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
October 30, 2025 • 69 mins
This is Sarah Jeong, features editor at The Verge. I’m standing in for Nilay for one final Thursday episode here as he settles back into full-time hosting duties. Today, we’ve got a fun one. I’m talking to Cory Doctorow, prolific author, internet activist, and arguably one of the fiercest tech critics writing today.
He has a new book out called Enshittifcation: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. So I sat ...
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October 27, 2025 • 65 mins
LexisNexis is one of the most important companies in the entire legal system. For ages it's been where you went to look up case law and do legal research. There isn’t a lawyer today who hasn’t used it — it’s fundamental infrastructure for the legal profession, just like email or a word processor.
But in 2025, apparently nobody can resist the siren call of AI, and LexisNexis is no different. The first word Sean said to describe Lex...
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October 22, 2025 • 78 mins
Today’s guests are General Motors CEO Mary Barra and new GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson. There’s a lot of big news the company just announced, including a Google Gemini-powered AI assistant that's coming to new cars and an entirely new hardware and software platform coming to the Escalade IQ in 2028 alongside true Level 3 autonomous driving.
So I asked Mary about all of that and how she's navigating the current moment...
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October 20, 2025 • 66 mins
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. I’m back from parental leave, and I’m really excited to jump back into Decoder. Today’s episode is a special one: I’m talking to Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz, and we chatted live on stage at the TechFutures conference in New York City.
You’re almost certainly familiar with ZocDoc — it’s a platform that helps people find and book appointments with doctors. It’s a classic of the early app economy. The big dif...
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October 16, 2025 • 39 mins
This is Jake Kastrenakes, executive editor at The Verge. I’m filling in for Nilay here while he settles back into full-time hosting duties. We’ve got a very good episode for you today. My guest is Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins, and we’re talking about the federal EV tax credit.
The tax credit expired at the end of September, and there are a lot of questions about what happens to the auto industry after its demise. This...
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October 15, 2025 • 22 secs
If you're a paid subscriber to the Verge, there's great news: you can now listen to Decoder, Version History, and The Vergecast completely ad-free. Just head to your Account Settings page to opt-in and start listening without ads. Not a member of The Verge yet? No worries! You can sign up at theverge.com/subscribe to get ad-free podcasts, plus other perks like exclusive newsletters and unlimited access to everything we publish.
Lea...
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October 9, 2025 • 44 mins
This is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge and your Thursday episode guest host. It’s been a very big news week in AI, and a lot of it had to do with OpenAI, its DevDay in San Francisco this week, and the viral explosion of AI-generated video thanks to the company’s new Sora app.
So I brought in Kanjun Qiu, CEO of AI startup Imbue and a close watcher of the industry, to break down what’s really happening, why it’s happ...
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October 6, 2025 • 50 mins
I’m Joanna Stern, the senior personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and this is my final Decoder episode filling in for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. My guest today: Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. This is RJ’s third time on the show, and it felt like the perfect follow-up to my conversation last week with Ford CEO Jim Farley.
I loved the idea of going straight from Ford to Rivian. And if you listened to the Farley ...
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October 2, 2025 • 46 mins
This is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge and your Thursday episode guest host. Today, I’m talking with David Hershey, who leads the applied AI team at Anthropic. I wanted to have David on because earlier this week, Anthropic released a brand-new AI model called Claude Sonnet 4.5 that’s been making waves.
So I wanted to sit down with David, who spends a lot of time testing out what modes like Claude Sonnet 4.5 can and ...
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September 29, 2025 • 63 mins
This is Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal. I’m the last Monday guest host filling in for Nilay here on Decoder while he’s out on parental leave with his adorable new son, and I’m very excited to be talking today to Ford CEO Jim Farley.
I’m a longtime Decoder listener and my favorite episodes are car episodes. I think car CEOs are currently facing some of the most fascinating and complex ...
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September 25, 2025 • 42 mins
This is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge — and your Thursday episode guest host. I have another couple of shows for you while Nilay is out on parental leave, and we’re going to be spending more time diving into some of the unforeseen consequences of the generative AI boom.
Today, I’m talking with Heidy Khlaaf, who is chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, about the tech industry’s shift toward AI military applica...
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September 22, 2025 • 66 mins
Guest host Hank Green talks with his friend Dropout CEO Sam Reich about keeping a business simple, trying to run a company the “right way,” and why the internet should be full of as many weird little projects as possible.
Read the full transcript on The Verge.
Links:
How CollegeHumor reinvented itself for the new internet age | People
CollegeHumor shaped online comedy. What went wrong? [2020] | Wired
‘I believe in t...
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September 18, 2025 • 50 mins
Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field and New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill discuss the significant mental health impact AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, can have on users — both people in crisis, and also people who seemed stable.
This episode contains non-detailed discussions of suicide and mental illness. If you or someone you know is in crisis, considering self-harm, or needs to talk, please call the Lifeline at 988.
Links:...
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September 15, 2025 • 61 mins
This is Hank Green, the cofounder of Complexly. I’m back for my second guest hosting spot here on Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave. Today, I’m talking with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi, who runs a major marketing and ad agency. You might remember Amy; Nilay interviewed her for Decoder live at an event in New York City almost a year ago. But Nilay, who runs what might be the last website on Earth, has a very different perspecti...
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September 11, 2025 • 51 mins
This is Alex Heath. For my final episode as your Thursday episode guest host, I recently sat down with Bret Taylor, the CEO of AI startup Sierra and the chairman of OpenAI, for a live event in San Francisco hosted by Alix Partners.
Bret has worked at Google, Facebook, and Salesforce in high-level, executive roles, and he led Twitter’s board during Elon Musk’s takeover, so very few people have seen the tech industry up close like ...
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September 8, 2025 • 63 mins
This is Hank Green, cofounder of Complexly. You might remember last year when I turned the tables on Nilay and interviewed him on his own show. That was a ton of fun, and it was so much fun that they’ve brought me back again. This time, I’m stepping in for Nilay to host the next few Decoder episodes while he’s out on parental leave.
Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Sal w...
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September 4, 2025 • 40 mins
Despite being one of the most valuable companies in the world, OpenAI is still technically a nonprofit. That’s what set the stage for the dramatic board coup in 2023 that briefly ousted Sam Altman as CEO. And now, OpenAI is trying to shake this nonprofit structure so it can raise even more money and, eventually, go public. There’s a lot at stake here, and not just for OpenAI.
Links:
OpenAI abandons plans to become a for-profi...
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August 28, 2025 • 67 mins
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Senior Producer Nick Statt. We’re on a small break for the end of summer, and, sadly, Nilay will still be out a little while longer when we come back. But we have an excellent slate of guest host episodes starting up next month, so stay tuned for those.
In the meantime, we wanted to bring back one of our favorite Decoder interviews from earlier this year. It’s with Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter, ...
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August 25, 2025 • 57 mins
Hello! Decoder senior producer Kate Cox here. I’m afraid I’m still not Nilay, but I hope you’ve been enjoying our series of guest hosts this summer while he’s out on parental leave. We have a few more really great guest episodes coming up, before Nilay returns to the host chair later this fall, so stay tuned.
The production team is taking our own break this week, so while we’re off we’re excited to share this episode of The Gray A...
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August 21, 2025 • 53 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. One of the biggest topics in AI these days is agents — the idea that AI is going to move from chatbots to reliably completing tasks for us in the real world. But the problem with agents is that they really aren’t all that reliable right now.
There’s a lot of work happening in the AI industry to try and fix that, and that brings me to my guest tod...
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