Decoder with Nilay Patel

My guest today is Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of Channels, a podcast about the media industry. And it’s a big week for the media industry — Comcast just announced that it’s splitting itself up, into the Comcast broadband company and the NBCUniversal entertainment company. This dream, that you can combine distribution with big splashy entertainment properties, has...

Today I’m talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators Division at United Talent Agency. UTA is an enormous talent agency, and Ali and Raina's creators division represents some of the biggest creators and influencers in the world. So I really wanted to know how Raina and Ali identify up-and-coming talent, how they work with that talent to build durable businesses, and what th...

We’ve got a special Decoder today. I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the south of France. There’s a lot in this one on AI, the creator economy, and the future of marketing – like I said, Amy is as sharp as they come, and I really enjoy talking to her about how the mone...

It’s time for our annual Fourth of July grill episode here at Decoder, which is when we invite the CEOs of outdoor cooking companies onto the show to explain just how their businesses kind of look like every other business. And this is a very special edition.  Today we’re talking to Roger Dahle, the CEO of Weber Blackstone, a full circle moment for Decoder. Roger was our first-ever grill CEO on th...

Hey everyone, Nilay here. You might remember I took a break from Decoder last year — we had a baby, so I took some leave. In my place, we had an excellent slate of guest hosts, and we’ve been working hard to bring you those episodes in full video since we launched our official Decoder YouTube channel. So today, we’re featuring a really great interview conducted by my very good friend Joanna Stern,...

A lot has changed on the internet, in the creator landscape, and at Patreon itself since CEO Jack Conte was last on the show in 2021. AI and platform shifts have stolen creator content and decimated artists' reach and revenue streams, and Patreon has made some pretty existential changes to the way it works in response.  Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links:  My thoughts on AI | P...

My guest today is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5.  Hayden actually just published a fantastic play-by-play on The Verge about how the Fable ban went down, a...

Today, I’m talking with Slydio CEO Adam Bry, who runs the leading US maker of autonomous drones. We covered a lot in this conversation, including Skydio’s police and government work at a time when military use of AI is more controversial than ever and competing with Chinese drones against the backdrop of the Trump’s administration’s DJI ban. There’s a lot in this one – maybe more than anything, it...

Hey! Nilay here. It’s conference season, so I’m traveling across the country and around the world a lot more than usual. Stay tuned for some very special Decoder episodes we have coming up soon, starting on Monday.  In the meantime, I wanted to share a conversation between my friend Peter Kafka and Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on the excellent Channels podcast. Lynch says he’s told his teams to assu...

Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. This is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from his approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious.  Of course, we also talked about Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around...

My guest today is Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and co-author of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I wanted to have Ryan on today because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons.  Its biggest-ever size, of course, at...

I last talked to Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr in 2024 — when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but not exactly clear how that would happen. Now, Harvey says AI is “omnipresent” in music production. So what kinds of tools are musicians using, in what way, and what kind of music is it making for us? Is it any good? And how do we identify, and take care of, ac...

Today, I’m talking with Wassym Bensaid, the chief software officer at Rivian, and the co-ceo of Rivian’s platform joint venture with Volkswagen. That joint venture, called RV Tech, is about a year and a half old, so I wanted to ask Wassym how it all works and Rivian’s ongoing relationship with Volkswagen.  Because it’s Rivian, I also had to ask Wassym about CarPlay. But the company also just launc...

Connecting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai at I/O every year is one of my favorite Decoder traditions. This was our fifth year doing it, and there’s always a whole slew of new things to talk about. This year, in addition to the news, we talked about Google Zero; picking fights with YouTube creators and publishers; and what being at “the foothills of the singularity" even means. Read the full intervi...

Musk v Altman was nominally about OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit entity, and how it went about that change. But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way. Verge reporter Liz Lopatto spent the last month covering the trial, in all its chaos, and joins Decoder to ask:...

Just days before we spoke, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti agreed to sell the company, which was losing money and at risk of shutting down. Now there’s a new lease on life — and new leadership. Jonah is taking on a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI, and Byron Allen will become CEO of BuzzFeed.  That’s obviously a huge structural and organizational change, and a really big decision — p...

Brendan Ballou is founder of the Public Integrity Project and author of the new book,  When Companies Run the Courts, about the rise of forced arbitration. Forced arbitration is similarly everywhere in modern life, and there have been some very high-profile cases these past few years highlighting how deeply unfair these clauses are to consumers. Brendan’s book delves into how and why we got here —...

My guest today is longtime friend of the show Joanna Stern. You all know Joanna: she is the former senior personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a former Decoder guest host, one of my co-founders at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends. Joanna just left that lofty perch at the Journal to start her own media company called New Things, and she’s starting with h...

Hey, everyone, Nilay here. We’re off today, while the team and I are cooking on a lot of really great stuff in the coming weeks. We’ll be back with an all-new interview on Monday.  In the meantime, we really wanted to highlight this episode we first aired in the fall, because it’s about a huge subject: AI in schools. The school year is starting to wrap up now around the country, and we’re no close...

It’s become an annual tradition to have Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi join us in the studio when he comes to New York for Uber’s big Go-Get event every year. This year, the big news was that Uber's expanding into a much larger platform for travel, starting with hotel booking and services like personal shopping. Uber is going so far as to call this an everything app, so I wanted to see how far Dara th...

This is Nick Statt, senior producer on Decoder. We last ran a mailbag episode during the holidays, and we decided it was a good idea to do that kind of thing more often. So we’re back with Nilay as the guest, answering questions and responding to feedback, criticism, and suggestions. We talk through some recent controversial episodes like our interviews with the CEOs of Superhuman and Puck, and we...

Jennifer Scanlon is CEO of UL Solutions, one of those hidden-in-plain-sight companies we like to poke at here on Decoder. UL's been around for more than 100 years; it started as a way for insurance companies to standardize fire and safety testing as electricity was the new technology spreading into homes. But now it's everywhere, and "safety" in tech doesn't just mean the hardware. UL is adapting...

Today on Decoder, I want to lay out an idea that's been banging around my head for weeks now as we've been reporting on AI and having conversations here on this show. I've been calling it software brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops.  Software brain is powerful stuff. It's a way of thinking that basically created our modern...

The last time Canva CEO Melanie Perkins was on Decoder, the company was starting a big push into enterprise. Now, she's leading it through a total reinvention, going, in Canva's words, "from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools." But there's a lot of competition in that AI enterprise space. Not only is Canva competing with design software like the Adobe Creative Suit...

Today I’m talking with Ronan Farrow, one of the biggest stars of investigative reporting working today. He broke the Harvey Weinstein story, among many, many others. Just last week, he and co-author Andrew Marantz published an incredible deep-dive feature in The New Yorker about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, his trustworthiness, and the rise of OpenAI itself. So Ronan came on the show to discuss the piec...