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.
Episodes
August 28, 2025 • 67 mins
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Senior Producer Nick Statt. We’re on a small break for the end of summer, and, sadly, Nilay will still be out a little while longer when we come back. But we have an excellent slate of guest host episodes starting up next month, so stay tuned for those.
In the meantime, we wanted to bring back one of our favorite Decoder interviews from earlier this year. It’s with Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter, ...
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August 25, 2025 • 57 mins
Hello! Decoder senior producer Kate Cox here. I’m afraid I’m still not Nilay, but I hope you’ve been enjoying our series of guest hosts this summer while he’s out on parental leave. We have a few more really great guest episodes coming up, before Nilay returns to the host chair later this fall, so stay tuned.
The production team is taking our own break this week, so while we’re off we’re excited to share this episode of The Gray A...
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August 21, 2025 • 53 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. One of the biggest topics in AI these days is agents — the idea that AI is going to move from chatbots to reliably completing tasks for us in the real world. But the problem with agents is that they really aren’t all that reliable right now.
There’s a lot of work happening in the AI industry to try and fix that, and that brings me to my guest tod...
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August 18, 2025 • 54 mins
Obsidian is a note-taking and productivity app that occupies the same "second brain" space as competitors like Notion — but in a lot of ways, it's also startlingly different. Obsidian's files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use.
Steph Ango, the CEO, is also different in a lot of ways: He's not an Obsidian founder, but instead came to the role from being basically a member of the fan ...
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August 14, 2025 • 55 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today, I’m talking to a very special guest: Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT.
While Sam Altman is definitely the public face of OpenAI, Nick has been leading ChatGPT’s development since the very beginning, and it’s now the fastest-growing software product of all time with more than 700 million weekly users. So, Nick and I talk about the back...
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August 11, 2025 • 55 mins
This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. This is the second episode of my productivity-focused Decoder series I’m doing while Nilay is out on parental leave.
Today, I’m talking with Notion cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao. I’ve followed Notion for quite some time now — I’m a big fan, and I use Notion as part of my workflow with Platformer. So I was very excited to get Ivan on the show...
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August 7, 2025 • 61 mins
This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. My guest today is GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. In many ways, GitHub Copilot set off the current AI coding boom. But since Thomas was on the show a year ago, the rise of vibe coding has shifted the buzz to newer platforms like Cursor and Windsurf. As you’ll hear in our conversation, Thomas is thinking a lot about the competition, and GitHub’s role in the future of software development.
...
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August 4, 2025 • 55 mins
This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. I’ll be guest hosting the next few episodes of Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave. For the next three weeks, I’ll be talking to leaders in the productivity space about what they’re building, and how they can help us get things done.
My guest today: Michael Truell, the CEO of Anysphere, the maker of automated progra...
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July 31, 2025 • 39 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today I'm joined by Hayden Field, The Verge’s new senior AI reporter to talk about the AI talent wars and why some researchers are suddenly getting traded like their NBA superstars.
Both Hayden and I have been reporting on this for the past several weeks to get a sense of much these companies are paying for top talent, why Big Tech firms like Goog...
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July 28, 2025 • 54 mins
This is CNBC journalist Jon Fortt. This is the last episode I’ll be guest-hosting for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. My guest today is Richard Robinson, who is the cofounder and CEO of legal tech startup Robin AI.
Richard is a corporate lawyer-turned-startup founder working on AI tools for the legal profession. But law and AI have not mixed well. So I wanted to ask Richard about hallucinations, how lawyers can use AI tod...
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July 24, 2025 • 56 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host. Today I'm talking with Gaurav Misra, the CEO of Captions. You may not have heard of Captions yet, but by now, you’ve probably seen a video that was generated using its AI models. The company’s Mirage Studio platform lets anyone generate AI versions of real people, and the results are alarmingly realistic.
Captions just put out a blog post titled, “We Build Synthetic Humans. He...
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July 21, 2025 • 62 mins
This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist. I’m guest-hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Nilay is out on parental leave. Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authoritarianism.
Links:
Is Peter Thiel the Antichrist? NYT didn’t th...
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July 17, 2025 • 49 mins
This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. Nilay’s out on parental leave for the next few months, so I’ll be stepping in to host our Thursday episodes while he’s out. My guest today is Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built.
Perplexity just released Comet, an AI web browser for the Mac and Windows that’s still in an invite-only beta. I’ve been using it, and it’...
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July 14, 2025 • 63 mins
This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator and host of the Fortt Knox podcast. I’m stepping in to guest host a few episodes of Decoder this summer while he’s out on parental leave, and I’m very excited for what we’ve been working on.
For my first episode of Decoder, a show about how people make decisions, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I sat down with Cassie Kozyrkov, the CEO and founder ...
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July 10, 2025 • 48 mins
On this episode of Decoder, Ellis Hamburger — former journalist at The Verge, early Snap employee, and founder of the brand strategy studio Meaning — joins guest host Alex Heath to share why many AI founders are missing the bigger picture.
Links:
Meaning | Ellis Hamburger
Social media is doomed to die | Verge
I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything | Verge
Hideo Kojima se...
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July 7, 2025 • 84 mins
It’s summertime, which means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. In years past we’ve talked to the leaders of Big Green Egg, Traeger, and Blackstone, and it’s always fascinating how those companies have all the same kinds of problems and ideas as any of the tech companies we have on the show.
This time, I finally had the opportunity to sit down with SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. We’ve wanted to have SharkNinja on the show ...
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June 30, 2025 • 69 mins
Today, I’m talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic and the public face of WordPress. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine, and there’s been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.
It’s been a long, drawn-out saga. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking he...
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June 23, 2025 • 63 mins
Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.
Justin and I dug into that here, and we also explored some of the thorny issues around AI and dating, Hinge’s monetization, and data privacy in the seco...
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June 12, 2025 • 60 mins
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. Decoder is on a short summer break right now, but we’ll be back starting June 23 with new episodes, and we’re very excited for what we have on the schedule.
In the meantime, we have an episode from the excellent podcast Stay Tuned with Preet, with host and former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Last month, Preet sat down with former FTC Chair Lina Khan for a pretty high-level discussion about antitrust, mon...
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June 9, 2025 • 67 mins
Today, I’m talking with Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith. Taskrabbit is an interesting company; it’s known best for being a platform for hiring people to put together your furniture, so much so that Ikea acquired it in 2017. But Taskrabbit is still operating as a mostly independent company all these years later, and Ania is now in charge of maneuvering a fast-changing labor market during uncertain economic times and a potentially major AI...
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