Decoder with Nilay Patel
Decoder is a show from The Verge about big ideas — and other problems. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to a diverse cast of innovators and policymakers at the frontiers of business and technology to reveal how they’re navigating an ever-changing landscape, what keeps them up at night, and what it all means for our shared future.
All episodes(62)
- StandardSummaries onlyThe CMO is a dying role, says Digitas' Amy Lanzi
Published Jul 2, 2026
We’ve got a special Decoder today. I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the south of France. There’s a lot in this one on AI, the creator economy, and the future of marketing – like I said, Amy is as sharp as they come, and I really enjoy talking to her about how the money really works. Links: The Influencer Cliff | Carmen Vicente (TikTok) The Wrong Promises | Publicis
- StandardSummaries onlyHe changed outdoor cooking forever — then took over Weber
Published Jun 29, 2026
It’s time for our annual Fourth of July grill episode here at Decoder, which is when we invite the CEOs of outdoor cooking companies onto the show to explain just how their businesses kind of look like every other business. And this is a very special edition. Today we’re talking to Roger Dahle, the CEO of Weber Blackstone, a full circle moment for Decoder. Roger was our first-ever grill CEO on the show back when he was the CEO of just Blackstone. Five years later, Roger now runs one of his bigge
- StandardSummaries onlyRewind: CEO Jim Farley on Ford's EV gamble
Published Jun 25, 2026
Hey everyone, Nilay here. You might remember I took a break from Decoder last year — we had a baby, so I took some leave. In my place, we had an excellent slate of guest hosts, and we’ve been working hard to bring you those episodes in full video since we launched our official Decoder YouTube channel. So today, we’re featuring a really great interview conducted by my very good friend Joanna Stern, now the founder and CEO of New Things, and Ford CEO Jim Farley. Joanna pulled some exclusive news o
- StandardSummaries onlyCan Patreon fight fire with social media fire?
Published Jun 22, 2026
A lot has changed on the internet, in the creator landscape, and at Patreon itself since CEO Jack Conte was last on the show in 2021. AI and platform shifts have stolen creator content and decimated artists' reach and revenue streams, and Patreon has made some pretty existential changes to the way it works in response. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: My thoughts on AI | Patreon I tried to prove I’m not AI | Howtown Patreon: Apple’s 30% tax is the price of staying in the A
- StandardSummaries onlyWho decides when AI is too dangerous?
Published Jun 18, 2026
My guest today is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5. Hayden actually just published a fantastic play-by-play on The Verge about how the Fable ban went down, and the scramble through the weekend from both sides to figure out what exactly happened and how it mi
- StandardSummaries onlySkydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer
Published Jun 15, 2026
Today, I’m talking with Slydio CEO Adam Bry, who runs the leading US maker of autonomous drones. We covered a lot in this conversation, including Skydio’s police and government work at a time when military use of AI is more controversial than ever and competing with Chinese drones against the backdrop of the Trump’s administration’s DJI ban. There’s a lot in this one – maybe more than anything, it was refreshing to hear Adam talk about using AI to bring even more people to work at Skydio as the
- StandardSummaries onlyCondé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan
Published Jun 11, 2026
Hey! Nilay here. It’s conference season, so I’m traveling across the country and around the world a lot more than usual. Stay tuned for some very special Decoder episodes we have coming up soon, starting on Monday. In the meantime, I wanted to share a conversation between my friend Peter Kafka and Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on the excellent Channels podcast. Lynch says he’s told his teams to assume that traffic will be zero from now on — that’s what I’ve been calling Google Zero. Roger also shar
- StandardSummaries onlyMicrosoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job
Published Jun 8, 2026
Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. This is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from his approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious. Of course, we also talked about Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around AI right now, and whether any of the consumer products are good enough to overcome it. Like I said,
- StandardSummaries onlyElon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire
Published Jun 4, 2026
My guest today is Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and co-author of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I wanted to have Ryan on today because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons. Its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars. But also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being
- StandardSummaries onlyAI is blowing up music. How should the Grammys handle it?
Published Jun 1, 2026
I last talked to Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr in 2024 — when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but not exactly clear how that would happen. Now, Harvey says AI is “omnipresent” in music production. So what kinds of tools are musicians using, in what way, and what kind of music is it making for us? Is it any good? And how do we identify, and take care of, actual human musicians in this mess? Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: Why the G
- StandardSummaries onlyRivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons
Published May 28, 2026
Today, I’m talking with Wassym Bensaid, the chief software officer at Rivian, and the co-ceo of Rivian’s platform joint venture with Volkswagen. That joint venture, called RV Tech, is about a year and a half old, so I wanted to ask Wassym how it all works and Rivian’s ongoing relationship with Volkswagen. Because it’s Rivian, I also had to ask Wassym about CarPlay. But the company also just launched an AI-powered voice assistant, which I got to try early. So I had a lot of fun digging into that
- StandardSummaries onlyHow Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era
Published May 26, 2026
Connecting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai at I/O every year is one of my favorite Decoder traditions. This was our fifth year doing it, and there’s always a whole slew of new things to talk about. This year, in addition to the news, we talked about Google Zero; picking fights with YouTube creators and publishers; and what being at “the foothills of the singularity" even means. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: If Google can’t make AI agents useful, maybe no one can | The Ver
- StandardSummaries onlyMusk v Altman: Much ado about nothing
Published May 21, 2026
Musk v Altman was nominally about OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit entity, and how it went about that change. But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way. Verge reporter Liz Lopatto spent the last month covering the trial, in all its chaos, and joins Decoder to ask: In a courtroom full of untrustworthy, unreliable people all fighting with each other, did anyone ev
- StandardSummaries onlyExclusive: Jonah Peretti explains why he sold BuzzFeed
Published May 18, 2026
Just days before we spoke, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti agreed to sell the company, which was losing money and at risk of shutting down. Now there’s a new lease on life — and new leadership. Jonah is taking on a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI, and Byron Allen will become CEO of BuzzFeed. That’s obviously a huge structural and organizational change, and a really big decision — prime Decoder bait if there ever was any. What are digital media companies doing to adapt and survive
- StandardSummaries onlyHow companies weaponize the terms of service against you
Published May 14, 2026
Brendan Ballou is founder of the Public Integrity Project and author of the new book, When Companies Run the Courts, about the rise of forced arbitration. Forced arbitration is similarly everywhere in modern life, and there have been some very high-profile cases these past few years highlighting how deeply unfair these clauses are to consumers. Brendan’s book delves into how and why we got here — spoiler: we can blame Antonin Scalia for some of it — but also, most importantly, how we may be able
- StandardSummaries onlyJoanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them
Published May 11, 2026
My guest today is longtime friend of the show Joanna Stern. You all know Joanna: she is the former senior personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a former Decoder guest host, one of my co-founders at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends. Joanna just left that lofty perch at the Journal to start her own media company called New Things, and she’s starting with her new book about AI called I Am Not a Robot, which is out this week on May 12th. So we had Joanna o
- StandardSummaries onlyRewind: How AI is fueling an existential crisis in education
Published May 7, 2026
Hey, everyone, Nilay here. We’re off today, while the team and I are cooking on a lot of really great stuff in the coming weeks. We’ll be back with an all-new interview on Monday. In the meantime, we really wanted to highlight this episode we first aired in the fall, because it’s about a huge subject: AI in schools. The school year is starting to wrap up now around the country, and we’re no closer to figuring out how to thread the needle about generative AI in education than we were in September
- StandardSummaries onlyDara Khosrowshahi on replacing Uber drivers — and himself — with AI
Published May 4, 2026
It’s become an annual tradition to have Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi join us in the studio when he comes to New York for Uber’s big Go-Get event every year. This year, the big news was that Uber's expanding into a much larger platform for travel, starting with hotel booking and services like personal shopping. Uber is going so far as to call this an everything app, so I wanted to see how far Dara thinks everything actually goes — and whether he’s feeling pressure to own more of the user experience
- StandardSummaries onlyHow to win — or lose — Decoder
Published Apr 30, 2026
This is Nick Statt, senior producer on Decoder. We last ran a mailbag episode during the holidays, and we decided it was a good idea to do that kind of thing more often. So we’re back with Nilay as the guest, answering questions and responding to feedback, criticism, and suggestions. We talk through some recent controversial episodes like our interviews with the CEOs of Superhuman and Puck, and we also discuss how we’re covering AI, thinking about the future of the show, and what it takes to win
- StandardSummaries onlyThat UL safety logo is a lot more complicated than it looks
Published Apr 27, 2026
Jennifer Scanlon is CEO of UL Solutions, one of those hidden-in-plain-sight companies we like to poke at here on Decoder. UL's been around for more than 100 years; it started as a way for insurance companies to standardize fire and safety testing as electricity was the new technology spreading into homes. But now it's everywhere, and "safety" in tech doesn't just mean the hardware. UL is adapting quickly to the connected, AI-powered era... but do the companies making and distributing tech even c
- StandardSummaries onlyTHE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION
Published Apr 23, 2026
Today on Decoder, I want to lay out an idea that's been banging around my head for weeks now as we've been reporting on AI and having conversations here on this show. I've been calling it software brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops. Software brain is powerful stuff. It's a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. But software thinking has also been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain th
- StandardSummaries onlyCanva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software
Published Apr 20, 2026
The last time Canva CEO Melanie Perkins was on Decoder, the company was starting a big push into enterprise. Now, she's leading it through a total reinvention, going, in Canva's words, "from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools." But there's a lot of competition in that AI enterprise space. Not only is Canva competing with design software like the Adobe Creative Suite, but also it's competing with AI companies, like Anthropic and Meta, that are launching their own
- StandardSummaries onlyRonan Farrow on Sam Altman's "unconstrained" relationship with the truth
Published Apr 16, 2026
Today I’m talking with Ronan Farrow, one of the biggest stars of investigative reporting working today. He broke the Harvey Weinstein story, among many, many others. Just last week, he and co-author Andrew Marantz published an incredible deep-dive feature in The New Yorker about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, his trustworthiness, and the rise of OpenAI itself. So Ronan came on the show to discuss the piece, his reporting process, and why he thinks this story and the revelations it contains really matter
- StandardSummaries onlyCan Puck’s CEO reinvent the news business for the influencer age?
Published Apr 13, 2026
Sarah Personette is the CEO of Puck, a media company that's been around for about five years. Puck hires big star reporters who write newsletters as part of a subscription bundle. Those newsletters are often must-reads in their industries, and those reporters get equity in Puck and a share of the company's revenue. It's a place where the financial incentives of the influencer economy crash right into the rigors of traditional journalism — and as regular Decoder listeners know, I have a lot of qu
- StandardSummaries onlyThe AI industry's existential race for profits
Published Apr 9, 2026
Today, let’s talk about the looming AI monetization cliff, and whether some of the biggest companies in space can become real, profitable businesses before they careen right off it. My guest today is Hayden Field, who’s our senior AI reporter here at The Verge. She’s been keeping close tabs on both Anthropic and OpenAI, and how these two companies, both slate to go public this year, tell us a whole lot about the AI industry in 2026. Links: The vibes are off at OpenAI | The Verge Anthropic essent
- StandardSummaries onlyCisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space
Published Apr 6, 2026
My guest today is Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. Cisco is one of those big companies that everyone has heard of but most of us don’t have to interact with very much; they’re not really a consumer brand. But without Cisco's actual routers and switches and silicon — and the software to make those things work — there’s no internet, no cloud, and no AI. But a data center is a really unpleasant neighbor to have, and there’s robust opposition to new data center builds all over the country. So I had to start
- StandardSummaries onlyA jury says Meta and Google hurt a kid. What now?
Published Apr 2, 2026
Today, we’re talking about the landmark social media addiction trials that just resulted in two major verdicts against Big Tech — one in California against Meta and Google, and another in New Mexico against just Meta. These are complicated cases with some huge repercussions for both how these platforms work and the very nature of speech in America. So we’ve brought on two heavy hitters: my friend Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork, as well as Verge senior pol
- StandardSummaries onlyOkta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity
Published Mar 30, 2026
My guest today is Okta CEO Todd McKinnon. Okta is a platform that big companies use to manage security and identity across all the many apps and platforms their employees use. Most of us run into it as login management at work. SaaS companies like Okta are under a lot of pressure in the age of AI, which Todd even said on an earnings call he's "paranoid" about. But you'll also hear Todd say that for Okta specifically, there's also a world of opportunity as the very concept of a digital "identity"
- StandardSummaries onlyEveryone hates Ticketmaster. Why'd Trump go easy on them?
Published Mar 26, 2026
Today, we’re talking about the major antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation, and what it might mean for antitrust and competition law in general now that the Trump DOJ has decided to settle its part of the case — even as several states including California, New York, and Texas carry on. To break it all down, I’m joined by Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner. Lauren’s our resident court expert, and she’s been chronicling this trial from the beginning. Links: Stat
- StandardSummaries onlyConfronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me
Published Mar 23, 2026
Today, I’m talking with Shishir Mehrotra, the CEO of Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product. Back in August, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and recently, reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included me, among many others. No one ever asked permission to use our names this way, and a lot of reporters were outraged by this. T
- StandardSummaries onlyParamount's $110 billion Warner Bros. gamble
Published Mar 19, 2026
Today, let’s talk about the big Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Right now, Paramount head David Ellison is very much acting like he’s over the finish line after outbidding Netflix, which walked away after what seemed like a done deal. Back in January, I asked Puck’s Julia Alexander to walk me through Netflix’s reasoning, and today I’m digging into Paramount’s with Rich Greenfield, a media and entertainment analyst and cofounder of research firm LightShed Partners. There’s a lot going on
- StandardSummaries onlyYahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage
Published Mar 16, 2026
Jim Lanzone is the CEO of Yahoo. It's basically impossible to sum up Yahoo's story over the last 25 years, but the short version is that once upon a time, Yahoo paid Google to run the search box on its website, and everything immediately went sideways. Jim calls it Yahoo's original sin. But after a long series of mergers, spinouts, and a hot, weird minute as part of Verizon Yahoo is once again an independent, privately held company — and it's growing. But can Yahoo really take market share from
- StandardSummaries onlyAnthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you
Published Mar 12, 2026
My guest today is Mike Masnick, the founder and CEO of Techdirt, the excellent and long-running tech policy blog. Mike has been writing about government overreach, privacy in the digital age, and other related topics for decades now, and he’s an expert on how the internet and the surveillance state have grown in interconnected ways over the past two decades. I wanted to have Mike on the show to discuss the messy, fast-moving situation at Anthropic, the maker of Claude that now finds itself in a
- StandardSummaries onlyHasbro's CEO lets AI Peppa Pig help design toys
Published Mar 9, 2026
Hasbro might be a toy company, but CEO Chris Cocks has spent the last several years pushing it more and more into the digital media, gaming, and collectibles space. That makes sense, since adults have money and kids don't. All those IP and licensing deals are working out for Hasbro so far. But Hasbro is also facing a lot of risk from instability: in trade and tariffs, in politics and culture, and in the video game market, which seems to be in a more or less permanent state of crisis. Read the fu
- StandardSummaries onlyPrediction markets want to be the news
Published Mar 5, 2026
Today let’s talk about prediction markets, which continue to insert themselves into the news cycle and the news in increasingly weird, unsettling, and potentially illegal ways. My guest today is Liz Lopatto, a senior reporter at The Verge who owns what we cheerfully call the chaos beat. Liz has been writing a lot about prediction markets lately and especially why they all seem so intent on being perceived as sources of news — a position which directly incentivizes insider trading. That in turn c
- StandardSummaries onlyZillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis
Published Mar 2, 2026
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 a vertically-integrated platform for buying, selling, and renting real estate. Jeremy’s argument is that the future of Zillow looks a lot like an end-to-end business platform for real estat
- StandardSummaries onlyInside Xbox's executive shakeup
Published Feb 26, 2026
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, is stepping down. But in a shocking twist, his deputy long-assumed successor Sarah Bond is also out too, and the Xbox division is now in the hands of an Asha Sharma, one of Microsoft’s AI executives with no prior game industry experience. There is no better person to talk to about all of this than Tom Warren, senior editor here at The Verge and author of the excellent Note
- StandardSummaries onlyHank Green lets loose on YouTube, billionaires, and algorithms
Published Feb 23, 2026
Today, I’m talking with Hank Green, a longtime friend of Decoder and the co-founder 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 in the process. That’s some of the purest Decoder bait that ever was, because it’s all about how you structure a company and how you make decisions about changing that structure.
- StandardSummaries onlyMoney no longer matters to AI's top talent
Published Feb 19, 2026
Today we're talking about the war for AI talent. Right now, the hottest job market on the planet is for AI researchers. And 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, most of which are now paying some of the highest salaries in the history of tech to poach from one another. We’ve been dying to really dig in and try to unpack what's going on with all these talent moves in AI. So we brou
- StandardSummaries onlyLet's talk about Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state
Published Feb 16, 2026
Today, we're talking about the camera company Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state. 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 how the same technology that can find lost dogs can be used to find people, and then used to invade our privacy in all kinds of uncomfortable ways, by cops and regular people alike. Although Ring has since canceled its partnership with controversial surveillan
- StandardSummaries onlyThe surprising case for AI judges
Published Feb 12, 2026
My guest today is Bridget McCormack, former chief justice for the Michigan Supreme Court and now president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association. For the past several years, Bridget and her team have been developing an AI-assisted arbitration platform called the AI Arbitrator. So I sat down with her to talk about how the tool works, the pros and cons of automating parts of the arbitration process, and the bigger picture questions around institutional trust, justice, and the future of l
- StandardSummaries onlySiemens CEO's mission to automate everything
Published Feb 9, 2026
Siemens is one of those absolutely giant, extremely important, fairly opaque companies we love to dig into on Decoder. At a very basic, reductive level, Siemens makes the hardware and software that let other companies run and automate their stuff. We spent a lot of time talking about what happens to jobs when Siemens automates everything — and what happens to a company like Siemens when the free trade era we’re used to gets turned on its head. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Lin
- StandardSummaries onlyReality is losing the deepfake war
Published Feb 5, 2026
Today, we’re going to talk about reality, and whether we can label photos and videos to protect our shared understanding of the world around us. To do this, I sat down with Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed, who covers creative tools for us — a space that’s been totally upended by generative AI. We’ve been talking about how the photos and videos taken by our phones are getting more and more processed for years on The Verge. Here in 2026, we’re in the middle of a full-on reality crisis, as fake and
- StandardSummaries onlyDocusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts
Published Feb 2, 2026
Today, I’m talking with Allan Thygesen, who is the CEO of Docusign. You know Docusign, it’s the platform that lets you sign stuff online. It turns out 7,000 people work there, which is one of those facts floating around that’s always felt like perfect Decoder bait. What are all those people doing? And what kind of product roadmap does a company like Docusign even need? Alan has only been CEO of Docusign for three years, so he has some interesting perspective on where the company was, the changes
- StandardSummaries onlyNetflix is eating Hollywood — because it has to
Published Jan 29, 2026
Today, we’re talking about the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason. It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga — big names, big money, and big drama. To help me make sense of it all, I wanted to talk with Julia Alexander, a Verge alum and now media correspondent at Puck News who’s one of the best in the business at analyzing corporate strategy, Hollywood, and what’s next in en
- StandardSummaries onlyExperian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir'
Published Jan 26, 2026
Experian is one of those giant multinationals convoluted enough to have multiple CEOs all over the world, so first I asked Alex Lintner, Experian's CEO of technology and software solutions, to dig into the classic Decoder questions and explain how all of that even works. He oversees big operations like security and privacy, and now, of course, AI. If you want to participate in the modern economy — rent an apartment, buy a car, get a job, etc — you’re part of Experian’s ecosystem, whether you lik
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy nobody's stopping Grok
Published Jan 22, 2026
Grok, the chatbot made by Elon Musk’s xAI, is able to make all manner of AI-generated images on demand, including non-consensual intimate images of women and minors. It's the kind of "controversy" that would have completely sunk a platform five or 10 years ago, but now it seems clear that Elon wants Grok to be able to do this. A lot of people feel like someone should be able to do something about a one-click harassment machine like this. But who has that power, and what they can do with it, is a
- StandardSummaries onlyRazer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus
Published Jan 19, 2026
We’re back to start the year with a very special live interview with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, which we taped in front of a terrific audience at Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas during CES. At this year’s show, Razer made headlines for something it calls Project Ava, an AI companion that has a physical presence in the real world, as an anime hologram that sits in a jar on your desk. It’s powered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk’s Grok. There are a whole lot of choices bundled up in all of that, as well as
- StandardSummaries onlyRewind: How private equity kills companies and communities
Published Jan 15, 2026
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. We’re settling back in here after the winter break and CES, and we’ll have new episodes for you starting next Monday. In the meantime, we wanted to highlight one of our favorites from last year: an interview with journalist and author Megan Greenwell about her book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. My conversation with Megan last year was extremely illuminating as to why private equity does what it does to industries like healthcare, media
- StandardSummaries onlyDropout CEO Sam Reich on the business of subscription comedy
Published Jan 12, 2026
We’ve got something special for you today. It’s my friend Hank Green, longtime YouTuber, science educator, and viral TikTok star, interviewing Dropout CEO Sam Reich. Hank did this episode as a guest host over the summer, and it’s a fan favorite, bringing together two internet personalities that’ve known each other for a very long time and who have a lot of inside knowledge about how the internet, Hollywood, and entertainment all intertwine. Links: Dropout’s Sam Reich on business, comedy, and kee
- StandardSummaries onlyWhat’s next for Netflix and Paramount in the Warner Bros. battle
Published Dec 22, 2025
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. Decoder is on our holiday break. We’ve got a lot of fun stuff coming up in the New Year, though, including a special Decoder Live at CES. Stay tuned for more details, including how to RSVP for free tickets. In the meantime, we’ve got a great episode of the podcast Channels, featuring two of the best media reporters in the business. Host Peter Kafka sat down with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw to talk about the bidding war between Paramount SkyDance and Netflix over Warner Bros.
- StandardSummaries only"All chaos and panic": Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions
Published Dec 18, 2025
Hey everyone! Decoder senior producers Kate Cox and Nick Statt here. We’ve had a big year, including nearly 100 episodes, a new YouTube channel, an ad-free podcast feed, and a slate of great guest hosts while Nilay was on parental leave. It’s been a lot! We’ve also had a lot of great questions and comments this year from you, our audience. So we pulled together all the feedback we’ve received on topics like CarPlay, Monday episode guest suggestions, and — of course — AI. And then we turned the t
- StandardSummaries onlyStack Overflow users don't trust AI. They're using it anyway
Published Dec 15, 2025
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar was last on the show in 2022 — just one month before ChatGPT launched and upended literally everything for Stack Overflow in a deeply existential way. He called a company emergency, reallocated about 10 percent of the staff to figure out solutions to the ChatGPT problem, and made some pretty huge decisions about structure and organization to navigate that change — all of it pure Decoder bait. Links: 2025 Developer Survey | Stack Overflow The people who m
- StandardSummaries onlySen. Ed Markey wants media companies to fight for the First Amendment
Published Dec 11, 2025
Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and I agree it seems like democracy is on the line right now, especially around the First Amendment and the increasing pressure the Trump administration — especially FCC chair Brendan Carr — is putting on free speech. I also had a lot of questions for Sen. Markey about the supposed TikTok ban, which no one seems to know anything about, and all the other problems we’re facing in 2025. Links: Even the lawmakers behind the TikTok ban have no idea what’s going on | The V
- StandardSummaries onlySquare's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money
Published Dec 8, 2025
Today, I’m talking with Willem Avé, who’s the head of product at Square. You know Square — it was started by billionaire Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame more than 15 years ago, and it got big on the back of that little magnetic reader that once plugged into the headphone jack of the iPhone and let small businesses accept credit cards. Nowadays, of course, Square is more than a credit card reader, and sadly, the headphone jack is ancient history. The company itself is now part of parent organization
- StandardSummaries onlyThe tiny team trying to keep AI from destroying everything
Published Dec 4, 2025
Today, I’m talking with Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field about some of the people responsible for studying AI and deciding in what ways it might… well, ruin the world. Those folks work at Anthropic as part of a group called the societal impacts team, which Hayden just spent time with for a profile she published this week on The Verge. The team is just nine people out of more than 2,000 who work at Anthropic, and their only job, as the team members themselves say, is to investigate and publi
- StandardSummaries onlyIBM CEO Arvind Krishna says there is no AI bubble after all
Published Dec 1, 2025
IBM was instrumental to the entire 20th century of computing — but it's a lot harder for most of us to see what it's been up to during this century. That's because it's fully an enterprise company, and CEO Arvind Krishna says that business is booming. But there’s a huge change coming to that business as well, as Watson-style deep learning has given way to LLMs and generative AI. Sure, Arvind says IBM got there a little too early. But he doesn’t seem concerned that IBM would be stuck on the sidel
- StandardSummaries onlyWhat the climate story gets wrong
Published Nov 24, 2025
Hey everyone, it's Nilay. It’s been great being back in the Decoder chair this fall, and we’ve got a bunch of great episodes coming up to round out the year. But the production team is off this week for the holiday, so today, we’re going to share this episode of The Gray Area with you. This time, host Sean Illing is talking to data scientist Hannah Ritchie — about climate science and how although the crisis is definitely real, it’s not all bad news. There are actually a lot of great indicators o
- StandardSummaries onlyThe DoorDash Problem: How AI browsers are a huge threat to Amazon
Published Nov 20, 2025
Okay, let’s talk about AI and what I’ve been calling the “DoorDash problem.” This is about to define the next battle in AI, and it might completely transform not only how you order a sandwich, but also how the entire internet economy works in general. If you’ve been listening to the show this past year, you’ve heard me bring up the Doordash problem nearly a dozen times. I’ve been asking CEOs and leaders in tech and AI about it any chance I can get. Now, a lawsuit between Amazon and Perplexity is
- StandardSummaries onlyRing's Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime
Published Nov 17, 2025
Jamie Simonoff, founder of Ring, won't let me call him the CEO. He says his title is and always has been 'chief inventor.' His mission with Ring is to make the world safer, and he has a pretty expansive view of what that means. He told The Verge last month he thought Ring could 'almost zero out crime' in some neighborhoods within a year or two. That's a big promise — and also potentially a very troubling one, as we face the erosion of privacy and a surveillance panopticon that only ever seems to
- StandardSummaries onlyThe company at the heart of the AI bubble
Published Nov 13, 2025
So a lot of people think AI is a bubble. So we sent Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto out to report on the AI bubble — whether it's real, how it might pop, and what all of this means. She’s joining the show today to talk about a particular company that sits right in the middle of all of it. That company is called CoreWeave, and Liz has spent considerable time diving into its history, its financials, and the truly fascinating story that all of that tells us about the modern AI boom. Links: CoreWe
- StandardSummaries onlySir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web
Published Nov 10, 2025
Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a legend in the history of the internet. He created HTML and HTTP. It doesn’t really get more foundational than that — Tim was there at the very very beginning of the modern internet. He also has a new memoir out called This Is For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web. So Tim joined the show to talk about the state of the web, as well as his current work at the decentrali