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 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.
Links:
How CollegeHumor reinvented itself for the new internet age | People
CollegeHumor shaped online comedy. What went wrong? [2020] | Wired
‘I believe in this enough to try to do it myself’ [...
Mark as Played
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:...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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 ...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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, ...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
August 18, 2025 • 54 mins
Obsidian is a note-taking and productivity app that occupies the same "second brain" space as competitors like Notion — but in a lot of ways, it's also startlingly different. Obsidian's files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use.
Steph Ango, the CEO, is also different in a lot of ways: He's not an Obsidian founder, but instead came to the role from being basically a member of the fan ...
Mark as Played
August 14, 2025 • 55 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today, I’m talking to a very special guest: Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT.
While Sam Altman is definitely the public face of OpenAI, Nick has been leading ChatGPT’s development since the very beginning, and it’s now the fastest-growing software product of all time with more than 700 million weekly users. So, Nick and I talk about the back...
Mark as Played
August 11, 2025 • 55 mins
This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. This is the second episode of my productivity-focused Decoder series I’m doing while Nilay is out on parental leave.
Today, I’m talking with Notion cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao. I’ve followed Notion for quite some time now — I’m a big fan, and I use Notion as part of my workflow with Platformer. So I was very excited to get Ivan on the show...
Mark as Played
August 7, 2025 • 61 mins
This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. My guest today is GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. In many ways, GitHub Copilot set off the current AI coding boom. But since Thomas was on the show a year ago, the rise of vibe coding has shifted the buzz to newer platforms like Cursor and Windsurf. As you’ll hear in our conversation, Thomas is thinking a lot about the competition, and GitHub’s role in the future of software development.
...
Mark as Played
August 4, 2025 • 55 mins
This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. I’ll be guest hosting the next few episodes of Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave. For the next three weeks, I’ll be talking to leaders in the productivity space about what they’re building, and how they can help us get things done.
My guest today: Michael Truell, the CEO of Anysphere, the maker of automated progra...
Mark as Played
July 31, 2025 • 39 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today I'm joined by Hayden Field, The Verge’s new senior AI reporter to talk about the AI talent wars and why some researchers are suddenly getting traded like their NBA superstars.
Both Hayden and I have been reporting on this for the past several weeks to get a sense of much these companies are paying for top talent, why Big Tech firms like Goog...
Mark as Played
July 28, 2025 • 54 mins
This is CNBC journalist Jon Fortt. This is the last episode I’ll be guest-hosting for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. My guest today is Richard Robinson, who is the cofounder and CEO of legal tech startup Robin AI.
Richard is a corporate lawyer-turned-startup founder working on AI tools for the legal profession. But law and AI have not mixed well. So I wanted to ask Richard about hallucinations, how lawyers can use AI tod...
Mark as Played
July 24, 2025 • 56 mins
This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host. Today I'm talking with Gaurav Misra, the CEO of Captions. You may not have heard of Captions yet, but by now, you’ve probably seen a video that was generated using its AI models. The company’s Mirage Studio platform lets anyone generate AI versions of real people, and the results are alarmingly realistic.
Captions just put out a blog post titled, “We Build Synthetic Humans. He...
Mark as Played
July 21, 2025 • 62 mins
This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist. I’m guest-hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Nilay is out on parental leave. Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authoritarianism.
Links:
Is Peter Thiel the Antichrist? NYT didn’t th...
Mark as Played
July 17, 2025 • 49 mins
This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. Nilay’s out on parental leave for the next few months, so I’ll be stepping in to host our Thursday episodes while he’s out. My guest today is Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built.
Perplexity just released Comet, an AI web browser for the Mac and Windows that’s still in an invite-only beta. I’ve been using it, and it’...
Mark as Played
July 14, 2025 • 63 mins
This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator and host of the Fortt Knox podcast. I’m stepping in to guest host a few episodes of Decoder this summer while he’s out on parental leave, and I’m very excited for what we’ve been working on.
For my first episode of Decoder, a show about how people make decisions, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I sat down with Cassie Kozyrkov, the CEO and founder ...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com