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
January 19, 2026 • 64 mins
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.
The...
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January 15, 2026 • 51 mins
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 pri...
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January 12, 2026 • 64 mins
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 ...
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December 22, 2025 • 43 mins
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 bi...
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December 18, 2025 • 56 mins
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...
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December 15, 2025 • 64 mins
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 b...
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December 11, 2025 • 57 mins
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 t...
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December 8, 2025 • 73 mins
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 ancie...
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December 4, 2025 • 38 mins
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 j...
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December 1, 2025 • 69 mins
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. ...
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November 24, 2025 • 50 mins
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...
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November 20, 2025 • 30 mins
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...
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November 17, 2025 • 70 mins
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 erosio...
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November 13, 2025 • 37 mins
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...
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November 10, 2025 • 55 mins
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 t...
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November 6, 2025 • 39 mins
We keep hearing over and over that generative AI is causing massive problems in education, both in K-12 schools and at the college level. Lots of people are worried about students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, and that is a problem. But really, the issues go a lot deeper, to the very philosophy of education itself.
We sat down and talked to a lot of teachers — you’ll hear many of their voices throughout this episode — and...
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November 3, 2025 • 78 mins
David Risher was on Lyft's board for years, but only stepped in as CEO in 2023, to help turn the company around. He's done pretty well so far, but there are still a lot of open questions for him to face. It's not just competition for riders and drivers Lyft has to deal with; it’s the future of transportation itself, and new AI tools that might take apps like Lyft out of the equation entirely.
Links:
Lyft’s first ‘robotaxis’ a...
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October 30, 2025 • 69 mins
This is Sarah Jeong, features editor at The Verge. I’m standing in for Nilay for one final Thursday episode here as he settles back into full-time hosting duties. Today, we’ve got a fun one. I’m talking to Cory Doctorow, prolific author, internet activist, and arguably one of the fiercest tech critics writing today.
He has a new book out called Enshittifcation: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. So I sat ...
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October 27, 2025 • 65 mins
LexisNexis is one of the most important companies in the entire legal system. For ages it's been where you went to look up case law and do legal research. There isn’t a lawyer today who hasn’t used it — it’s fundamental infrastructure for the legal profession, just like email or a word processor.
But in 2025, apparently nobody can resist the siren call of AI, and LexisNexis is no different. The first word Sean said to describe Lex...
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October 22, 2025 • 78 mins
Today’s guests are General Motors CEO Mary Barra and new GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson. There’s a lot of big news the company just announced, including a Google Gemini-powered AI assistant that's coming to new cars and an entirely new hardware and software platform coming to the Escalade IQ in 2028 alongside true Level 3 autonomous driving.
So I asked Mary about all of that and how she's navigating the current moment...
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