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
May 4, 2026 • 74 mins
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 — an...
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April 30, 2026 • 45 mins
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 ...
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April 27, 2026 • 62 mins
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-power...
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April 23, 2026 • 19 mins
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 ...
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April 20, 2026 • 66 mins
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...
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April 16, 2026 • 62 mins
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...
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April 13, 2026 • 74 mins
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 jour...
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April 9, 2026 • 38 mins
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 202...
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April 6, 2026 • 57 mins
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 oppositi...
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April 2, 2026 • 51 mins
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 o...
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March 30, 2026 • 66 mins
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 ...
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March 26, 2026 • 37 mins
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, an...
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March 23, 2026 • 75 mins
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 ...
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March 19, 2026 • 48 mins
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 co...
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March 16, 2026 • 77 mins
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 compa...
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March 12, 2026 • 48 mins
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 situa...
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March 9, 2026 • 72 mins
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 s...
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March 5, 2026 • 45 mins
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 p...
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March 2, 2026 • 65 mins
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 Zill...
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February 26, 2026 • 43 mins
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...
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