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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. No, I'm Kate Cox, senior producer at The Verge, and Decoder is Nilay's show about big ideas and other problems. That's why it has his face and voice all over it. My co-producer Nick Statt and I run this show, and it is fun for us every year to bring in Nilay to answer your audience questions. Nilay, welcome to Decoder. I really do not like being the guest. It's my dream to be the guest. I think being the guest is easier in some way, but I don't like it. Tough. I'm just saying, if you sense the abject terror, here it is. Let's go. The Decoder team has had...
Quite a year. Among us, personally, we've had births, deaths, marriages, and house purchases. We've been very busy. We've also been very busy making you lots of Decoder that you, the audience, have had lots of opinions about, and you have written to us, and we love getting those emails. We got a lot of incredibly positive feedback over the summer when Eli was out for parental leave, so thank you for that. It was really awesome to see some other people in the Decoder chair, and to see everybody have a lot of big thoughts on what those guest hosts brought to the show, what we should do differently, how we might improve. So thank you for those.
With that said, we're going to jump right in with some listener questions. Yeah, the first question we have is from listener Joe Rodericks. It's actually a two-part question, Eli. The first part is, do you really read all the emails? And that must be exhausting. His second question is, he gets a ton of value from the decoder questions, which he's actually started asking candidates in job interviews, particularly how they make decisions. So he says, I can't believe I'm going to suggest this, but I'd love it if there were more in the weeds decoder type questions about business decision making. So his question is, Eli, what questions do you want to add to the decoder question list? Well, first, I will say we do read all the emails, and I think we really enjoy reading them. The promise is that we read them all.
Not that we reply to them. That's where the work escalates to be too hard very quickly. But we love reading them. Keep sending them. They're very useful. They shape a lot of the questions I ask in the episodes afterwards. So just keep sending them. We love them. We talk about them a lot.
The Dakota questions are really interesting. So we started the show. I think we're five years into the show now. And podcasts are a forever project, especially interview podcasts. Kate and Nick spend a lot of time trying to get guests to show up, literally just show up on time and make their headphones work. That's a lot to do every week unless you have some goals. And so one of my goals at the very beginning was to impose some structure on the show to try to learn something over time, to make the show make a promise to you, the listeners, and deliver on that promise every week so it's not just a forever project about what's happening in the news. And so that's where they came from because I figured I could ask every CEO how their company was structured and how to make decisions, and they would have to answer. It's not a gotcha question.
The fascinating thing is it turns out to be a gotcha question. And I think Kate and Nick, we all have this experience every now and again, someone is just not prepared for the decoder questions. They cannot tell us how they make decisions or most interestingly of all, they avoid telling us how their company is structured because it turns out that's a very political answer. So we could add more to it. I think there's a lot to get from the decoder questions. There's a decoder book that's going to come out that deal assigned. I'm not going to reveal too much about it, but it's based on those questions. And the number one thing I would say is.
It might be interesting for you as the person who's hiring or the boss to ask the people who work for you or might want to work for you to go to questions, how to make decisions. It is vastly more revealing to go ask your boss. And if your boss can't answer how they make decisions, you should run. You should start applying for a new job. That might be the biggest takeaway from doing the show is, boy, when somebody can't answer their questions, all three of us are like, oh, this episode is going to go totally sideways. I know there's deeper in the weeds decision-making questions we could ask. I thought John Fort, when he interviewed Google's former chief decision scientist as a guest episode, super fascinating episode. And I thought a lot about, should I incorporate more of these kinds of questions?
Getting the framework of decisions and then putting the framework into practice with what's actually happening in the company is so revealing. I don't want to get away from it. So I can definitely think of more. I'm eager for your contributions or your thoughts. But actually, my suggestion is go ask your boss how they make decisions and let me know how the answers go. Because I think that would be a fundamentally interesting decoder episode all on its own. So should Nick and I be asking you how you make decisions? I have no framework for making decisions. It's all chaos and panic every single day. Sorry, Kate. That's not true. So I get asked this question a lot. I do think about how I make decisions. Fundamentally, my goal is to be predictable.
We run a newsroom. Newsrooms have to run really fast. If I am not predictable, then all the people who work in the newsroom are always destabilized. All of us have worked in newsrooms before. We've worked in unstable newsrooms before. And that is just one of those things about working. The Verge newsroom operates in basically 20-minute increments. News happens, and then something has to happen on our site within 20 minutes for us to be on time. That means I have to be really predictable. So we are always joking that anybody who's been within 1,000 miles of Amazon headquarters gets infected like pluribus.
You know, like they all just come out of it saying the hive mind thing about type 1 and type 2 decisions and the decisions you can make quickly because you can reverse them and the decisions you can't reverse you have to go slow. The Verge newsroom is almost entirely like a type 1 decisions newsroom. Because we just have to go fast. There'll be another story tomorrow. We can try again. Type 2 decisions for us are like, what should the product look like? You know, like how should we think about expanding to YouTube? And we did take a lot of time to make sure we got that stuff right. Speaking of predictable.
CarPlay. Eli, you talk about CarPlay a lot. Every time we have a car CEO, you ask them about CarPlay. We had Joanna Stern guest hosting for you this summer. She asked all our car CEOs about CarPlay. Also, you personally like cars, so we have car CEOs on kind of a lot. Listeners have a lot of thought about this. So, for example, listener Matt McCurdy agrees with you, and he said he finds it infuriating, that's a quote, when CEOs don't seem to get why people want CarPlay. This is a very popular sentiment in our comments and our inboxes. In my house, my husband is buying a new car literally tomorrow. CarPlay was one of his top features that he had to have. But we also got an email from listener Joseph Quinn, who wrote to make the case for CarPlay not being good. And he wrote, CarPlay is a bandage.
solution to make the best of a bad situation in the majority of cars, and there exists a lot of legacy entrenchment in that convenience. So they're both kind of right. But the overall question from the inbox is, Nilay, why do you care so much about CarPlay? Well, first, I need to know, what kind of car are you buying? Hyundai Launcher Hybrid. Oh, sure. We should just do an entire episode about hybrids. Yeah, it's replacing a 2011 Civic, so, you know. Very good. No CarPlay in the Civic. Okay, why do I care about CarPlay? I actually don't like CarPlay. I have it in one car. We don't have it. We had Mary Barra on from GM.
I have a Cadillac. It doesn't have CarPlay. No one misses it. It's fine. I mounted a phone at the end. It solved its problems. Why do we talk about it so much? Why do we pay so much attention to it? One, the audience loves it. So that is easy. The numbers on CarPlay episodes are so high. It's remarkable to us even. Two, I like a fight.
And CarPlay is just a huge fight. And you can see the contours of the fight if you've paid attention to computers at all over the past 20 years. Who gets to own the interface? Who gets to own the apps? Who gets to take 30% out of every single thing you buy on this interface? And historically, the answer has been Apple. I think Apple wants to keep winning that fight. The car makers all know that they should not give up control of things like Maps to Apple and Google. They all know that they're bad at it and they're losing ground to companies like Tesla who are good at it. Upstarts like Rivian think they will be good at it. And then they are also making deals with Google to provide Maps because they're not going to be good at making Maps. And so you just get.
500 different competing interests, all in a screen, in an interface people can see and understand and have feelings about. And that's very unusual in tech. I would love to do 50 episodes on the Fediverse, but I can't make you care about the Fediverse. There has to be a thing that you care about, and people are very passionate about cars, and they're very passionate about CarPlay, oddly. Again, they're not passionate about Android Auto. They're passionate about CarPlay. And so you just see, here's this fight, this clash of titans. And in the center of it, it's something consumers care about a lot. So I personally agree with Joseph Quinn here, who says CarPlay is a crutch. It is a crutch.
And it's a crutch because the car makers are lazy, and they allowed Apple this big inroad into their product. And Apple's not giving up, and the consumers aren't giving up, and they've got to make something that's good enough for you to not want that. Can they do that? I do not know the answer to that question. I think a lot of you think you know the answer to that question, and the answer is obviously no. But there are improvements. There is a lot of incentive to figure it out. And that's why we keep talking about it, because honestly, getting a CEO on the show and saying, have you looked at your own product that's not good, is like the prototype of a great episode of Decoder. This is why I keep wanting enterprise software CEOs on the show and why they don't come. But car makers love talking about their cars. They love talking to me for some reason and saying, is your software good? Really? It's like, that's it. I can do that for an hour every week for the rest of
So we've gotten a bunch of good topic suggestions from listeners. One of them, Laura Cracknell, is a librarian in the UK. She says she would love for Decoder to talk to some information professionals about what it's like in the current moment. She says libraries are where lots of normal people end up for tech support and computing. They're a vital lifeline for people who might not have digital access. They're also at the front line of the free speech war. She's also writing that in particular in the US right now, public libraries are under siege and they're a canary in the coal mine for the health of democracy. So Nilay.
Are you interested in doing any episodes on libraries or free access to information? Yeah, I think we should definitely do an episode on libraries. I think the fascinating dynamic of Silicon Valley continuing to invent public goods and accidentally inventing libraries over and over again is at the heart of all that. What does it mean to have the internet and access to information as a public good in the commons supported by the state? Boy, there's a lot of decoder themes in there. And it is under a lot of pressure. I think the framing question I would ask, and I welcome the help on this, is how do you make the importance of a library in a community legible to people who might not be going? Because it's important whether or not you're going. It's important that there's a place for people to gather. It's important that communities just express that they care about knowledge in that specific way. But a lot of people aren't going. And so finding a way to make that turn seems really important to me. I'm interested for the feedback because I could use the help. I have a friend in Los Angeles whose job that is, and I think she's about to get...
going into helping me with my job. Stephen Ebster, who is a frequent correspondent, writes that he would love to see us do something on the ever-increasing issue of digital identity online, age verification, privacy with adult sites and social media. Ben Cooper suggested we should have folks on to talk about the tech scene in India and ask if maybe the next Xiaomi or Baidu might be coming out of India, which is interesting. David Jarman actually just sent us a link about the world's oldest known org chart from 1855, which was just very cool. All of these, Nilay, so when it comes to explainer topics, not guests, we'll come back to that, I promise, what would you like us to cover in 2026?
I got to see this org chart. Also, I have to believe there are org charts older than 1855. I don't know. They claim it's the world's oldest org chart, but maybe it's just Britain's oldest org chart because it was a British museum. Yeah. You don't think some Roman emperor had an org chart written down and Claudius is cool? I know. I know that there's an older one than that. We should do that video. That'd be fun. So we should see that one and what is an org chart, where they come from. I think that's fascinating. The other two are we're going to do a lot of digital identity on The Verge this year, and I think that will turn into Dakota episodes over and over again. Tim Cook is in D.C. this week and the week before lobbying against...
App Store is having to do age verification. He does not want that to be his responsibility. That runs right into do these platform providers know who you are, which runs right into identity. At the same time, Tim Cook is like, put your driver's license into my phone. put your passport into the phone. Like, I want to get rid of your wallet, but I don't want to know who you are is a very weird product stance to have. And that's Apple's product stance right now. So I think we're going to do a lot here. You can see country by country, state by state. There are so many laws that depend on knowing how old you are and what content you should access. Australia just banned everybody under age of 16 from having social media. They need to know who you are. So we're going to see a lot there because the internet as we know it is built on anonymity for a lot of very good reasons. There's a lot of surveillance implications to changing that. So I can pretty much guarantee we will end up doing a bunch of identity and age verification.
laws in the context of kid safety on Decoder in 2026. That seems like a promise we can make, right, guys? The India topic is ultra fascinating. Obviously, all the big tech companies are there. They've spun off a lot of their own talent. There's a lot of money in India. The question of whether India can make its own giant multinational global tech firm on the order of a body or something kind of runs into India's own nationalism, America's nationalism, weird Chinese geopolitics that gets weirder day by day, from what I can tell. We should do that episode. It will take us a while to settle on a theme for that one because there's so many issues at play about whether that's possible today in 2026.
right if you'd asked me five years ago i'd say obviously this is gonna happen there's a bunch of google millionaires in india who are gonna start companies but can you can you start a new kind of multinational today big question the question was do you have other explainers you would like us to I'm going to come back and say I think we should do more episodes on what is happening to social media, what happens when AI slop overtakes social media, what happens to the creator industry when the supply of content because of AI goes through the roof. I predict that the creator economy is going to get rocked in 2026. I basically predict this every year. But you can see the cracks starting to form. You can see some of the rates dropping for brand deals, which I think is really interesting. And I think the users are going to rebel against AI. And the social networks are going to have to do a form of really interesting content moderation to label that stuff that they do not want to do.
So I think we're going to find ourselves doing explainer episodes about content moderation again in 26, but in the context of AI and creators, which will be fascinating. We have to pause here for a short break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so do your company security risks and requirements. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. Their agentic trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across more than 400 integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year round. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work.
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Welcome back. This is Decoder Senior Producer Nick Statt, and me and my fellow Senior Producer Kate Cox are grilling Neelai with all of your questions for our end-of-the-year special. Before the break, we were discussing some popular topic suggestions from all of you. But now we want to jump into the most contentious topic of the year, and one we've heard a whole lot of different opinions about in 2025. That is, of course, artificial intelligence.
Speaking of AI, we have a lot, a lot of audience questions and feedback and thoughts about how much we have discussed AI on Decoder this year. Yeah, I would say it was probably the number one topic for feedback we got all year long. Probably the second one was don't talk about Trump so much at the beginning of the year, and then it turned into don't talk about AI so much. Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about AI. People angry at AI, people who don't want us to feature it at all, people who want us to only feature it and light it on fire and burn it to the ground. There was just a lot going on in the AI space this year, of course. We got a lot of positive feedback about, for instance, Liz Lopato's CoreWeave feature, which we featured an episode on.
We got a lot of feedback about Alex Heath's guest hosting and Casey Newton's guest hosting this summer, which our listeners felt they weren't critical enough of the AI industry, which I'm sure they hear that enough on their own. We got a lot of feedback about Hayden Fields' episodes where she talked about AI in the military and how the AI industry is cozying up to the military-industrial complex. We also got a lot of positive feedback about John Fort, a guest host this summer's interview with author Gil Duran, who writes a newsletter called The Nerd Reich. He specifically criticized figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and kind of their connections to the dark enlightenment and kind of how it's all coming together in the AI industry and companies like Palantir in a way that feels right. really scary and weird. So yeah, we got kind of the whole spectrum of feedback about covering the AI industry and kind of by extension, Silicon Valley billionaires and what their vision for the future is. So Nilay, how do you think about AI on Decoder, about covering AI more generally? And also the fact that it seems like literally every single CEO we have on the show is basically tripping over themselves to say AI is the thing that's going to define our future. It's going to supercharge our businesses. And we have to invest in it because if we don't, we're going to get left behind.
Well, first, I'll just say something that I feel very deeply about the fact that we run a newsroom. Ignoring things does not make them go away. And so we can just do CarPlay episodes every week for the rest of the year. The AI industry is not going to stop. What we bring to the table, ideally as a publication, as a show, is a little bit of critical distance from the hype and the ability to have these people on and ask them the questions.
I talked about the people who can and cannot answer the decoder questions. I invite you to go back and see how revealing some of those answers are in this context, in the context of the AI question, because I learned a lot. And so I like to show my work. I like very much to say, like, I've asked the questions. I have my opinions. It's based on the fact that I've done the reporting. You can evaluate the reporting. You maybe think I'm too soft, too.
But at least you can evaluate the reporting. So that's just the first piece. I don't think me personally ignoring the AI industry will make it go away or stop. And I don't think me paying attention to it or us paying attention to it accelerates it in any way. I really just don't think that's the function of our newsroom. We cover technology. And I fundamentally believe that there is something about AI that will create a new set of products.
And I say this only because every single day we are pitched some products built on the enabling technology of AI. Do I think LLMs can get to AGI? I do not. We have published that piece. It's fascinating. It's called Large Language Mistake. It's by Ben Reilly. It's very interesting. I think there's some hard limits on what LLMs can do. And I've asked a lot of our guests about those limits. I asked Sundar Pichai if he thinks language is the same as intelligence on the show. And he was like, why are you doing this to me?
So I want to keep asking that question. Underneath that are a lot of really interesting questions about how will the web work if you actually make agents go? How will anyone get paid? How are you going to think about labor? What is the next interface? I said I like a fight in the context of CarPlay. If you really think natural language interface is going to dominate the computing industry, there's a lot of questions downstream of that. Then there's just the opening question. Is that a good idea? So I think we're going to keep covering AI. It's not going anywhere. Our attention or ignorance of it is not going to affect the arc of that industry. I think what we can get is smarter about what's real and what's hype. And you might disagree with me.
I know a lot of people disagree with me, but this isn't to me the same as crypto, which we have all but ignored because it's boring and not useful. I don't know what else to say about that. We've made that point on the show as many times as we can. It's kind of boring and not useful. AI doesn't feel like that to me. There's parts of it that are super hypey. There's parts of it where Palantir exists and Palantir's business innovation, as far as I can tell, is just they will do immoral stuff and they'll take some warmed-over database tech and then do stuff that no one else would do. I don't know. We're trying to have Alex Karp on the show. I'm going to ask him that question if I can get a hold of him. We'll see what happens.
But the core technology, the piece of the puzzle where you as a user can just talk to the computer and the computer can take some actions, or instead of APIs, we'll have MCP servers and agents can just query a database. There's something there that is going to build a new class of applications. I think it is very important to pay critical attention to it and figure out what's realistic. So we're going to keep doing it. Again, I don't think the technology that we have today gets you to AGI, and I think saying that that's wrong over and over again is part of the promise I will make to you.
But everything up to that is like, I think up for grabs. And I think there's a lot of just interest, young developers, new companies, new structures that are fascinating that we should pay attention to beyond just talking to the CEOs of the thing companies over and over again. One specific AI challenge we discussed this year, we had your episode on the DoorDash problem. And you specifically asked our listeners and viewers to write into us with their thoughts. And dozens of them did what you told them to. We have a few really interesting pieces of feedback about the DoorDash problem. So Angela Diffley, who said she's a director at Coca-Cola, she said, I believe perplexity has a fighting chance against Amazon. Here's the tension.
Restaurants currently lose up to 30% margin to delivery giants like DoorDash and Uber Eats. They've been clawing to bring customers back to native platforms, not just for margin, but for data. She asks if AI-driven ordering agents take over, will restaurants finally win or just continue to lose margin to the next big disruptor? And when delivery becomes autonomous, which is a whole separate other problem that is a thing, what happens to the economics of convenience? And then Ian Yanicki also wrote, you mentioned that retailers could have their customer connections severed.
But is that necessarily bad? As consumers, do we actually want to be tracked across the Internet just to satisfy a value calculation? Or isn't agentic shopping inherently more privacy first? So it's only been a few weeks since the DoorDash episode. But all of our listeners would like to know from the response, from their responses, did you hear anything else that has really surprised you or changed your thinking on the subject in that last few weeks? Yeah, one very surprising thing happened.
I want to answer our listener questions. But the episode on YouTube kind of broke containment and went into the broader YouTube algorithm a little bit. And then the comments were like, I can't believe capitalists talk about owning the customer. And that, to me, just represents a lot. Like, Decoder is a little bit of a bubble. It's a business podcast. We use business vocabulary. We use acronyms. We're in the bubble of how do you run a business and how do you make money on the internet. And then you break containment on an algorithmic platform. And a bunch of people hear you talk about owning the customer. And they're like, this is horrible. Like, I don't wish to be owned in this way. And I think there's something very important there.
Right. I don't think people want to feel like they're a customer that's owned, that, you know, the idea that you're perfectly surveilled, that there's dynamic pricing on DoorDash now, that people hate this. Something very important there. Can your own personal LLM insulate you from that by going out in the world on your behalf and prevent you from being tracked and deal with the restaurants directly because they've set up their own little MCP servers? That would be the dream. Is that likely?
Is it likely that we will all have our own little agent server in the basement running on a Raspberry Pi and every restaurant is going to have an MCP server and there's going to be an MCP discovery engine that's decentralized? Man, I hope so. If you are building any of those products, you give us a call. We will pay so much attention to you that you have no choice but to be successful. But I don't think that's how it's going to work. And the flip side of that, and I saw this in the comments on our site, I see this on comments on YouTube, I think it's reflected in Angela's comment there, people aren't happy with DoorDash. They're not happy with these middlemen service providers. But those service providers exist.
So if you disrupt Uber, you get rid of Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and whatever else tomorrow, a lot of people whose income and livelihoods depend on those platforms get disrupted. So you have to make some tradeoffs along the way. And you can say, man, I wish Uber never existed. But the problem is that it does. I can't do anything about that for you. So it exists, and now you're saying, okay, it could change and it could get disrupted. All the people who make their living driving for Uber today, what are you going to do with it? And so maybe the 30% should move back to the restaurants, but now you've taken away from the Uber drivers and you've moved it to robots. That is a tradeoff you could make.
The technology could force us into that tradeoff over time. But I think our show is going to just put people in a complicated situation of having to make those tradeoffs or at least work through those tradeoffs over the course of an hour-long interview because it's all coming. And I don't think the agents, they're not going to live in our basements on Raspberry Pis. They're going to live on big centralized cloud services operated by tech giants who have their own incentives. Understanding their incentives versus your own will be, I think, critical to preserving some consumer agency. One listener, Asif Sagi, wrote in about your prediction last year related to the creator economy, Nilay. So you brought up a little bit earlier that you are kind of always keeping an eye on the creator economy, what might happen to it.
He's asking specifically, do you think that with AI dominating the industry right now, will we even notice or hear the creator bubble bursting? Or do you think the creator economy has already corrected itself? I think there's been some correction in the creator economy already. Let me be specific about what I mean there. The creator economy is really expressed as brands can show up, pay creators to do endorsements and sponsorships, and that will drive some sales back to those brands.
That's the whole economy. There's not a part of that economy where any of the platforms are paying creators high enough rates to survive. So if you are a YouTuber or an Instagram influencer or a TikToker, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are not paying you nearly enough money to eat. It's just not true. And so all of those creators need to get subsidized by brands. They need to do brand deals and sponsorships and find other ways to make money because the platforms themselves don't pay enough. And this is the heart of the creator economy. The platforms don't pay enough money to support the content of the platforms. So advertising has to fill in the gap. And what you're seeing this year is the advertisers are not paying.
the same rates as they were, particularly in like the pandemic when rates shot through the roof because no one can measure anything. The advertisers are getting smarter about the return their money is delivering. So you can't just pay every creator. You can actually start to measure creators. We had the CEO of Shark Ninja on the show and he said they do very sophisticated measurement of engagement. They don't just want views. They want likes and comments. They're doing sentiment analysis on the comments, on the videos that creators do to promote Shark Ninja products, to figure out what creators to work with over time in a relationship. That means rates are dropping.
You're now measuring, you're paying for results. The inevitable result of metrics is you drop rates because you're not paying the margin for unknowns. You're only paying for what you want. That's fascinating to me. Then you have just the reality of Shark Ninja is going to a bunch of creators and saying, we're going to pay for exactly this result. And you have turned all these platforms into QVC. And audience engagement might drop. Then you flood the platforms with AI content, which is like pure engagement slop that you can make for zero dollars. And you can drop those rates even farther. Then you have Mark Zuckerberg saying, you don't even need to make ad creative. Pay us money. We will AI generate you ads and deliver you business results, which is the thing he said earlier this year.
I think that's going to drop rates even farther. So you just see the beginning of the pressure on this economy where because the platforms do not value the content, they literally do not pay enough to the creators for the creators to eat. They are wholly dependent on the dynamics of the advertising industry. And the advertising industry is both professionalizing and industrializing the creator economy and dealing with AI like everybody else. And all that means is the rates are dropping. The rates for a brand deal are dropping. And the middle class of creators is absolutely getting squeezed.
I think that will be a theme. It was a little bit of our theme of our coverage this year. It's going to be a big theme next year. And like I said, I think the platforms are going to start labeling and filtering AI content for a huge number of reasons. I think a revolt from creators is going to be one of those reasons. We have to take another short break. We'll be right back.
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First Citizens Innovation Banking, formerly Silicon Valley Bank, is the bank of the innovation economy. The name may have changed, but for over 40 years, their commitment to bold ideas, relentless ambition, and delivering what's next is as strong as ever. So if you're wondering where the road to innovation starts, it's here. First Citizens Innovation Banking. Head to firstcitizens.com slash innovation to learn more. This is Decoder senior producer Nick Stapp, and me and my fellow senior producer Kate Cox are grilling Neelai with all of your questions for our holiday mailbag special. We just spent a good chunk of time talking about AI, how we cover it here at Decoder and The Verge, and how that's become rather tricky as the topic only continues to get more polarized.
Now we want to take a look ahead, talk about some guest suggestions, and our plans for Decoder in 2026. That's the AI piece of it all. That really takes us to our Monday guest lineups, because we've talked to a lot of AI CEOs this year, and also every CEO we've talked to this year claims to be an AI CEO. Yeah, without exception. Without exception, all of them. The next person we are interviewing is also going to do that. That's just what they are. We get a lot of our suggestions for who to talk to from our audience. When we talked to Unity CEO Matt Romberg last year that started with a listener email, that subject line was literally, please interview my boss. I loved that. If you want us to interview your CEO so we can ask them how they make decisions for you, absolutely let us know.
Recent requests we've had come into the inbox this past couple weeks include the CEO of Stripe, the CEO of Framework Computer, AI guy Jeffrey Hinton, and Linus Torvalds, which are all interesting suggestions. We'll see what next year holds. If you can get us Linus, make the call. Let's do it. Let us know, please. We would love to. Last year, we had a set of Moonshot guests that was, I don't know, last year we said maybe we'll want to talk to Tim Cook or maybe we'll want to talk to Bob Iger. I would still really like us to talk to Bob Iger. I want to know what he's thinking. Neelai, who do you have on this year's Moonshot guest list? That's a good one. Yeah, I'm taking Tim Cook off the list. I've said this on the Vergex several times. I don't think he has anything interesting to say. Or if he does, he won't say it.
I've watched any number of Tim Cook interviews over the past 15 years, and I've yet to think that I personally can crack the code because no one else has. So just off the list. Unless, Tim, you want to blow it up on your way out the door. You want to announce you're leaving Apple on Decoder. Now's the time. It's off the list. Min shots. I actually do think I should do more interviews with people I don't agree with or openly disagree with.
So Alex Karp is high on my list. I have a lot of questions about what Palantir's technology actually is. If you watch any interview with him or any executive of Palantir, they obfuscate the answers to what it is they actually make incredibly hard. And I don't think you can get away with that with me. So he's high on my list. I think we're overdue on Andy Jassy. We've had a lot of Amazon executives on the show. I'm dying to know what he thinks about the future of that business in the context of agentic retail, all those questions there, in the context of having to spend money on data center build-outs. Andy Jassy, come on the show. Bob Iger, definitely on the list, especially now that he's asking Google to stop training.
on Disney IP, and then he's investing a billion dollars in OpenAI so that they can use Disney IP. That seems very backwards. I would love to ask him about the mechanics of that deal and what he's thinking there. Dario from Anthropic. We've done a lot of AI CEOs. We should have Dario. We should have Sam Altman. I think Sam Altman is another one where asking him what his actual plan is. Can you describe the structure of OpenAI, Sam Altman? That's a challenge I'll ask you to you. This is what this show is for. Everyone gets asked what their org chart is. Can you describe OpenAI's org chart, Sam? I welcome you on the show. And then I have to say this, for chat listeners, this is on my list. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. I've been anywhere, anytime, anyplace, but if Brendan wants to come on Decoder this year...
I think we have to take the shot. I think that will be a very interesting episode. And it's not so much a moonshot. We've interviewed her before, but I actually think Lisa Sue from AMD, we should have her back next year. She's in the heart of the chip conversation. She needs to compete for capacity with TSMC with NVIDIA, which is a fascinatingly hard challenge. We should probably get Jensen on for NVIDIA, too. But I think, actually, Lisa, every time we've been on, she's been refreshingly candid. And AMD is, like, madding a little bit of a comeback. And I think that would be a really good episode next year. That was a perfect segue into our next question, which is about repeat guests.
In particular, listener Ian wanted to know how that happens. He says, you often say to a guest at the end of an interview that it'd be great to have them back, but what's your decision-making framework around actually getting them back? Do you wait for a new product, a book? Do you set a reminder like the one I have for 2030? And this person actually has a reminder, a screenshot of the reminders app where they say contact Nilay Patel and remind him that the metaverse will have a great year in 2030. That's great. So he wants to know how do you have a guest back and how does it work? I should ask you two because you two do all the booking. My impression of how Dakota works right now is that we do very little outbound.
We have a lot of incoming. A lot of people want to be on the show. The joke I keep making is that it's a game called New Life versus Media Training, which is a game you can win, but also a game you can lose. And the fact that it's a little bit challenging makes a lot of very competitive type A CEOs want to be on the show because they see their peers either win or lose, and they think they can do better. By the way, this is not like some secret information. I say this out loud all the time and everyone knows this is how I think of the show and everyone keeps showing up. So that's great. That continues to work. There's a piece of the puzzle, which is really interesting. I've heard this from a few people. I'm curious if anyone wants to confirm to us where a lot of times the executives come on the show because they want to prove to their own employees that they can take the heat. And there's no way to do that in like the brand and content universe or the softball interview universe or like the employee town hall. Like you can't have your own head of comms ask you a question that amounts to do you know what you're doing, but I'll do that. And so like there's something important there. So that's one reason I keep coming back. The repeat guests for me are.
When someone got a new job, when they're the new CEO or the outgoing CEO, super fascinating. They're a little bit more candid. They have to make some change. Anjali Sood, she went from Vimeo to Tubi. I love talking to her about that transition. I thought that was one of our best episodes ever because she learned a bunch of stuff at one place and she obviously worked at another place. She didn't have to pretend that everything had gone well at the previous place. She got to be honest about what she learned. I think that's an incredible time to bring someone back. And then there are structural changes in an industry that I think are a really good time to bring people back on. So I suspect we will have Sundar Pichai and Sachin Nadella on the show on a cadence forever.
There's huge structural changes in the industries in which they work. They are among the masters of the universe, and they like explaining how they are approaching those changes. And I like hearing those answers. I think you can hear those interviews. I obviously disagree with your answers from time to time. But that dynamic is really important to me. Like, is there a structural change? Can you walk me through it in a way that's honest? That's the other time I think a repeat guest is really important. Having a car CEO back every six months to say they haven't changed their mind on car play I think is of diminishing value. But so, yeah, big structural changes or new job, new role. If you've changed your org chart, you've restructured your company. I love those episodes because there's something very rich to talk about.
I will say you threw it to us for a second. It is much more common for me and Nick to tell somebody, no, you can't come back. It's too soon. Then it is for us to have to reach out and say, will you come back? Yeah. Which I think is interesting. I'm glad you mentioned media training, Nilay versus media training, because we had one very interesting email from Zach Yanni who wrote, my honest feedback is that Nilay versus media training isn't good radio. Nilay and the decoder format are one of the best attempts to make these PR stops interesting with the decoder questions and asking hard questions. Occasionally, Nilay even generates a really interesting moment when he backs them into a corner hard enough. But by and large, this is not a good format. It was a great experiment. If anyone could have done it, it would have been Nilay, but media training makes it boring.
But he adds, on the other hand, when Neelai talks to people who aren't selling a company vision, Decoder can really shine. There have been some truly great episodes of that format, and I bet leaning into that could get some even better guests. We've talked about this a lot inside our team. Neelai, I would love for our audience to hear your thoughts on our Monday guests overall and the whole concept of Neelai versus media training. All right. Can I rewind the clock all the way? We do think about this a lot. I'm rewinding the clock to the very beginning of Decoder. And this show started as Kara Swisher's show, right? It was Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. And so she went off.
To do the next thing, she graciously said we could take over the feed. And I was like, I have to replace Kara Swisher. Just imagine that. I can just do that. And so I made a list of all the things Kara did that were of value to the audience and all the things I could do. And there's a whole bunch of stuff Kara can do that I can't do.
Just send me your list. Send me the list of things you think Kara can do that I can do. And I'll tell you if it's the same as mine. And the one thing I could circle that was I can keep this value to the audience going without completely cratering the feed and ruining everyone's experience was I can interview CEOs. This is where this all started. What is Kara delivering every week on the show that I'm going to rebrand and try to do something new? And instead of being like, hey, it's totally different now, I can continue on with some scrap of value and maybe earn your trust to do something else. And it literally was I can get CEOs to show up and talk to me.
There's a lot of reasons for that. I think among them, chief among them is the version of product review site. And every CEO who makes tech products wants to be near product reviews. And I can do that. Great. So we can get the CEO up and talk about products. So that was step one. And then I think that was successful. We didn't turn a bunch of Kara's audience away. And Kara went off to do all her amazing things that she does. And now we're doing something different.
And over time, we started doing really different things. I'm not at all trying to compete with Kara and all the things she does. Again, I think she's doing great. I think it's useless to try to compete with that. I'm going to try to do my own thing. That's where you get decoder questions. How do I deliver different value? How do I make this meaningfully different? Casey Newton is always saying the podcast ecosystem is such that any person is always talking to someone else and you can find that conversation. You can pick two names out of a hat. They've done a podcast episode together. How do you make it different? So we try to make it different with decoder questions by adding these sort of explainer episodes. And we have now gotten to the place where I think our own audience data shows people like the episodes where I talk more than the episodes where the CEOs talk.
That's a victory. I feel very weird about that, but we have it. We are hearing the feedback. Do the explainer episodes. Do the DoorDash problem episodes. The problem with all that is that I am at my core still a reporter, and I need to show you my reporting.
So if I just show up and do ranted out video episodes every week, it would be much easier for all of us. And as you can tell, I could probably just do it. But if I don't have the reporting, I won't feel good about it. And so to me, a huge part of the Monday episode is just showing my work. Here's how I do the things I do. Here's where the opinions I have come from. I allow these people to challenge my opinions as directly as they want. I challenge theirs. I've come to a deeper, more interesting understanding of how this whole industry works and how the masters of the universe make decisions. And then I can show up on a Thursday episode and say, hey, I think that sucks.
And I feel great about where that came from. And there's just some honest dealing about all that that's important. Now, does media training suck? Are there episodes where in the middle of it, I'm like, boy, I could just be talking to AI right now. Yes. I will try to do better at breaking that down. I think one of the big learnings we had this year as a team was, well, we do a lot of prep. Kate and Nick write amazing prep docs for me. And I spend an hour before every episode just inhaling them. And then...
the more I leave it behind, the better off we are, right? Where I just let the episodes go to wherever I think is interesting and I don't try to hit all the questions on the list. That's the thing that I'm going to start push on and make the interviews more interesting. But I do think the core dynamic of everybody can see me doing the work and that is the foundation for all the other stuff I say, that feels very important to me. Because if I don't show my work, I'm not sure how I can earn trust in a media environment that looks like this one. All right, what do you guys think? Should we just stop interviewing CEOs? I think you probably won or at least came to a draw versus media training for like...
The majority of 2025. I can only think of a couple that like media training really, really won. I will say that we all know when we get someone from McKinsey on the show that it's going to be a fight. Like if you're a CEO and you spent time working at McKinsey, like I come ready for war against media training. Like startup founders, we love startup founders because they're all just raw. Like they're just ready to go. They will say anything. And there's a real dynamic there that I think is fascinating. But yeah, the consultant class and I.
I'm still, it's ex-consultants and politicians where I'm still working on it. I've taken it just swearing at the politicians. You said this before where you said that you think some portion of the Decoder audience just wants you to end every episode by arresting a CEO. I think that's a kind of useful frame too because, you know, as much as, yeah, sometimes you get the McKinsey's, you also do every once in a while get those interviews that do have explosive moments. And then those interviews that you feel like.
add fuel to the decoder frame for future interviews, right? Because if somebody sees somebody kind of melt down, they come on the show and they go, oh, well, I can't do that. I don't want to do what the Intuit CEO did because that's bad. I encourage more CEOs to come on and do what the Intuit CEO did. If you could, that would make my day. I think there is value in not treating every interview like you're trying to create that moment, but giving enough room where that moment could happen with almost anybody except for maybe the super, super well-media trained folks does create a good enough dynamic that it's kind of like a will it happen kind of thing.
Yeah, look, I read the comments. We read all the emails. I get the criticism that this sometimes feels like free publicity for people who are just trying to increase the ferocity of the capitalist hellhole in which we all live. Okay. I think my job as a reporter, my job as a person who runs this newsroom is to ask the questions as directly as I can. And look, I started my career without any access at all. I started as a journalist making $12 a post writing about SD cards for Engadget, a division of AOL. And that might have been when I was happiest, to be perfectly honest with all of you. Nick has actually been a reporter in our newsroom. I'm like, we should write about SD cards all the time. It's a recurring theme since the last 10 years. Being a gadget blogger might be where my heart is.
I do not care about the access. I really don't. I think access is poison. I think it changes your worldview. It warps your incentives. And my firm belief is that the less access you need, the more you get. And that has been borne out across the entire arc of Verge. It's been borne out across the entire arc of Decoder. We're at the point. I keep saying this. The audience is like, we just want you to talk. That is a very powerful position to be in. So we're going to keep earning that. But then I should use that to get the access that other people have to ask for or make concessions to get. And we don't have to do that. And I won't ever do that. And I think that puts me in a position where we can create more of these moments of conflict, more adversarial moments of journalism. But we also have to not.
be rude. Like the people have to want to show up and engage and be honest with me. And so I think sometimes people see like decorum is concession and that there's nothing I can do about that. They have to open their web browser and look into a camera and talk to me. And the fact that often they're not even the same room as me means leaving is trivial. It's like you're a command W away from ending this interaction. And so you do have to walk the line a little bit. This actually brings us very well to the last question we have for you. Listener Jeremy Curl wrote in with frustration with tech journals and podcasts overall. And he writes,
The tech industry is creating and exacerbating problems within society. Aren't we way past the point of looking at tech as cool and fun and definitively going to solve all problems? There is some deep, dark shit happening because of tech, and it has the power to really tear apart society. That's a very valid point. We need tech journalism to be better at shining a light on these troubling issues. Otherwise, a podcast sounds like two people hanging out at a dinner party. So based on that, what does the future of Decoder in 2026 look like to you? Yeah, I don't disagree at all. Not one bit. I think the Decoder team shares that worldview in a very real way. The Verge is built on it.
worldview. When we started in 2011, the idea that technology would just change culture was not taken for granted. This was our pitch. We're starting a website. It's about technology and culture being the same thing. Everyone's like, what are you talking about? It's cell phones, right? You're doing cell phones? It turns out cell phones have changed the entire world. We were correct. We bet correctly, but it was not obvious when we started the way it is obvious now. That's still our foundation. That's still our thesis. We do a lot of that coverage. That's where a bunch of angry emails about covering Trump came from. We're committed to that coverage. My thesis of the early part of the Trump administration in Doge was a bunch of tech bros realized the government runs on databases, and they could just take over the databases and delete them.
And that would change the government. And it kind of worked. That's weird. That's just a weird outcome that happened along the way of the Trump administration being a political force that started on cell phones. So there's some combination there. The thing I will caution you about, and I will caution everybody about, is if you make your focus relentlessly that, you will only attract an audience of people who care about that. You will narrow the amount of impact that you can have. And so we have a big audience of people who do like technology, who do think it should be used for good things, who are excited about the craziest Wi-Fi router on display at CES. I'm one of those people.
We should do a lot of decoder episodes about the Raspberry Pi that runs my smart home. Like, I would love to do that. I think the trick is taking that audience that sees the benefit of technology, who loves it for its own sake, and saying, these are the consequences. These are the implications of the choices that are being made by the companies that are developing the technologies that you love. And there's a lot there. I'll give a really dumb example. And this is the very small thing that was a genesis of all of our policy coverage here at the Verge. Do you remember the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4 had bad service? They dropped a lot of calls.
So we were running a gadget at the time, and you're like, why does the iPhone drop calls? There's an antenna gate. And you start with the iPhone drops calls. And you're like, it's not really iPhone. It's AT&T. Why does AT&T drop calls? It's because our 3G network is overloaded. It's because they don't have enough spectrum. And the government is actually going to shut down the analog TV system to re-farm 700 megagard spectrum for LTE. And that will solve the iPhone. And you end up at, now we cover the FCC. Like, very quickly, you end up at, here's how FCC auctions work. And that, to me, that's the link I want to make to people. Here's this experience you're having on your phone. And here's this entire structure.
that explains that experience. That's why the show is called Decoder. And a lot of that structure looks like capitalism. A lot of that structure looks like here's how workshops work. But even more of that structure is here's how it makes you feel. And here's how people are managing those feelings about the experience. You feel bad about DoorDash, you're still using DoorDash. That's The Verge. That's Decoder. We're going to keep doing it. Again, the caution is you don't want to narrow your audience to people who want to feel bad. You want to expand your audience to people who love things and say, actually, your interest, your enthusiasm, that can be the push to make some of this stuff better.
We'd like to thank Neelai for joining the show, and thank you for tuning in, not just today, but all year long. We hope you've enjoyed it, and we're really looking forward to another great year with all of you here on Decoder. We also have some really exciting news. Decoder will be live at CES 2026 on Wednesday, January 7th at the Brooklyn Bowl. We'd love for you to come hang out with us during the show, and we have some very fun stuff planned. Stay tuned for more details on how to RSVP in the coming days. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this show or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. We're at decoderatheverge.com. And we hope this episode demonstrated that we really do read every email.
You can also go hit up Neelai on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube, as so many of you asked us for last year. You can watch full episodes at at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're also at DecoderPod, and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and myself, Nick Statt. Our editor is the frankly incredible Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next year.
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