Decoder with Nilay Patel

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

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan

June 11, 2026 • 54 mins
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 tra...
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Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job

June 8, 2026 • 76 mins
Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. This is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from his approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious.  Of course, we also talked about Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around AI right now, an...
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Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire

June 4, 2026 • 48 mins
My guest today is Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and co-author of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I wanted to have Ryan on today because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons.  Its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dol...
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AI is blowing up music. How should the Grammys handle it?

June 1, 2026 • 65 mins
I last talked to Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr in 2024 — when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but not exactly clear how that would happen. Now, Harvey says AI is “omnipresent” in music production. So what kinds of tools are musicians using, in what way, and what kind of music is it making for us? Is it any good? And how do we identify, and take care of, actual human music...
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Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons

May 28, 2026 • 69 mins
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 a...
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How Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era

May 26, 2026 • 51 mins
Connecting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai at I/O every year is one of my favorite Decoder traditions. This was our fifth year doing it, and there’s always a whole slew of new things to talk about. This year, in addition to the news, we talked about Google Zero; picking fights with YouTube creators and publishers; and what being at “the foothills of the singularity" even means. Read the full interview transcript on The...
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Musk v Altman: Much ado about nothing

May 21, 2026 • 34 mins
Musk v Altman was nominally about OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit entity, and how it went about that change. But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way. Verge reporter Liz Lopatto spent the last month covering the trial, in all its chaos, and joins Decoder to ask: In a courtroom full o...
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Exclusive: Jonah Peretti explains why he sold BuzzFeed

May 18, 2026 • 70 mins
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 ...
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How companies weaponize the terms of service against you

May 14, 2026 • 54 mins
Brendan Ballou is founder of the Public Integrity Project and author of the new book,  When Companies Run the Courts, about the rise of forced arbitration. Forced arbitration is similarly everywhere in modern life, and there have been some very high-profile cases these past few years highlighting how deeply unfair these clauses are to consumers. Brendan’s book delves into how and why we got here — spoiler: we can ...
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Joanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them

May 11, 2026 • 60 mins
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 ...
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Rewind: How AI is fueling an existential crisis in education

May 7, 2026 • 42 mins
Hey, everyone, Nilay here. We’re off today, while the team and I are cooking on a lot of really great stuff in the coming weeks. We’ll be back with an all-new interview on Monday.  In the meantime, we really wanted to highlight this episode we first aired in the fall, because it’s about a huge subject: AI in schools. The school year is starting to wrap up now around the country, and we’re no closer to ...
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Dara Khosrowshahi on replacing Uber drivers — and himself — with AI

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 actual...
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How to win — or lose — Decoder

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’...
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That UL safety logo is a lot more complicated than it looks

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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THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION

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...
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Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software

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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Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman's "unconstrained" relationship with the truth

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, a...
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Can Puck’s CEO reinvent the news business for the influencer age?

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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The AI industry's existential race for profits

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 ...
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Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space

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 t...
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