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
September 19, 2023 • 51 mins
TechCrunch is one of the most important trade publications in the world of tech and startups, and its annual Disrupt conference is where dozens of major companies have launched… and some have failed.
Matt has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch for essentially a decade now, and he and I have been both friends and competitors the entire time. We’ve competed for scoops, traded criticisms, and asked each other for advice in running...
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September 12, 2023 • 57 mins
The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, from longtime space reporter and Verge alum Loren Grush, is out today.
It’s been 40 years since Sally Ride became the first American woman in space — but she was far from the last. In the early 1980s six women — Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid — would get a chance to fly a mission on one of the space shuttles… includ...
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August 29, 2023 • 73 mins
Okta is a big company, a Wall Street SaaS darling. For most of us, it's the thing we have to log into 50 times a week just to get any work done. But from Okta's point of view, Jameeka Green Aaron told us, it's an identity company.
I spoke with Jameeka about what "identity" really means — in the digital space, in your real life, and at work — in 2023, and how an identity-based approach might be more or less secure than other approa...
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August 22, 2023 • 70 mins
Perkins Miller is the CEO of Fandom, which both hosts thousands of wikis for everything from Disney to Grand Theft Auto and also runs several publications. Millions of people contribute millions of pieces of content to the platform, and Fandom surrounds all that content with ads and uses all that data to generate insights about how fans think about their favorite games, TV shows, and movies.
While you might enjoy the content, a lo...
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August 15, 2023 • 38 mins
We have a little surprise in the feed today: An episode of "Land of the Giants," which is all about Tesla this season. Former Verge transportation reporter Tamara Warren and former Jalopnik EIC Patrick George, who are both deeply sourced in the world of cars, host, and every episode has reporting and insight about Tesla that really hasn’t been shared before. It was ahead of the EV competition in basically every way for a long time....
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August 8, 2023 • 69 mins
AWS is quite a story. It started as an experiment almost 20 years ago with Amazon trying to sell its excess server capacity. And people really doubted it. Why was the online bookstore trying to sell cloud services? But now, AWS is the largest cloud services provider in the world, and it’s the most profitable segment of Amazon, generating more than $22 billion in sales last quarter alone. By some estimates, AWS powers roughly one-th...
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July 25, 2023 • 81 mins
ActivityPub is back in the news, thanks to Meta’s Threads launch and Elon’s continued immolation of Twitter — now X. That makes this the perfect time to dig into the Decoder archives to hear what Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko thinks about the future of social media. Mastodon got a head start as the most well-known of the rising decentralized social networks, but that’s changing fast. Bluesky, on a competing protocol, is picking up stea...
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July 18, 2023 • 63 mins
Today I’m talking to Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, the ubiquitous web hosting and design company. If you’re a podcast listener, you’ve heard a Squarespace ad.
I was excited to talk to Anthony because it really feels like we’re going through a reset moment on the internet, and I wanted to hear how he’s thinking about the web and what websites are even for in 2023.
If you’re a Vergecast listener, you know I’v...
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Today, I’m talking to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the newly created division of Google responsible for AI efforts across the company. Google DeepMind is the result of an internal merger: Google acquired Demis’ DeepMind startup in 2014 and ran it as a separate company inside its parent company, Alphabet, while Google itself had an AI team called Google Brain.
Google has been showing off AI demos for years now, but ...
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June 27, 2023 • 54 mins
Roblox has 66 million daily users, and people spent 14 billion collective hours on Roblox in just Q1 of 2023. But its CEO David Baszucki still wants to see the company grow.
One idea? Aging up the kinds of experiences that are allowed on its platform. Roblox recently introduced 17+ experiences. It wants to add new AI world-building capabilities. It’s even partnering with advertisers to roll out more immersive ad experiences.
It’s ...
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June 21, 2023 • 50 mins
If you’ve spent more than two minutes somewhere on social media, you have probably come across Gary Vaynerchuk. For years I have wondered, is this just a character? Or is there a real Gary Vaynerchuk somewhere behind “GaryVee,” the social media entrepreneur and internet brand?
Gary got his start working at his family’s liquor store, which he turned into an online wine shop. That’s where he started in social media, hosting a long-r...
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June 13, 2023 • 60 mins
The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs – mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. Then, the company can be sold or taken pu...
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June 6, 2023 • 65 mins
Jennifer Witz is the CEO of SiriusXM. You probably know the company as the satellite radio brand in virtually every new car, but it also owns Pandora, a huge podcast network that includes Team Coco and 99% Invisible, a content operation with huge stars like Howard Stern, and has broadcast deals with every major sports league.
SiriusXM is effectively the dominant market leader for built-in premium audio in cars, in a time when compe...
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Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, where he showed off the company’s new AI assistant tools, which Microsoft calls Copilots. Microsoft is big into Copilots. GitHub Copilot is already helping millions of developers write code, and now, the company ...
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May 16, 2023 • 50 mins
Today – we’ve got a treat for you. We’re going to run a special episode from our friends over at Vox. Peter Kafka and his team just wrapped up a special 3-part series on AI.
AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve talked to both Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about AI after they announced new AI-powered search products. And in the middle of the frenzy, it'...
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May 12, 2023 • 42 mins
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems.
We have a special episode today – I’m talking to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We hung out the day after Google IO, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s products.
It’s an important moment for...
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Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, was previously on the show in 2021. Back then, Airbnb was betting big on long-term stays for remote work amid the pandemic, and Chesky had just restructured the company to a more functional organization, getting rid of the divisions it had before.
Now, the pandemic is ending, Airbnb has itself adopted a hybrid policy, Chesky’s back in the office several days a week, and they’re two ye...
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Ben Smith is the former and founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, the founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and the author of a new book called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which is about the rise and fall of the social platform age in media, through the lens of Gawker Media and Buzzfeed and, in particular, their founders, Nick Denton and Jonah Peretti.
I say the fall of the...
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April 25, 2023 • 50 mins
We’ve got a special episode with Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and a familiar host for Decoder listeners, and David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark. That’s a company that just launched a service to make fast transactions using Bitcoin on something called the Lightning Network. David was previously at PayPal, and then he led Meta’s big payments effort that went nowhere, but he’s got a lot to say about where crypto and payment...
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April 18, 2023 • 71 mins
Travis Katz is the CEO of BrightDrop, a subsidiary of GM that makes electrified delivery vans with an eye toward rebooting all of how delivery works. BrightDrop has pretty big partnerships already, with names like FedEx, Verizon, and Walmart committed to its Zevo 600 van, and it’s got big ideas for making the steps from the van to your door more efficient as well with something called e-carts.
Katz says there’s a huge demand for d...
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