Decoder with Nilay Patel

Jennifer Witz is the CEO of SiriusXM. You probably know the company as the satellite radio brand in virtually every new car, but it also owns Pandora, a huge podcast network that includes Team Coco and 99% Invisible, a content operation with huge stars like Howard Stern, and has broadcast deals with every major sports league. SiriusXM is effectively the dominant market leader for built-in premium...

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, where he showed off the company’s new AI assistant tools, which Microsoft calls Copilots. Microsoft is big into Copilots. GitHub Copilot is already helping millions of developer...

Today – we’ve got a treat for you. We’re going to run a special episode from our friends over at Vox. Peter Kafka and his team just wrapped up a special 3-part series on AI.  AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve talked to both Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about AI after they announced new AI-powered search products. An...

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems. We have a special episode today – I’m talking to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We hung out the day after Google IO, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s produ...

Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, was previously on the show in 2021. Back then, Airbnb was betting big on long-term stays for remote work amid the pandemic, and Chesky had just restructured the company to a more functional organization, getting rid of the divisions it had before. Now, the pandemic is ending, Airbnb has itself adopted a hybrid policy, Chesky’s back in the office seve...

Ben Smith is the former and founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, the founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and the author of a new book called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which is about the rise and fall of the social platform age in media, through the lens of Gawker Media and Buzzfeed and, in particular, their founders, Nick Denton and Jo...

We’ve got a special episode with Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and a familiar host for Decoder listeners, and David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark. That’s a company that just launched a service to make fast transactions using Bitcoin on something called the Lightning Network. David was previously at PayPal, and then he led Meta’s big payments effort that went nowhere, but he’s got a lot to...

Travis Katz is the CEO of BrightDrop, a subsidiary of GM that makes electrified delivery vans with an eye toward rebooting all of how delivery works. BrightDrop has pretty big partnerships already, with names like FedEx, Verizon, and Walmart committed to its Zevo 600 van, and it’s got big ideas for making the steps from the van to your door more efficient as well with something called e-carts. Kat...

It is fair to say that Substack has had a dramatic week and a half or so, and I talked to their CEO Chris Best about it. The company announced a new feature called Substack Notes, which looks quite a bit like Twitter — Substack authors can post short bits of text to share links and kick off discussions, and people can reply to them, like the posts, the whole thing. Like I said, Twitter. Twitter, u...

Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras found himself playing an important role during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Brex is what you might call a neobank — not a traditional bank but rather a financial services provider that helps companies manage how they spend money, corporate cards, travel expenses and the rest. In the middle of the SVB collapse, Brex was more than just a spending management company. I...

Chris Cocks is the CEO of Hasbro, a company that just turned 100 this year. Hasbro is a huge company, making everything from Transformers to Lincoln Logs to My Little Pony and Monopoly. It also makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, which are massive and growing businesses. Chris was the head of that division, called Wizards of the Coast, before he became the CEO of Hasbro overall last...

Today I’m talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and it’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls, you join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people...

Meredith Kopit Levien is the CEO of The New York Times, which is perhaps the most famous journalism organization in the world, and certainly one of America’s most complicated companies. The Times is 172 years old, and has only recently become a force on the internet. It’s hard to remember, but back in 2014 and ‘15, people thought the Times was doomed — that it would be replaced by BuzzFeed and Vic...

This special episode dives deep on Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023, because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts. Here we go. Tr...

In this installment of our Centennial Series on companies that are over 100 years old, we are talking to Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. The last few decades have thrown some hurdles in Barnes & Noble’s way, however. Far from being the monster that inspired the plot of the movie You’ve Got Mail, it’s had to face down a new Goliath called Amazon and the general decline of big-box retail stores. Aft...

Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has unde...

Intro: Steve Bandrowczak, the CEO of Xerox, an iconic company that got started all the way back in 1906 as a manufacturer of photo paper and is, of course, best known for pioneering the copy machine. Here in 2023, Xerox has moved well beyond paper. It now works with companies large and small to provide IT services: it optimizes workflows, manages data, automates parts of businesses, and yes, still...

Pali Bhat joined Reddit from Google about a year ago — he’s actually Reddit’s first-ever chief product officer, which is pretty surprising considering that Reddit is a series of product experiences: the reading experience, the writing experience, and importantly, the moderation experience. One thing we always say on Decoder is that the real product of any social network is content moderation, and...

We taped this episode live at Hot Pod Summit. That’s our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It’s called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. Hot Pod Summit is where we bring that community of creators, trendsetters and decision-makers together to explore the latest developments in podcasting, audiobooks, and more. It was a packed house and a...

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems.  Today, I'm talking to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, the Pocket newsreader, and a bunch of other interesting internet tools. Now as you all know, Decoder is secretly a...

I’m coming to you from Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, where just a few hours ago, Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. There’s also a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window that can help you browse and understand web pages.  The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running i...

HBO started as an experiment. It was a way to get people to switch from getting TV over broadcast antennas to cable by offering events you’d otherwise need tickets to see: boxing, plays, movies. That’s where the name Home Box Office comes from. But it grew from there in surprising ways: HBO was a major innovator in satellite distribution, in working with cable operators around the country, and of...

A few weeks ago, President Biden was in the Netherlands, where he asked the Dutch government to restrict export from a company called ASML to China. ASML is the only company in the world that makes a specific machine needed to make the most advanced chips. Apple couldn’t make iPhone chips without this one machine from the Netherlands’ biggest company. ASML doesn’t just shape the Dutch economy—it s...

I have this theory that music is usually about five years ahead of the rest of media in terms of its relationship to tech—whether that’s new formats based on new tech, like vinyl to CDs; new business models like streaming; or simply being disrupted by new kinds of artists who use new forms of promotion like TikTok in unexpected ways. I’ve always thought that if you can wrap your head around what’s...

Last year I spoke with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s a book about artists and technology and platforms, and how different kinds of distribution and creations tools create chokepoints for different companies to capture value that might otherwise go to artists and creators.. In other words, it’s a lot of Decoder stuff. As we were prepping this epi...