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 10, 2026 • 45 mins
Acquiring Warner Bros. never goes well for anyone. AOL failed, AT&T failed, and Discovery failed — although it did succeed in flipping the assets to David Ellison’s Skydance.
So I’m talking to Peter Kafka, Business Insider chief correspondent and host of Channels, to see if Skydance has a chance at succeeding where nobody else has yet. Spoiler alert: Peter doesn’t think Skydance has a clear business pla...
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October 8, 2026 • 45 mins
My guest today is Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, and we're discussing the new wave of consumer friendly AI agents. AI enthusiasts have been using agents for a minute now, but the launch of Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, and XAI’s Grok Bot has brought easy to use agents to millions.
Muse, notably, is free, while Dots is not, and you’ll hear Hayden and me get into why Meta, which still...
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October 5, 2026 • 58 mins
California Sen. Adam Schiff sits on a bunch of the committees that do tech and AI oversight, so I really wanted to ask him about how we might regulate anything related to the tech industry at this moment in time.
He started our conversation by talking about the self-dealing and corruption present all through our politics now — right against the backdrop of President Trump gathering AI CEOs to the White House to pinky-swear t...
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October 3, 2026 • 36 mins
Hey everybody, it’s Nilay. We’ve got a little bonus drop for you today — I was recently interviewed about AI safety by Shumita Basu for Apple News In Conversation, and I enjoyed the conversation so much I asked if we could share it with you all.
We’ve actually got a few bonus drops coming up this month; we’ve been having a lot of great conversations lately, and we want to get them out to you on ...
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October 1, 2026 • 44 mins
Today I’m talking with Josh Dzieza, a longtime features writer here at The Verge, about a massive data center in Utah that does not exist, might never exist, and yet has already completely reshaped the politics of the entire state.
Josh just published a major feature this week on the struggling Stratos data center project in Utah backed by Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary. So I invited Josh on the show to discuss wh...
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September 28, 2026 • 76 mins
My guest today is Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is co-founder and CEO of Atlassian. Atlassian is one of those companies that every other company runs on — it makes important platform tools like Jira and Trello. This means Atlassian is also right in the middle of the way AI is changing how all these companies work.
Or, if you buy the idea of the so-called SaaSpocalypse, AI might just build all of these tools for you, destroy...
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September 26, 2026 • 78 mins
Cloudflare discovered in June that bots already make up more than half of internet traffic — and CEO Matthew Prince says that bots could outnumber humans a thousand to one within five years.
That's a huge change to the internet, and if the web is going to keep existing, it needs a huge change to its business model. Can Cloudflare use its place in the ecosystem to direct the money back to the people who make content?
Read th...
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September 24, 2026 • 23 mins
It’s a big week for Meta. The company has its big Connect conference, and the new Muse AI agent appears to be an early hit. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been doing a lot of interviews about it all — so of course we asked for him to be on Decoder. Meta declined, for whatever reason.
But luckily Mark just did a big interview with our friend and former colleague Alex Heath on the Sources podcast. So I figured we could hi...
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September 21, 2026 • 58 mins
Today, I’m talking with Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who is the world’s best-sourced Apple reporter. Earlier this month, Apple hosted its annual iPhone hardware event, and this event was special, for a number of reasons.
It was new Apple CEO John Ternus’ first major product launch. It was also the debut of the foldable iPhone Duo. So I wanted Mark on the show to explain why this event was so important, an...
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September 19, 2026 • 46 mins
The biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. The CEOs of all these companies have issued various calls to slow down development and develop regulation, including asking for antitrust exemptions so they can all coordinate on safety issues.
So to make sense of it all, I called Jonathan Kanter, the former antitrust chief for the U.S. Department of Justice in the Biden Administration. The...
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September 17, 2026 • 52 mins
Today, I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. As you’re no doubt aware, the biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. So I really wanted to talk to Mustafa about what he thinks is real and not in AI safety, whether the concept of alignment itself is up to the task, and whether this industry needs to slow down before it kills us all.
Read the full...
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September 14, 2026 • 65 mins
Adam Conover is a familiar face to anyone who’s spent time on the internet. He got his start at CollegeHumor back in the day, before transitioning into cable TV with Adam Ruins Everything, then onto Netflix, and all the way back to YouTube again, where he posts videos and hosts a podcast.
That is exactly the kind of career path that fascinates me, and it also happens to touch on basically every major Decoder theme there is.&...
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September 10, 2026 • 54 mins
We’re back with another Decoder mailbag special. This time, we focused on feedback to Nilay’s “software brain” video essay, our ongoing coverage of AI and Big Tech backlash, surveillance, interviewing politicians ahead of the midterms, and more.
Remember: we really do read every email, so please keep sending us your feedback, and letting us know what you think of our coverage and how we can improve.
...
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September 3, 2026 • 73 mins
My guest today is Sonos CEO Tom Conrad. Tom was on the board at Sonos during the disastrous 2024 app redesign that threatened to crash the entire brand, and he took over as interim CEO to right the ship during that period. About a year ago, he took the permanent role.
I have been dying to have Tom on the show to talk about how the board decided to move on from previous CEO Patrick Spence, how he diagnosed the issues inside t...
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August 31, 2026 • 51 mins
It’s an election year, with a shocking amount of tech policy at stake, and Gov.Hochul has taken strong positions on almost every major tech issue there is. You'll hear us talk about the settlement Meta reached with dozens of states, including New York, and about widespread age verification.
We also discussed 3D printing ghost guns; surveillance and Flock cameras; the politics of building — or not building — AI d...
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August 27, 2026 • 40 mins
Today, I’m talking with Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, about some pure Decoder bait: the seemingly-endless org chart changes at OpenAI, and how all of them seem to consolidate power under cofounder Greg Brockman, the company’s president.
While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI’s most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as oth...
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August 24, 2026 • 77 mins
Tim Cadogan is CEO of GoFundMe, the for-profit platform where you can donate to help people with everything from medical expenses to little league uniforms to starting a new business.
Tim took over as CEO in March 2020 — a chaotic moment when GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture. So you can imagine I had a lot of questions for Tim, how he thinks about all this, and how he makes some very tough decisions on...
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August 20, 2026 • 40 mins
My guest today is Robert Hart, The Verge’s London-based AI reporter. Robert recently wrote a fantastic story for us about the debate raging inside the world of mathematics — and the existential crisis over what it means that new frontier AI models have become very good at math in a shockingly short period of time.
I wanted to dive into all of this with Robert, who actually spoke to some of the most accomplished m...
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August 17, 2026 • 71 mins
Today I’m talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor. Ben ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom, and even wrote a book about it, called Traffic, which he discussed with me on Decoder back in 2023.
Semafor, which is only four years old, is now a fast-growing and profitable media company, which makes about half of its revenue from events. So I wanted to talk to Ben about how that all work...
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August 13, 2026 • 39 mins
My guest today is The Verge’s Hayden Field, and we’re discussing a question that’s been rocketing around the tech industry for the past week: Is Google losing the AI race?
That's because last week, the company announced a bombshell reorganization of its AI division. You can read these moves, and Google’s reaction, in a lot of different ways. So I really wanted to sit down with Hayden to dig into some of the...
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