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
July 10, 2025 • 52 mins
On this episode of Decoder, Ellis Hamburger — former journalist at The Verge, early Snap employee, and founder of the brand strategy studio Meaning — joins guest host Alex Heath to share why many AI founders are missing the bigger picture.
Links:
Meaning | Ellis Hamburger
Social media is doomed to die | Verge
I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything | Verge
Hideo Kojima se...
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July 7, 2025 • 88 mins
It’s summertime, which means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. In years past we’ve talked to the leaders of Big Green Egg, Traeger, and Blackstone, and it’s always fascinating how those companies have all the same kinds of problems and ideas as any of the tech companies we have on the show.
This time, I finally had the opportunity to sit down with SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. We’ve wanted to have SharkNinja on the show ...
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June 30, 2025 • 69 mins
Today, I’m talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic and the public face of WordPress. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine, and there’s been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.
It’s been a long, drawn-out saga. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking he...
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June 23, 2025 • 67 mins
Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.
Justin and I dug into that here, and we also explored some of the thorny issues around AI and dating, Hinge’s monetization, and data privacy in the seco...
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June 12, 2025 • 64 mins
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. Decoder is on a short summer break right now, but we’ll be back starting June 23 with new episodes, and we’re very excited for what we have on the schedule.
In the meantime, we have an episode from the excellent podcast Stay Tuned with Preet, with host and former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Last month, Preet sat down with former FTC Chair Lina Khan for a pretty high-level discussion about antitrust, mon...
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June 9, 2025 • 71 mins
Today, I’m talking with Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith. Taskrabbit is an interesting company; it’s known best for being a platform for hiring people to put together your furniture, so much so that Ikea acquired it in 2017. But Taskrabbit is still operating as a mostly independent company all these years later, and Ania is now in charge of maneuvering a fast-changing labor market during uncertain economic times and a potentially major AI...
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June 5, 2025 • 56 mins
Today, I’m talking with Runway CEO and co-founder Cris Valenzuela. This one’s special: Cris and I were live at an event in New York City last month hosted by Alix Partners, so you’ll hear the audience from time to time.
Runway is a leading AI video generation platform, and it’s getting better all the time. That puts Cris and his company on the same collision course with creators, artists, and copyright law as every other part of ...
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June 2, 2025 • 77 mins
Today, I’m talking with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. This is Brian’s fourth time on the show, and he’s one of my favorite guests because he’s so clearly obsessed with things like company structure, design, and decision making. You know, Decoder stuff.
This time, Brian came on to talk about the company’s new services product and the full-scale redesign and rebuild of the Airbnb app to support these broader ambitions. There’s a lot of ...
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May 29, 2025 • 49 mins
Today, I’m talking with journalist Megan Greenwell about her new book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. It comes out June 10th. It's fantastic and maddening in equal measure. I highly recommend it.
In this episode, we discussed the genesis of Megan’s interest in the subject and its genesis in media — including her time as editor-in-chief of the website Deadspin, which underwent a very public PE tak...
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May 27, 2025 • 46 mins
In what's become a bit of a Decoder tradition, I spoke with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in person after I/O. The conference this year was all about AI, particularly a slew of actual AI products, not just models and capabilities.
To Sundar, this marks the beginning of a new era for search and the web overall. So I had to ask: what happens to the web when AI tools and eventually agents do most of the browsing for us? It was a very Deco...
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May 22, 2025 • 67 mins
Today, I’m talking with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. We recorded this conversation on the same day Uber announced a big set of product updates, including new options for shared rides. Dara was in New York for all that, so he came to our studio and we did this one together, which always makes for a great episode.
If you’ve been listening to Decoder recently, you know that I’m very curious about how service apps like Uber will handl...
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May 19, 2025 • 74 mins
Today, I’m talking with Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft, and one of the company’s AI leaders. Kevin is one of my favorite repeat Decoder guests, and he joined the show this time to talk about the future of search.
Microsoft just announced an open-source tool for websites to integrate AI powered natural language search with just a little bit of effort, in a way that lets them actually run whatever models the...
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May 15, 2025 • 77 mins
Today, I’m talking with Gerrit Kazmaier, the brand-new president of product and technology at Workday. Gerrit’s new on the job, maybe a little bit braver than most, and to his credit he came on the show and took the heat. We spent a lot of time talking about what enterprise software really is, what it does and why it has a reputation of being so deeply frustrating for so many people.
Links:
Workday names Gerrit Kazmaier pres...
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May 12, 2025 • 83 mins
We’re doing something a little different today — I asked my friend John Gruber of Daring Fireball to come on the show and talk about the future of Apple, and, importantly, the App Store. I wanted to talk about the most recent ruling in the Epic v. Apple legal saga.
But I also wanted to talk about the big picture at Apple, and why the company seems to have found itself being hammered on all sides: by the developers that feel it’s ...
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May 8, 2025 • 70 mins
Today, I’m talking with Paul Bascobert, who is the president of Reuters, as part of a special Thursday series we’re running this month to explore how leaders at some world’s biggest companies make decisions in such a rapidly changing environment. Reuters is a great company for us to kick off with, because it’s been around since 1851, when the hot technology enabling mass media was the telegraph.
Here, today, in 2025, the tech dri...
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May 5, 2025 • 70 mins
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. We’re off today, but we’ll be back Thursday, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we have an excellent episode from Business Insider Chief Correspondent Peter Kafka, who hosts the media podcast Channels.
In this episode, Peter sat down with one of the biggest names in journalism: New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger. It’s a fascinating conversation that covers some of the most pressing issues facing journal...
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May 1, 2025 • 52 mins
A lot has happened in the first 100 days of Trump's second term. It’s nearly too much to keep up with, really, but we're going to try. Verge policy editor Adi Robertson joins Decoder this week to talk through six of the biggest stories and themes we're covering, from tariffs to TikTok to DOGE.
Links:
Donald Trump’s first 100 days: all the news affecting the tech industry | Verge
The DOGE days have just begun | Verge
A...
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April 28, 2025 • 58 mins
A few days ago, I hosted a panel with FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington, DC. We recorded the discussion, and we’re bringing it to you today.
Normal Decoder stuff, but these are anything but normal times. Becca and Alvaro were FTC commissioners until very recently, when President Donald Trump fired them — but he doesn't have that legal authority. They’re suing to g...
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April 24, 2025 • 72 mins
Today we’re talking about the very real possibility that Google might be broken up by the United States government. And to do that, I’m talking to Jonathan Kanter, the former assistant attorney general for antitrust under the Biden administration. Kanter left the DOJ after Trump was elected, but he was the architect of the major antitrust cases the Trump administration continues to pursue against Google. That means he’s much more f...
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April 21, 2025 • 72 mins
As CEO of Verizon's consumer division, Sowmyanarayan Sampath oversees the biggest part of the company, which does business with roughly a third of the entire country. He's a longtime Verge reader, so we talked very directly about whether the huge 5G investment had actually paid off, and whether – whether the “race” we were supposedly in with China was actually worth it, and what kinds of new apps and services actually come to ligh...
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