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 5, 2024 • 44 mins
The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isn’t static, parts of it sometimes just… vanish.
But it’s not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. In 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in t...
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August 29, 2024 • 45 mins
Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday. In the meantime we thought we’d re-share an explainer that’s taken on a whole new relevance in the last couple weeks, about deepfakes and misinformation.
In February, I talked with Verge policy editor Adi Robertson how the generative AI boom might start fueling a wave of election-relat...
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August 26, 2024 • 42 mins
Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday, and I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule.
But while we’re out, we’d like to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season, for a deep dive into Disney. Can it be a tech company? It’s the question that defines...
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August 22, 2024 • 61 mins
The Onion is a comedy institution — and like everything else in media, it went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. We could do an entire episode on the G/O Media calamity, but the short version is: A bunch of friends just managed to buy The Onion, and they're busy relaunching the website, going back to print, and, clearly, having a blast doing it. CEO Ben Collins and chief product officer Danielle Strle joined me to explain...
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August 19, 2024 • 80 mins
Today I’m talking with Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. GitHub is the platform for managing code – but since 2018, it’s also been owned by Microsoft. We talk a lot about how independent GitHub really is inside of Microsoft — especially now that Microsoft is all-in on AI, and Gitbhub Copilot is one of the biggest AI product success stories that exists right now. But his perspective on AI is pretty refreshing: It’s clear there’s sti...
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August 15, 2024 • 42 mins
There’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. At a high level, KOSPA could radically change how tech platforms handle speech in an effort to try and make the internet safer for minors.
It’s a controversia...
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August 12, 2024 • 72 mins
Today, I’m talking with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda, and I will just tell you right away, we get all the way to people marrying their AI companions, so get ready. It’s a ride.
Replika’s basic pitch is pretty simple: what if you had an AI friend? The company offers avatars you can curate to your liking that pretend to be human, so they can be your friend, your therapist, or even your date. That’s a lot for a private compa...
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August 8, 2024 • 47 mins
Today, I’m talking to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. This is Jonathan’s second time on the show, and it’s a bit of an emergency podcast situation. On Monday, a federal court issued a monumental decision in the DOJ’s case against Google, holding that Google Search and the text ads in search are monopolies.
The court hasn’t decided on the penalties for all t...
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August 5, 2024 • 76 mins
Today, I’m talking with Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, which owns a large portfolio of familiar travel brands: OpenTable, Kayak, and Priceline, as well as its largest subsidiary, Booking.com. This episode is pure Decoder bait all the way through — from Booking’s structure, to competition with hotels and airlines increasingly going direct to consumer, even to how European regulation affects competition with Google. Oh, an...
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August 1, 2024 • 36 mins
Every time we talk about AI, we get one big piece of feedback that I really want to dive into: how the lightning-fast explosion of AI tools affects the climate. AI takes a lot of energy, and there’s a huge unanswered question as to whether using all that juice for AI is actually worth it, both practically and morally.
It’s messy and complicated and there are a bunch of apparent contradictions along the way — so it’s perfect for D...
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July 29, 2024 • 65 mins
Today, I’m talking with Hanneke Faber, the CEO of Logitech. Hanneke’s still pretty fresh to the role: She joined the company last October, after former CEO Bracken Darrell left following the pandemic boom and subsequent economic slowdown that halted Logitech’s growth. Hanneke, who comes from Unilever and Procter & Gamble, is new to the world of consumer electronics.
So we talked about the structural changes she’s already making a...
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July 25, 2024 • 38 mins
The Supreme Court has just taken on the entire idea of the US administrative state — and the Court is winning. Earlier this month, a conservative majority overturned a longstanding legal principle called Chevron deference. The implications are enormous for every possible kind of regulation — and net neutrality looks poised to be the first victim. Verge editor Sarah Jeong joins me to explain why.
Links:
Supreme Court overrules Ch...
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July 22, 2024 • 63 mins
Today, I’m talking with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe. RJ was on the show last September when we chatted at the Code Conference, but the past 10 months have seen a whirlwind of change throughout the car industry and at Rivian in particular. This year alone, the company unveiled five new models in its lineup and also just announced a $5 billion joint venture with Volkswagen. We got into all that and more.
If you’re a Decoder ...
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July 18, 2024 • 44 mins
This week I’m talking to Matthew Ball, who was last on the show in 2022 to talk about his book “The Metaverse: How it Will Revolutionize Everything.” It’s 2024 and it’s safe to say that has not happened yet. But Matt’s still on the case — in fact he just released an almost complete update of the book, now with the much more sober title, “Building the Spatial Internet.”
Matt and I talked a lot about where the previous metaverse hyp...
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July 15, 2024 • 60 mins
Today, I’m talking with Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s a cabinet-level position, where she works as the chief science and tech advisor to President Biden. Arati and her team of about 140 people at the OSTP are responsible for advising the president on not only big developments in science but also about major innovations in tech, much of which come from the private se...
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July 11, 2024 • 51 mins
Today I’m talking to Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic. I was really excited to talk to Nick. Like so many media CEOs, including Vox Media’s, he just signed a deal allowing OpenAI to use The Atlantic’s vast archives as training data, but he also has a rich background in tech. Before he was the CEO of The Atlantic, Nick was the editor-in-chief of Wired, where he set his sights on AI reporting well before anyone else.
I was...
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July 8, 2024 • 66 mins
Canva got its start more than a decade ago as a different form of disruptive tech for creatives. It’s a web-based platform that makes design tools cheaper and accessible for individuals, schools, and businesses from tiny to enterprise. Melanie has big goals to grow the company — and try to do good in the process.
Links:
Canva tackled digital design — and now the office suite is next | The Verge
Canva Inks Deals With Warner Musi...
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July 1, 2024 • 76 mins
It’s almost the Fourth of July, and that means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. This year, I’m talking with Big Green Egg CEO Dan Gertsacov, who has big plans for using very modern fan-based marketing techniques to expand the market for the company’s old-fashioned, fire-burning, aspirational product.
Links:
Big Green Egg Appoints a New CEO | CookOut News
Big Green Egg 50th Anniversary 1974-2024 | Big Green Egg
Yep...
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June 27, 2024 • 45 mins
Today, we’re talking about politics and lobbying in America. It’s hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and billionaires didn’t touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didn’t really exist before the 1970s. Now, our political debates about everything from energy, finance, and healthcare are deeply intertwined with corporations and their money — and new big players in tech n...
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Today, I’m talking with Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix. I caught up with Greg while he was at the Cannes Lions festival in France, which is basically the world’s biggest gathering of advertisers and marketers. It’s an increasingly important place for Greg to be, as Netflix’s new ad tier has nearly doubled in six months to more than 40 million subscribers and feels increasingly pivotal to the future of the company.
On top of t...
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