Decoder with Nilay Patel

For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. I think of Decoder as a show for people trying to build things, and a lot of people have built their things on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone else’s platform is: What are...

Today, I’m talking with Joseph Cox, one of the best cybersecurity reporters around and a co-founder of the new media site 404 Media. Joseph has a new book coming out in June called Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically a caper, but with the FBI running a phone network. For real.  Joseph walks us through the fascina...

Today, I’m talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the big Google I/O developer conference. Google’s focus during the conference was on how it’s building AI into virtually all of its products. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it “Google Zero,” and I’ve been asking a lot of web and media CEOs what woul...

Last week, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US government claiming the divest-or-ban law is unconstitutional — a case it needs to win in order to keep operating under Bytedance’s ownership. There’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law here: Some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of prior attempts to regulate speech and the internet, while the...

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has been at the top of my list of people I’ve wanted to talk to for the show since we first launched — he’s led Adobe for nearly 17 years now, but he doesn’t do too many wide-ranging interviews. I’ve always thought Adobe was an underappreciated company — its tools sit at the center of nearly every major creative workflow you can think of — and with generative AI poised t...

Today, we’re going to talk about the smart home — one of the oldest, most important, and most challenging dreams in the history of the tech industry. The idea of your house responding to you and your family, and generally being as automated and as smart as your phone or your laptop, has inspired generations of technologists. But after decades of promises, it’s all still pretty messy. Because the b...

Today, I’m talking with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, whom I first interviewed on the show back in 2021. Those were heady days — especially for upstart EV companies like Polestar, which all seemed poised to capture what felt like infinite demand for electric cars. Now, in 2024, the market looks a lot different, and so does Polestar, which is no longer majority-owned by Volvo. Instead, Volvo is no...

Today, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I are going to try and figure out Tesla. I said try — I did not say succeed. But we’re going to try. That’s because Tesla has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks, in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes. If you’ve been following the company, you know that that gap between what the business is and how i...

A lot has changed since the last time Ola was on Decoder. Back then, he said Mercedes would have an all-EV lineup by 2030 — a promise a whole lot of car companies, including Mercedes, have now had to soften or walk back. But he doesn't see that as a setback at all, and he and Mercedes are both still committed to phasing out gas in the long run. We also spent some time talking about what's happenin...

Today, we’re talking about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of Congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media. This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years n...

Today, I’m talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming-focused voice and chat app. You might think Discord is just something Slack for gamers, but over time, it has become much more important than that. For a growing mix of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandom, and other niche communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire onli...

Today, we're talking about Disney, the massive activist investor revolt it just fought off, and what happens next in the world of streaming. Because what happens to Disney really tells us a lot about what's happening in the entire world of entertainment. Earlier this month, Disney survived an attempted board takeover from businessman Nelson Peltz. While investors ultimately sided with Disney and C...

At the absolute most basic, Dropbox is cloud storage for your stuff — but that puts it at the nexus of a huge number of today’s biggest challenges in tech. As the company that helps you organize your stuff in the cloud itself goes all remote, how do we even deal with the concept of “your stuff?” Today I’m talking with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston about those big picture ideas — and why he thinks gener...

Today we’re talking about Vice, the media company: Where it came from, what it did, and, ultimately, why it collapsed into a much smaller, sadder version of itself.  This is a lousy time for digital media, and it’s hard to make a profit from putting words on the internet right now. So when Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto went to go report on what happened, she and I both assumed Vice had been do...

Cloudflare is an infrastructure provider basically protecting more than 20% of the entire web from bad actors. When everything is going well, you don't even have to know it exists. It's one of the only defenses — sometimes the only defense — standing between websites and the people who want to take them down. Protecting free speech on the internet around the world, across war zones and hundreds of...

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. This is David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge and co-host of The Vergecast, subbing in for Nilay, who’s out on vacation. Regular Decoder programming returns next week. In the meantime, we have an exciting episode for you today all about video game emulation, which, as it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated than it seems.  Gaming emulation made headlines r...

Today, I’m talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a pretty rough patch in the company’s history. In 2021, Intuit acquired the company, and the very next year, co-founder Ben Chestnut stepped down after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over. This is a pretty hu...

Hey everyone it’s Nilay – I’m on vacation this week, so the Decoder team is taking a short break. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes. To tide you over until Monday, we have a bonus episode from our friends at Vox Media and Eater’s Gastropod about an incredible patent battle in the world of pizza.  I’m serious: One of the biggest fights in the pizza indus...

Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but...

Both the EU and US have spent the past decade looking at Big Tech and saying, "someone should do something!" In the US, lawmakers are still basically shouting that. But in the EU, regulators did something. The Digital Markets Act was proposed in 2020, signed into law in 2022, and went into effect this month. It's already having an effect on some of the biggest companies in tech, including Apple, G...

We’ve got a fun one today — I talked to Figma CEO Dylan Field in front of a live audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And we got into it – we talked about everything from design, to software distribution, to the future of the web, and, of course, AI.  Figma is an fascinating company – the Figma design tool is used by designers at basically every company you can think of. And importantl...

If you’ve been listening to Decoder or the Vergecast for a while, you know that I am obsessed with Google Search, the web, and how both of those things might change in the age of AI. But to really understand how something might change, you have to step back and understand what it is right now.  So today I’m talking with Verge platforms reporter Mia Sato about Google Search, the industries it’s cre...

Today, I’m talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which...

Our Thursday episodes are all about big topics in the news, and this week we’re wrapping up our short series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. In our last couple episodes, we talked a lot about some of the biggest, most complicated legal and policy questions surrounding the modern AI industry, including copyright lawsuits and deepfake legislation. But we wanted to end on a more p...

On this special episode of Decoder, science educator and YouTuber Hank Green is guest hosting. And the guest? It’s Nilay Patel, who sat down with Hank to discuss building The Verge, the state of media, and the future of the web. Also: whether the fediverse is worth investing in, and how social platforms’ control of distribution has shaped the internet. In the words of Hank: “Nilay has got some wei...