Casey Newton, and Nicole Wetsman about Apple and Google announcing a system for tracking the spread of the new coronavirus, allowing users to share data through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transmissions and approved apps from health organizations. Links: Apple and Google are building a coronavirus tracking system into iOS and Android What is contact...

Stories discussed this week: Webcams have become impossible to find, and prices are skyrocketing Why the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories don’t make sense UK mobile carriers politely ask people to stop burning 5G towers No one’s getting new emoji in 2021 because of the pandemic Foxconn will produce ventilators at its controversial Wisconsin plant Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: AMD has rewritten t...

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about his new book Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley―Making AI Serve Us All. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul talk to Tom Warren about Zoom's privacy and security concerns. The crew also looks back at the history of Sprint after it finally merged with T-Mobile. Paul's weekly segment "If I were a rich man" updates the keyboard-in-the-front club. The show ends with some chat about Apple buying the weather app Dark Sky and allowing in-app rentals on their mobile devices. Stories discu...

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to founder and CEO of The Future Today Institute Amy Webb. Amy is also a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business and recently came out with a book called The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity. During the coronavirus pandemic, Amy and Nilay discuss whether we could have predicted this outbreak, how it can change...

Stories discussed this week: Amazon warehouse workers are outraged after a coworker tested positive for COVID-19 and they weren’t notified ‘We’re all going to get sick eventually’: Amazon workers are struggling to provide for a nation in quarantine It’s time for a regular Amazon daily coronavirus briefing Twitter locks account encouraging coronavirus ‘chickenpox parties’ Zoom is 2020’s hottest yog...

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown about Impossible's mission to replace animal-derived meat worldwide and what that would mean for our climate and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss the new iPad Pro and Macbook Air that Apple announced this week, the confusion around Google's coronavirus testing website, and the specs revealed for the PS5. Stories discussed this week: Comcast modestly raises slow internet speeds for low-income users because of coronavirus AT&T is suspending broadband data caps for home internet customers due to coronavirus AT&T...