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.
Filtered episodes(25)
- 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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