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
April 28, 2025 • 58 mins
A few days ago, I hosted a panel with FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington, DC. We recorded the discussion, and we’re bringing it to you today.
Normal Decoder stuff, but these are anything but normal times. Becca and Alvaro were FTC commissioners until very recently, when President Donald Trump fired them — but he doesn't have that legal authority. They’re suing to g...
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April 24, 2025 • 72 mins
Today we’re talking about the very real possibility that Google might be broken up by the United States government. And to do that, I’m talking to Jonathan Kanter, the former assistant attorney general for antitrust under the Biden administration. Kanter left the DOJ after Trump was elected, but he was the architect of the major antitrust cases the Trump administration continues to pursue against Google. That means he’s much more f...
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April 21, 2025 • 72 mins
As CEO of Verizon's consumer division, Sowmyanarayan Sampath oversees the biggest part of the company, which does business with roughly a third of the entire country. He's a longtime Verge reader, so we talked very directly about whether the huge 5G investment had actually paid off, and whether – whether the “race” we were supposedly in with China was actually worth it, and what kinds of new apps and services actually come to ligh...
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April 17, 2025 • 67 mins
One of the ways I’ve been trying to sort out the chaos of tariffs and trade wars is by talking to the people behind the software that makes the global trade system go. So today I wanted to bring back one of my favorite Decoder guests: Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen, whose software manages the logistics of moving things around the world, from factory to doorstep.
We didn’t get too much into the numbers — those tariff percentages keep ...
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April 14, 2025 • 79 mins
Today, I’m talking with Vlad Tenev, the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, which started as a way to open up stock trading. But the company’s ambitions have grown over time – and they’re getting bigger. Just a day before Vlad and I talked, Robinhood announced it would soon be offering bank accounts and wealth management services, which would really allow Robinhood to be involved with your money at every possible level.
So I was ver...
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April 10, 2025 • 52 mins
Rohit Chopra was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head until the end of January, when President Donald Trump fired him and Elon Musk’s DOGE began trying to dismantle the agency. The CFPB has been pretty popular since it was founded in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers, so shutting it down has kicked off a bunch of controversies — not least of which was whether Trump and Musk even had the power to do...
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April 7, 2025 • 70 mins
Today, I’m talking with Daniel Dines, the co-founder and once again the CEO of UiPath, a software company that specializes in something called robotic process automation. We’ve been featuring a lot of what I like to call full-circle Decoder guests on the show lately, and Daniel is a perfect example.
He was first on the show in 2022, and UiPath has had a lot of changes since then, including a short stint with a different CEO. Danie...
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April 3, 2025 • 59 mins
Today, we’re diving head first into the AI art debate, which to be honest, is an absolute mess. If you’ve been on the internet this past week, you’ve seen the Studio Ghibli memes. These images are everywhere — and they’ve widened an already pretty stark rift between AI boosters and critics.
Brian Merchant, author of the newsletter and book Blood in the Machine, wrote one of the best analyses of the Ghibli trend last week. So I inv...
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March 31, 2025 • 74 mins
Unity is one of those hidden in plain sight companies we love here on Decoder, and CEO Matt Bromberg is in many ways the perfect Decoder guest. He's been on the job less than a year and took over in a moment of crisis. He describes the company as being "at war with its customers" before he joined, and he's not wrong.
The game industry right now is also contracting overall — studios are closing, and some big bets on things like the...
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March 27, 2025 • 49 mins
Today we’re talking about bird flu, but in a pretty Decoder way. Science journalist Lauren Leffer, who recently wrote a piece for The Verge about bird flu and how it’s becoming a forever war, is joining me on the show. We’re going to talk about the systems, structure, and culture that might control bird flu — and those that might make it worse.
Links:
We’ve entered a forever war with bird flu | Verge
Kennedy’s alarming prescri...
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March 24, 2025 • 70 mins
Today, I’m talking with Kakul Srivastava, CEO of music creation platform Splice, which is one of the biggest marketplaces around for loops and samples. You can just go sign up, pay the money, and download these loops to try to make pop hits all day long. Take, for instance, Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, which was composed almost entirely out of Splice loops.
Now, if you’re a Decoder listener, you know that some of my favorite con...
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March 20, 2025 • 51 mins
Today we're talking about the Tesla Takedown protest movement, which has emerged as a way for people to express how deeply unhappy they are with Elon Musk installing himself as a not-so-shadow president who is tearing the federal government apart, leaving confusion and destruction in his wake.
Tesla's stock price is sinking, new car registrations and down, and hype around the company is fading rapidly. There's an opportunity there...
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March 17, 2025 • 71 mins
I'm talking to Evan Smith, who started Altana in 2019 because he predicted the first wave of globalized manufacturing and trade would end, and that companies would want new powerful tools to adapt their supply chains as the world grew more complex. Here in 2025, that looks like a pretty good bet — even if the way it's playing out is more stressful and chaotic than anyone really wants it to be.
There are some big, unsettling ideas ...
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March 13, 2025 • 52 mins
Today, I’m talking to Verge policy editor Adi Robertson about a bill called the Take It Down Act, which is one in a long line of bills that would make it illegal to distribute non-consensual intimate imagery, or NCII. This is a real and devastating problem on the internet, and AI is just making it worse.
But Adi just wrote a long piece arguing that giving the Trump administration new powers over speech in this way would be a mist...
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March 10, 2025 • 68 mins
Almar Latour is the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and also CEO of its parent company, Dow Jones — itself a part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Almar's been with the paper since the 90s, and now he's got insight into all the modern messes. He's made a big deal with OpenAI, while also suing Perplexity — all while building his own AI data products for Dow Jones customers.
He's also a strong defender of press freedom who fought...
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March 6, 2025 • 40 mins
So today I’m talking to Andy Hawkins, The Verge’s transportation editor, about what’s going on in the skies. Andy just edited a big piece for us by writer Darryl Campbell that helps put a lot of what’s happening in air travel right now in perspective. It has some very reassuring data points, but it also raises important questions about what we need to do next to reinstill confidence in air travel.
Andy and I talked about how safe ...
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March 3, 2025 • 73 mins
Panos Panay is in charge of devices and services at Amazon — that's everything from Alexa and Kindle to Ring, Eero, and even the Project Kuiper satellite internet service that's meant to compete with Starlink.
He's led the team through giving Alexa a big AI infusion which is what drew him to Amazon after nearly 20 years with Microsoft. Like so many folks in tech, he sees AI as a platform shift that will change the way we use comput...
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February 27, 2025 • 39 mins
This is Alex Heath, deputy editor of The Verge. I’m guest hosting today’s episode while Nilay is still away for a much-needed vacation. He’ll be back next week. But today, we’re diving into the bromance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and more specifically, how it’s impacting the changing right-wing political movement here in the United States.
There’s no better place to get that temperature check than CPAC. Musk showed up th...
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February 24, 2025 • 77 mins
Vimeo started many years ago as something of an artsier, more creative competitor to YouTube. Its last CEO, Anjali Sud, took the company through a pretty huge transformation into an enterprise software company, and we had her on the show to talk about that transformation a couple years ago.
Now, her successor, new CEO Philip Moyer, not only has to decide what parts of that strategy are working, but also how to navigate the additio...
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February 20, 2025 • 58 mins
This is David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge. Nilay is off this week for a much-deserved break. So I’m filling in for him, and the Decoder team thought this would be a good opportunity to switch gears a little bit from the political apocalypse beat and talk about something completely different. So today we’re diving into the video game industry and discussing a particular set of very thorny problems facing Microsoft and its X...
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