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

February 13, 2025 51 mins
The First Amendment, protecting free speech and free media, is a pillar of US law. It is, famously, the first one. We don’t usually tolerate government interference with speech. So it’s been disconcerting these first few weeks of the second Trump administration to realize suddenly, there’s a nonzero chance the government will punish our work. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is absolutely determined to turn all that talk about the media ...
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Today, I’m talking with Senator Ron Wyden, a democrat and the senior senator from Oregon. He’s been in the Senate for almost 30 years, which makes him one of longest serving members of the institution. We scheduled this interview with Senator Wyden a while ago — he’s got a new book out called “It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change.”  But recent events made it vastly more important to talk about the stat...
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Today, we’re discussing a very big problem with extremely far-reaching consequences: Do we still have a functional federal government here in the United States? And how much of it has been handed entirely to Elon Musk?  If you’ve been following the news, you know there’s a lot here that’s unfolding very fast, but I wanted to know how all these changes are affecting the people who’ve so far been the most newly supportive of Trump b...
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Andy Hunter is the CEO of Bookshop.org, a website he launched in 2020 that lets local bookshops sell all over the country. He always meant it to compete directly with Amazon, and the timing of that launch right into the teeth of the pandemic meant it was able to start strong and grow quickly. Now Bookshop is selling ebooks, which is another market hugely dominated by Amazon. For Andy and Bookshop to get what they want, they’re pro...
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Today, we’re talking about DeepSeek, and how the open source AI model built by a Chinese startup has completely upended the conventional wisdom around chatbots, what they can do, and how much they should cost to develop.  We’re also talking about Stargate, OpenAI’s new $500 billion data center venture that’s supposed to supercharge domestic AI infrastructure. Both stand in stark contrast with one another — and represent a new, esc...
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Today, I’m talking with Gary Smith, CEO of the networking company Ciena. You probably aren’t familiar with Ciena — the company isn’t really a household name. But every internet user has relied on the company’s products; Ciena makes the hardware and software that makes the fiber optic cables connecting the world light up with data.  That’s everything from local fiber networks for broadband ISPs to the massive undersea cables that c...
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It’s been a messy couple of weeks for big tech companies as the second Trump administration kicks off an unprecedented era of how we think about who controls the internet. Right now, there's a major collision, or maybe merger, happening between billionaire power and state power, and everyone who uses tech to communicate — so, basically everyone — is stuck in the middle. I sat down with law professor and online speech expert Kate Kl...
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Today, I’m talking with Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. Matt took over as CEO last June — you might recall that we had his predecessor Adam Selipsky on the show just over a year ago. That makes this episode terrific Decoder bait, since I love hearing how new CEOs will decide what to change and what to keep going after they’ve settled into their role. Links:  There’s no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky...
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Hello, Nilay here. We’re still on winter break; we’ll be back with brand-new Decoder interviews next week, and with our Thursday shows later this month. I’m excited for what we’ve got in the pipeline. I think you’re going to love it. For today, though, we’re sharing an episode of Peter Kafka’s new show Channels – he’s talking to disinformation researcher Renee DiResta about what’s going on with speech online in an era where platfo...
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December 20, 2024 53 mins
The Decoder team turns the tables on Nilay and makes him answer your burning listener questions in our end-of-year wrap up special. We also reflect on the year’s biggest Decoder themes, discuss some of the most popular feedback we’ve received, and tease what we have planned for next year.  Links:  Here we go: The Verge now has a subscription | The Verge How The Verge Works | The Vergecast Intuit asked us to delete part of thi...
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December 18, 2024 36 mins
Today we’re talking about antitrust policy and tech, which is at a particularly weird moment as we enter the second Trump administration. A lot of tech policy is at a weird moment, actually, but antitrust might be the weirdest of them all — the pendulum has swung back and forth on antitrust policy pretty wildly over the past few years, and it’s about to swing again under Trump. So I asked Leah Nylen, an antitrust reporter for Bloom...
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Alex Heath, Deputy Editor at The Verge, guest hosts this episode of Decoder featuring a live interview with Arm CEO Rene Haas about the future of AI and the semiconductor industry. The two discuss his thoughts on the struggles of Intel, the rumors Arm is developing its own AI chips to rival Nvidia’s, and his thoughts on the incoming Trump administration.  Links:  What Arm’s CEO makes of the Intel debacle | Command Line How Arm ...
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We’ve been talking a lot this year about the changing internet, and what it’s doing to the media ecosystem — particularly journalism, which has taken a backseat to creators and influencers. But the tech platforms themselves have a lot of influence over what those creators and influencers make, too. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ll recognize this as one of my common themes — the idea that the way we distribute media directly inf...
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December 11, 2024 38 mins
There’s something strange happening these days in the podcast world — in particular, the way companies that deal in money have been using podcasting as not just an entertainment medium, but a unique kind of hybrid of marketing, thought leadership, and networking. Guest host David Pierce and Vulture podcast critic Nick Quah break it all down.  Links:  How Venture Capitalists Use Podcasts to Lure in Founders | Vanity Fair Your Ne...
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Today, I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. Mustafa is a fascinating character in the world of AI — he’s been in and out of some pivotal companies like DeepMind, which he cofounded, and Google. He landed at Microsoft through a unique not-quite-acquisition deal of his latest startup, Inflection AI.  As CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa now oversees all of its consumer AI products, including the Copilot app, Bing, a...
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AI investment is massive, but AI profits are not — and yet investors seem confident massive AI fundraising will one day translate into sizable AI profits. To break it down, Verge Deputy Editor Alex Heath guest hosts this episode of Decoder featuring Menlo Ventures partner Tim Tully and AirStreet Capital founder Nathan Benaich.  Links:  2024: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise | Menlo Ventures State of AI Report | Nath...
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Bluesky has really taken off since the election, and since the Decoder team took some time off for Thanksgiving break, we felt it was a great time to bring back the interview we did earlier this year with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, the upstart competitor to Meta’s Threads and the platform formerly known as Twitter.  At the time, Bluesky was a pretty small platform. It had just reached 5 million users when Jay and I spoke. But...
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I spoke with GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani live on stage last week at an event hosted by Alix Partners in Palo Alto. GoDaddy is one of those companies that feels tied to an earlier era, but Aman’s been CEO since 2019, and he’s been building out what he calls adjacencies. The business of the web has really changed in the past few years: the walled-garden, social network era really took over in the past decade, and now huge changes to Go...
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November 21, 2024 34 mins
For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. Google is constantly changing that platform — it launched another attempt to combat ‘parasite SEO’ just this week — and not all of those changes have worked well. Earlier this year I talked to a lot of people who have built on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one ...
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November 18, 2024 45 mins
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay — Decoder is on a short break this week. We’ll be back with a special live interview episode on Monday of next week, and then regular programming will resume in December. 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 of a new podcast from our friends over at Vox called Explain It To Me. On this episode, host Jonquilyn Hill and her ...
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