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.
Filtered episodes(9)
- StandardSummaries onlyThat UL safety logo is a lot more complicated than it looks
Published Apr 27, 2026
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 quickly to the connected, AI-powered era... but do the companies making and distributing tech even c
- StandardSummaries onlyTHE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION
Published Apr 23, 2026
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 world. But software thinking has also been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain th
- StandardSummaries onlyCisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space
Published Apr 6, 2026
My guest today is Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. Cisco is one of those big companies that everyone has heard of but most of us don’t have to interact with very much; they’re not really a consumer brand. But without Cisco's actual routers and switches and silicon — and the software to make those things work — there’s no internet, no cloud, and no AI. But a data center is a really unpleasant neighbor to have, and there’s robust opposition to new data center builds all over the country. So I had to start
- StandardSummaries onlyConfronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me
Published Mar 23, 2026
Today, I’m talking with Shishir Mehrotra, the CEO of Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product. Back in August, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and recently, reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included me, among many others. No one ever asked permission to use our names this way, and a lot of reporters were outraged by this. T
- StandardSummaries onlyHasbro's CEO lets AI Peppa Pig help design toys
Published Mar 9, 2026
Hasbro might be a toy company, but CEO Chris Cocks has spent the last several years pushing it more and more into the digital media, gaming, and collectibles space. That makes sense, since adults have money and kids don't. All those IP and licensing deals are working out for Hasbro so far. But Hasbro is also facing a lot of risk from instability: in trade and tariffs, in politics and culture, and in the video game market, which seems to be in a more or less permanent state of crisis. Read the fu
- StandardSummaries onlyInside Xbox's executive shakeup
Published Feb 26, 2026
Today, we’re talking about the future of Xbox. Phil Spencer, a two-time Decoder guest who’s led Xbox for more than a decade, is stepping down. But in a shocking twist, his deputy long-assumed successor Sarah Bond is also out too, and the Xbox division is now in the hands of an Asha Sharma, one of Microsoft’s AI executives with no prior game industry experience. There is no better person to talk to about all of this than Tom Warren, senior editor here at The Verge and author of the excellent Note
- StandardSummaries onlyMoney no longer matters to AI's top talent
Published Feb 19, 2026
Today we're talking about the war for AI talent. Right now, the hottest job market on the planet is for AI researchers. And the vast majority of these people are concentrated into a small number of hugely valuable, extremely fast-growing companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of which are now paying some of the highest salaries in the history of tech to poach from one another. We’ve been dying to really dig in and try to unpack what's going on with all these talent moves in AI. So we brou
- StandardSummaries onlyThe surprising case for AI judges
Published Feb 12, 2026
My guest today is Bridget McCormack, former chief justice for the Michigan Supreme Court and now president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association. For the past several years, Bridget and her team have been developing an AI-assisted arbitration platform called the AI Arbitrator. So I sat down with her to talk about how the tool works, the pros and cons of automating parts of the arbitration process, and the bigger picture questions around institutional trust, justice, and the future of l
- StandardSummaries onlyDocusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts
Published Feb 2, 2026
Today, I’m talking with Allan Thygesen, who is the CEO of Docusign. You know Docusign, it’s the platform that lets you sign stuff online. It turns out 7,000 people work there, which is one of those facts floating around that’s always felt like perfect Decoder bait. What are all those people doing? And what kind of product roadmap does a company like Docusign even need? Alan has only been CEO of Docusign for three years, so he has some interesting perspective on where the company was, the changes