Decoder with Nilay Patel

Bluesky has really taken off since the election, and since the Decoder team took some time off for Thanksgiving break, we felt it was a great time to bring back the interview we did earlier this year with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, the upstart competitor to Meta’s Threads and the platform formerly known as Twitter.  At the time, Bluesky was a pretty small platform. It had just reached 5 milli...

I spoke with GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani live on stage last week at an event hosted by Alix Partners in Palo Alto. GoDaddy is one of those companies that feels tied to an earlier era, but Aman’s been CEO since 2019, and he’s been building out what he calls adjacencies. The business of the web has really changed in the past few years: the walled-garden, social network era really took over in the past...

For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. Google is constantly changing that platform — it launched another attempt to combat ‘parasite SEO’ just this week — and not all of those changes have worked well. Earlier this year I talked to a lot of people who have built on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly n...

Hey everyone, it’s Nilay — Decoder is on a short break this week. We’ll be back with a special live interview episode on Monday of next week, and then regular programming will resume in December. I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule.  But while we’re out, we’d like to highlight a great episode of a new podcast from our friends over at Vox called Explain It To Me. On this epi...

Today we’re talking about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Tesla — and I have to say, it feels like the first of many episodes about these three characters that we’ll be doing over the course of the next four years. Because when Elon used his wealth and influence to help Trump get elected, he also bought himself a seat at the president-elect’s inner circle. But what does the world’s richest person rea...

Harvey Mason, Jr is CEO of the Recording Academy, the nonprofit organization most famous for the Grammy Awards. We spoke right before this year's Grammy nominations came out, and you'll hear us talk a whole lot about the changes he's tried to make with how the awarding membership works. I always say to watch what’s happening to the music industry because it’s a preview into what will happen to eve...

Today, we’re talking about work. Specifically, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re on the verge of changing yet again. For many people, the pendulum has swung wildly between working fully remote and now a push to return to the office from their bosses, and there are a lot of theories about what...

Today, I’m talking with Baris Cetinok, who is in charge of all the software in the cars that GM makes, which is a lot of cars. And if you’ve been following any of the drama in the world of car software, you know it also means Baris is the guy who has to defend GM’s decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from most of its cars, especially EVs.  I’ve had versions of this conversation with th...

Trump and a bunch of billionaires, like Elon Musk, are calling for the FCC to punish TV stations by revoking their licenses and using the spectrum for other stuff. In a normal world, this would be idle billionaire wishcasting. Punishing news organizations is one of those things we have a First Amendment to protect against. You know — the one that protects free speech by prohibiting the government...

Today, I’m talking with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who is only the second person to be on Decoder three times — the other is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Brian made a lot of waves earlier this year when he started talking about something called “founder mode,” or at least, when well-known investor Paul Graham wrote a blog post about Brian’s approach to running Airbnb that gave it that name. Founder mod...

Today, we’re going to try and figure out "digital god." I figured we’ve been doing Decoder long enough, let’s just get after it. Can we build an artificial intelligence so powerful it changes the world and answers all our questions? The AI industry has decided the answer is yes.  In September, OpenAI’s Sam Altman published a blog post claiming we’ll have superintelligent AI in “a few thousand days...

Today’s episode, well — it’s a ride. I’m talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who’s built Intuit into a juggernaut business software company in part through a series of major acquisitions: TurboTax, MailChimp, CreditKarma, and loads more. There’s a lot of good Decoder material there, and we get into it.  But it’s TurboTax, and the company’s tax lobbying efforts to protect it, that really drives a...

Today’s episode is a little different: Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi and I recorded this conversation live on stage during advertising week in New York City at an event graciously hosted by Adweek.  I've actually been dying to talk to Amy. Digitas is one of the most important agencies in the entire advertising business with huge clients and massive influence over big platforms like Instagram and YouTube....

Luis von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. There are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI, and we talk about all that — but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning, generally. Duolingo is a global product, and there are a lot of tech tensions there, dealing with different user needs worldwide. We talk about it all in a pretty direct way... including all th...

I’m talking with my good friend David Pierce, Vergecast co-host and The Verge’s editor-at-large, about something he spends an ungodly amount of time thinking and writing about: software. Scores of new workplace apps are cropping with clever metaphors to try to make us work differently. Sometimes that works… and sometimes it really, really doesn’t. And it feels like the addition of AI to the mix wi...

Rabbit’s adorable R1 gadget launched with a lot of hype, but early reviews of the device were universally bad. Now, a core feature, its long-promised LAM Playground has arrived. I had a lot of big questions for CEO Jesse Lyu about how it all works — not just technologically, but if his plans are sustainable from a business and legal perspective.  Links:  Rabbit R1 review: an unfinished, unhelpful...

Today, I’m talking to Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg journalist and author of the new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. If you don’t know Blizzard, you do know its games — the studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch has achieved legendary status over three decades. At the same time, the company has become emblematic of many of gaming’s biggest failings. Jason...

Matt Strauss is the Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer at NBC Universal. That’s a big fancy title that means he’s not only in charge of Peacock but also every other streaming video offering the company has worldwide. So you can bet Matt and I got into what that structure even looks like, and how it all operates under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transitio...

We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. This year, before his interview with Mark, Alex got to try a new pair of experimental AR glasses the company is calling Orion.  Alex talked to Mark about a whole lot more, including why the company is investing so...

Today, I’m talking with Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, a relatively new software maker that develops the Arc browser. The company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages, which puts it right in the middle of a contentious debate in the tech industry around paying web creators for their work.  We’ve been talking about these topics pretty m...

Google’s in the middle of its antitrust case in just as many months, after it lost a landmark trial in August over anticompetitive search practices. This time around, the DOJ is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market.  Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner has been on the ground at the courthouse to hear testimony from news publishers, advertising expert...

Today, I’m talking with Roy Jakobs. He’s the CEO of Royal Philips, which makes medical devices ranging from MRI machines to ventilators. Philips has a long history —- the company began in the late 19th century as a lightbulb manufacturer, and over the past century it’s grown and shrunk in various ways. Basically, while every other company has been trying to get bigger, Philips has been paring itse...

We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt could completely reset our cultural relationship to photography. But one argument keeps cropping up in response. You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s when people say “it’s just like Photoshop,...

Today, I’m talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the industry. Anthropic’s main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT.  Mike has a fascinating resume: he was the cofounder of Instagram, and then started AI-powered newsreader Artifact. I was a fan of Art...

The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isn’t static, parts of it sometimes just… vanish. But it’s not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. In 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they...