This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hello and welcome to Decoder, Nilay’s show about big ideas and other problems. This is Nick Statt, senior producer, and I’m joined by host and very occasional guest, Nilay Patel. Nilay, welcome back to your own show.
Hello. I hate being the guest.
Now, you have said that in the past, but there’s also a version of you that says that is the ideal version of this show, where you just get to not do anything and show up and talk about stuff. So I feel like you’re of two minds about what the ideal version of Decoder is.
Being a permanent guest is a level of success that is hard to attain, where other people just want you to show up because they think you will be interesting. I would love to attain that level of success. At the same time, being the guest means you also have to be interesting all the time. Being the host, you’re just in control. You’re basically saying, “Can you be interesting over and over again for an hour?” And then you see what happens.
So that is my job today. A few months ago, we did another mailbag episode, which we were thinking of as an annual thing that would happen around the holidays, where we respond to listener questions, feedback, criticism, and suggestions. But recently, we thought we should just do this more often because we get a ton of great feedback, and we do really read all of the emails. So we are here again. I thought we would just jump into it. Nilay, are you ready?
Yeah, let’s do it.
So by far, our most popular episode of this year was also our most contentious. It was your interview, Nilay, with Superhuman CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, which focused heavily on Grammarly’s expert review controversy. We got mounds and mounds of feedback about that episode. Most of it was overwhelmingly positive. There were a lot of interesting emails, comments, and feedback we wanted to highlight here.
Some of them were like, “Damn, Nilay’s questions are making me nervous,” which was one of our top comments. Another said, “We need to make tech CEOs this uncomfortable more often.” A Verge subscriber wrote in to say, “This episode was extremely uncomfortable to listen to and absolutely the reason I became a subscriber less than a week ago.” So I think to kick this all off, Nilay, my first question for you is, how did you feel about the reception to the Superhuman episode? Were you at all surprised by any of the reactions?
I was a little surprised by some of the reactions. As Nick alluded to, Shishir was booked to come on the show well before any of the controversy, and I was really excited to talk to him. He had been both the chief product officer and the chief technology officer at YouTube; he’s on the board at Spotify. He was thinking about distributing AI through Grammarly, and distributing AI is actually a really hard challenge. You’re up against Google, you’re up against Apple, which is going to integrate AI into iOS with Google’s models over time. So there’s just a lot to talk about there in the creator economy and where AI is supposed to go and how it’s supposed to work.
And then this thing happened. I give Shishir a lot of credit for coming on the show. He knew what he was going to get. It’s not that we give people the questions. I think it was just obvious what I was going to ask about from the jump. And my feeling was that he could take the heat because he had these big roles at big companies. I don’t like taking young founders and putting them on trial for the whole industry, but given Shishir’s background, his depth of expertise, his enormous network, and his ability to just sit in there and answer the questions, I felt like we could do that with that episode, right?
Because of who Shishir was, it felt like I could ask him about the specific issues in the case as a proxy for the bigger issues with AI. And I think a lot of people were responding to that. The thing that surprised me was the reactions that kind of felt like, “You don’t understand AI. This is just how it’s going to be. You don’t understand what being a builder is like.”
I kind of get it from one perspective, but I think my response is, A, this is what Decoder is about. What are the consequences of building these products? How do these products actually work? How should they actually work? How should we all feel about them? And my sort of more important response is if we don’t ask these questions, if we don’t ask them sort of relentlessly, then we will never make the people building the products actually think about what the answer should be. That was really my goal.
I know Shishir is thoughtful. I know he came on because he can take the heat, and I took the opportunity to ask the questions as plainly and as bluntly as I could. And maybe that made people feel uncomfortable. I feel like everybody in the room got exactly what they knew was coming, and I think it was a service to the audience because that tension right now is reflected in every conversation about AI.
Are these companies taking too much from us? Are they running roughshod over the laws we have to protect things like creativity, likeness, and large bodies of work that authors, creatives, and other people should be compensated for when you use them again? And we’re just racing forward without resolving the answers to any of those questions. So I think we accomplished what we wanted to in that episode. I’m not surprised at the reaction it got. I think the thing that surprised me is that’s what we do here on Decoder. So coming to the store and being like, “I don’t like the product you’re selling.” Well, that’s what we make. I hope we continue to make it.
One commenter, Brendan G, said he does media training professionally, and so he obviously hates listening to media-trained executives, he said. He added that either Shishir’s media training was really good, or he was just smart enough to ignore it and decided to have a real conversation, other than occasionally hiding behind lawyers. Brendan also said that from his perspective, it felt like you spent a lot of time grinding what felt like a personal ax. You sounded angry, although he doesn’t know if that was a kind of performance that you were doing. And he said, “From a media trainer’s perspective, I would have loved that because it just makes Shishir, in this case, seem reasonable or calm.”
So the question for you, Nilay, is: how did you decide to approach that interview? And did you think of it as you having to kind of play a part on behalf of the people whose likeness Superhuman had appropriated? Or was your strategy just, “Oh, I’m going to just nail him on this one part around how much he owes me, and then we’re going to go from there”?
It’s very rare that the story is actually about me. It’s just not a thing that occurs very often on Decoder or on The Verge as a whole. And so this was one of the rare times where I was just in the story, just straightforwardly, there was an AI clone of me in their product, and that made it feel like I could make this story more human from the beginning. I didn’t have to explain how it would affect regular people. It was just very obvious how it was affecting me.
My feeling was that by letting the story naturally be about me, which I don’t like doing and which I think no journalist likes doing, but by letting it naturally be about me, I could make the stakes of it plain. And I think a lot of people who felt themselves reflected in that story, a lot of artists want to go up to a CEO and say, “How much are you going to pay me?” And very few of us will ever get that opportunity, and this was just one of those opportunities. So I took it.
I think the anger piece is really interesting, and I do think that is because it was me in the first person talking about myself. I didn’t feel angry during that interview. I certainly have a temper. It rarely comes out, but I didn’t feel angry. What I felt was intensity. And I think those things are a little different. A lot of our interviews lately have had a lot of intensity to them, and I think maybe you can mistake that for anger, and I should do a better job of communicating the nuances of those emotions, but there’s no anger here.
I’m aware that the tech industry is going to take all of my work and remix it on 1,000 platforms every single day. It’s been happening to me for 15 years. Whatever. That’s just a thing that happens. I think the intensity is, “Hey, are we going to stop and think about this for one second? Are we going to think about the value exchange here for one second?” And I get the opportunity to do that. I’m very lucky that I get the opportunity to do that. I think a lot of people never get that opportunity, and I was hoping to reflect that intensity in the questions.
One commenter wrote something interesting about this. In reference to you asking Shishir how much they should pay you, he said, “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say they’ll pay you zero dollars.And in fact, they just did that. They got free publicity, and you didn’t sue. To him, he won this round.”
Of course, you’re not part of the lawsuit yet, or we don’t determine who’s part of the lawsuit as journalists. But I think that relates to a question, Nilay, that we get a lot of the time here on Decoder: Are we platforming people that don’t deserve a platform? Are we giving them free publicity to hawk their product, push AI hype, or whatever it is?
I have a lot of complicated feelings about the platforming debate. We’ve run The Verge for 15 years. We’ve lived through a lot of different versions of “Who do you platform? Should you platform them? Are you just giving people free publicity?” And I’ve arrived at the conclusion — and I know a lot of people disagree about this, and that’s fine — that The Verge, the thing that we make, choosing not to platform people, effectively does not matter. And you can just look around and be like, “Well, if you ignore things, they don’t go away.” So it is better for us to ask the questions, be direct, and make people face the logical conclusions to the thoughts that they have started to have.
I don’t think the people we have on the show are bad actors to the level where we should have a platforming debate. I think they are, by and large, people who are trying to build things, people who want to talk about the way they build things. They are people who are running complex organizations with lots and lots of multifaceted challenges. It just seems better to have honest, sincere conversations about what all those things mean than to say, “I hate every CEO in the world, and we’re never having them on the show.” And that’s my position. It’s our little show, but I’ve become convinced over time that ignoring things does not make them go away.
The major platforms have all deplatformed Donald Trump, and now he is our president again, and he is creating a particular kind of chaos that is almost unimaginable. Deplatforming him simply did not work. I don’t know what else to say about that. There are all kinds of ultra-hard right, ultra nationalist figures who have been kicked off platforms, come back on platforms. I don’t think we’re going to have a bunch of ethnonationalists on our show anytime soon. I’m not suggesting that’s where we need to go. I just think that this answer about platforming CEOs and giving them free publicity reflects a kind of nihilism that I’m actively trying to get away from. And what I would like to do is to say they come on the show because they know, all these people know, what kind of questions I’m going to ask.
At this point, the show has a reputation. I have a reputation. They come on because they want to show that they can take the heat, and then my job is to do a good job. And I think that balance, that dance, ideally helps make everybody more considerate. Again, I think you can disagree with all this. A lot of people have disagreed with all of this. I personally have arrived at the conclusion that ignoring things doesn’t make them go away.
Another episode that we got a ton of feedback about, Nilay, was, of course, one of our most recent episodes with Puck CEO, Sarah Personette. In particular, listeners almost universally picked up on Sarah’s evasiveness. A lot of listeners were divided on whether this makes for a good podcast or not. One listener, Alejandro Tauber, sent us a one-line email saying the interview was “majestic.” Another listener said, “Excellent.”
But we also got an almost equal amount of polar opposite feedback. One commenter wrote, “When Nilay has a CEO who comes off as overly media trained or maybe overly prepared, I have a hard time getting through it.” Another commenter said, “Honestly, I couldn’t listen through this one because of all the sidestepping, zooming out, non-answers.” Somebody wrote, “This interview almost feels combative, but only because the squirming to avoid answering questions is truly out of this world.”
We get a lot of feedback about episodes like this, where people are overly prepared, or they just don’t want to answer something. And some people can’t handle it because it makes them too uncomfortable. It kind of sounds like they’re watching a cringe comedy. We heard this about Superhuman quite a bit. Some people said they couldn’t listen to the whole thing because it made them too uncomfortable.
The broader topic here, of course, is that we sometimes deal with challenging subjects that are either too [media] trained, boring, or difficult to talk to. They’re evasive, or they’re uninterested in straying from their talking points, and that creates a lot of unnecessary friction that is plainly obvious to anyone who’s listening to the interview.
How are you thinking about those kinds of situations, whether you would describe them as adversarial or challenging? Have you been tweaking your approach or your style in terms of how you get through these interviews, or try to extract more insight out of them?
The weirdest thing about doing an interview show is that the episodes are only good if the other person is good. I can’t make Sarah Personette understand her business more than she does. I tried, man. I don’t think she understands it at all. Not even a little bit. And the questions I was asking her, I don’t think, were particularly adversarial. We got off that recording, and I think it was Kevin McShane, our editorial director, who said, “I don’t think Sarah realized she’s on the same side as you, because she was in outer space.” I am not going to back off on, “Do you understand the basics of your business?” That seems like fair game to me, and I don’t think she does.
I also feel like, with Shishir as a good example, I knew that he was prepared. I knew he had the experience and the history. He could do it. If you’re the guy who runs product at YouTube, people have asked you a lot harder questions, and you face a much hotter fire than I can provide to you in a one-hour conversation. So there’s a spectrum here, and I’m just going to flat-out say it. I thought Sarah blew it. I thought that was one of the worst performances on the show we’ve ever had. And I think you could tell about halfway through that episode that I was just like, “Do you know anything?” Maybe she does. Maybe she just didn’t know what show she was on, she wanted to give her TED Talk, she got derailed, and that’s that. On the other hand, I feel like if I do think you know what you’re saying, if I do think you have the depth of understanding and you’re ready for it, then the pressure should only escalate.
Maybe it all feels the same in the end, but to me, just sitting in the room, they feel like very different vibes. And that’s what I want to do. As I said, to make an interview show, the other person has to want to show up. We always say Decoder is a game you can win. They have to want to be here and participate honestly and openly. They have to think that they’re going to come out the other end, and they won’t feel completely attacked because otherwise, we won’t get guests. They can just hang up. They can just click the button and go. So the show has to be an environment that reflects and respects the participation.
At the same time, if it’s a game you can win, it’s also a game you can lose. And I think we’re just seeing that dynamic. I think everyone is very used to very puffy influencer interviews. There’s a lot of that going around lately, and maybe everyone should just be one more turn more prepared.
There’s a real hunger from the audience for what you might call accountability journalism. The joke that you’ve said before is that the audience wants you to end every episode by arresting a CEO. And we’ve even had some commenters referencing that as an editorial strategy. Some people are saying they want you to be even tougher. But this is running headlong into the idea that companies don’t necessarily want to do these kinds of interviews all the time or even often, and that people don’t like being put into unpredictable situations where they don’t know the questions, they don’t know what you’re going to ask.
Then, audiences themselves are sometimes not really that interested in that kind of product, like the end result of that. For instance, Diary of A CEO is not hard-hitting journalism, even though it’s very engaging, and Acquired as well. TBPN is certainly not journalism, and whatever monitoring of the situation from Andreessen Horowitz is not journalism at all.
But I think we saw a version of this kind of play out recently with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Dwarkesh Patel, where he’s not a traditional journalist, but he asked some challenging questions. It kind of broke people’s brains because they weren’t used to seeing anyone check somebody like Jensen, a rich tech guy, but also head of the most valuable company in the world. And people think he’s infallible. This was a rare moment where people were divided on the purpose of the interview.
So Nilay, the question for you is, how are you thinking about that tension between the functions of journalism, what the audience wants, and then what the audience actually responds to when it comes to tough questions? And also, why do you think people are coming on this show when we’re not paying them, we’re not telling them what we’re going to ask beforehand. Even though they know what to expect, they are going in kind of blind.
My favorite is when people show up, and they’re not ready to be asked what the structure of their company is or how they make decisions. I feel like those are gimmes at this point, and every now and again, it’s just like, “Oh, you didn’t know.” You can always tell how things are going to go when those questions seem like a surprise.
I think journalism is critically important. Obviously, we make journalism here. All of us who are making the show right now are journalists; we’re steeped in it. Maybe we’re just high on our own supply and the platforms are going to kill us all in the end, but I think it’s important. And our audience… You can see it now that we make more clips and put them on social platforms. The audiences who have never encountered us before, because the algorithms are just taking the videos wherever they go, they’re like, “Oh, I love this.” So that’s the product we make. It seems to have found some audience. I hope we continue to find more audience and we can all keep doing this because I like making journalism.
I know why people come on the show. It has finally clicked for me. I’ve had a lot of conversations about it. Nick and Kate, our producers, will tell you, “We don’t do a ton of outbound booking anymore. We have an incoming list that’s a mile long.” People want to be on the show. And the number one reason that I hear is that all of these executives know that their own teams aren’t going to listen to the audience. Their own teams aren’t going to read the emails, and it is good for them as leaders to go get the external validation, not their own comms stuff, not their own branded content, not their own fake TED Talks.
Some of them do fake TED Talks, which is wild. We’ve moved on to fake podcasts. We’ve gotten pitches for me to do a fake podcast that will then be clipped into fake podcast clips. And I’m like, “I don’t need to. I have a real podcast.” But this is the market that we live in, and everyone can see through it. Everyone can see through it. So if you can come on this show and explain your company well, explain how you make decisions as a leader, explain how your company is structured, take a little heat, be asked some challenging questions, and do a good job, then it is actually good for those folks out in the world with our audience, which is big and growing, but it is also good for them inside of their companies. And so, as I said, you can win that game, and you can lose that game.
That external validation is so important. I look at TBPN, and congratulations on selling a podcast with 70,000 YouTube subscribers for $200 million. That’s great. It is very engaging. I’ve watched a lot of it. They were inside the industry, they’re unapologetic, boosters of the industry, and now they’re inside a company in the industry. They have no ability to provide external validation. They’ve lost the thing that might provide conflict, and conflicts are what drive all great stories.
Andreessen Horowitz has started and failed 10 million media brands. They had a tech blog called Future that was just about how great everything was, and it failed because no one wants to read it, because conflict and emotion are what drive stories. You can’t get that if you’re inside. If you are working at a place where you are not allowed to criticize the people who work at your own company, you are never going to write a good story about that company. You can write great press releases.
So I know what role we play in the ecosystem at The Verge and on Decoder, and it is to be outside, and you have to show up here on our terms and do a good job. We have a big audience, and if you do a good job, I think the audience will be excited for you. If you do a bad job, I think the audience is going to let you know it. That’s hard to get. And we’re also precious about all of the rest of it. We won’t do brand deals, integrated sponsorships, and all the stuff that compromises that core promise that we make as journalists. I talk about that stuff a lot. I don’t need to overdo it now, but to me, that’s why everybody shows up. It’s hard to find the thing that we make anymore.
The producers and I will not give anyone the questions that they’re going to face on Decoder in advance. We will not let them tell us what topics they want to cover. We will not accept edits afterwards or approvals on answers afterwards. You have to show up, you have to do a good job, and sometimes you can do a bad job, and everybody can see it.
I also think a lot of people are very confused by influencer media where those asks are tied to brand deals, integrations, and money made down the line, and there are approvals, but we just don’t do it. Sometimes people think they can pressure us, and our response to pressure is to turn it right back around.
The last time we did a mailbag episode, we got a lot of feedback about AI, how The Verge covers it, how we cover it here on Decoder when we talk to CEOs, and how we approach AI coverage in our explainer episodes with reporters like Hayden Field. A lot of the feedback was like, “Oh, you’re not hard enough on AI. You need to go harder.”
But we’ve noticed something interesting in the last three, four, five months, which is that we’re starting to see a lot of mixed feedback around AI, especially people saying we’re too critical or we’re fixating on the wrong perspectives. It’s not a bubble, or people are actually using it now. Companies are token maxxing. There’s Claude Code, there’s OpenClaw. There’s all this stuff happening, and AI is changing.
So Nilay, I know you’re thinking about how AI coverage is evolving all the time. How are you thinking about it right now, especially for Decoder? Are we fixating too much on questions like whether the industry is a bubble, or whether there’s mainstream appeal or product market fit for this technology? How is that thinking evolving?
I have really mixed feelings on how to cover AI, and it is related to all of the polling we’re constantly talking about. It’s how regular people are encountering it more and more, and they’re hating it more and more. And I really take to heart that Decoder is the business show that sits on top of a big consumer tech website. So The Verge, as a publication, is very much for consumers. That’s what we cover here. We don’t do a lot of enterprise tech coverage on The Verge. We focus relentlessly on technology and how it makes regular people feel. Decoder is a business show, right? I’m asking CEOs what their org charts look like. That is very far from anything any consumer cares about. I think understanding how the companies and the people think really helps you understand the products. When we do the product coverage, we get a really interesting feedback loop where I understand the businesses that built the products, and I think that’s reflected in the products.
Then I can come back around, and you hear me do it on Decoder all the time and say, “Also, we run a giant reviews program. We use your products, and I think your products are bad.” And it’s hard to find that dynamic anywhere else. I think that’s honestly what makes The Verge unique and what makes the relationship between Decoder and The Verge unique. Specifically as applied to AI, I think for a long time, we were using the products, and they just couldn’t do the things the company said they could do.
You can use free ChatGPT all day and all night, and if you have an ounce of self-reflection, you will say to yourself, “This is not alive.” It’s just prompting me to ask another question at the end of every response, and I don’t see how you get from here to this thing that can run an entire business, to this thing will attain sentience, to this thing will be AGI. You can just look at the product and see that it doesn’t work. David Pierce recently reviewed the Starbucks integration in ChatGPT, and the thing is a miserable failure.
We can just look at the products and see what they are and see the promises these companies are making, and ask very directly, are those promises being kept? And I think on the consumer side, the answer is manifestly no. They cannot do the things they promised consumers they could do. I think that is very much why consumers are turning on AI. They’re not getting the value, but they’re getting all the demands.
The thing that has changed, and I think this is the reason the feedback is getting mixed, is that on Decoder, particularly, we have a business audience, and there’s real product-market fit for AI in the enterprise. You can see what Anthropic’s revenues look like. You can see OpenAI basically sloughing off every consumer thing it was doing, including Sora, and trying to focus heavily on Codex and enterprise use of AI. And there’s a lot to be said for that. I think a lot of business processes should be automated. I think having agents run around and do things inside your business so that real people can do actual tasks of higher value is great.
I think the cutting edge of marketing is automation in some way. I think it’s going to be really weird for a lot of people, but it’s happening, and you can’t deny that it’s happening. You can’t deny that AI has found uses here, and some of them will fall flat, some of them will succeed, and that will be really interesting to cover. So that’s where I think the mixed opinions come from. If you’re looking at one part of the market, you say, “Oh, AI has a lot of value to offer here.”
But then you kind of take the jump, and I think we’ve recently heard Jensen Huang say AGI is already here. Jason Calacanis has said AGI is already here. And what they are describing is that it can write software, it can automate some business processes, which means maybe you can run a company all by yourself. AGI is here.
That’s pure nonsense to me. I think the thing that I’m looking at a lot is where is the product, the AI product that people love that actually changes their minds? And to me, that product doesn’t exist. So I think we’re going to hammer on that divide pretty hard in the years to come here.
That relates to a comment we got from a reader, Chris. He says that “he thinks the ‘AI polling is a bad shtick lately’ on Decoder, and Vergecast is underrating how much, one, he cannot trust images or video anymore. Two, this is really bad right now. Three, it’s easy to understand that it’s genuinely apocalyptic in the near future, and apocalypse looms large in the American imagination. And four, those bad outcomes are the fault of gestures broadly toward AI.” So he’s saying, not only is there no good consumer AI product, but that the consumer AI products that do exist are a threat to the social contract in real and immediately obvious ways.
Obviously, you mentioned the AI polling around Gen Z. It’s manifesting in some very dark ways. There have been attacks on politicians, attacks on Sam Altman’s home, a lot of pressure mounting against data centers, pushing back on AI executives who claim that they’re going to create more jobs, not destroy them. And then some AI executives, of course, just plainly say, “We’re going to destroy all jobs.” How is this affecting how you think about talking to people about AI on Decoder, particularly tech leaders and people who are working on this technology?
One, I think I want to make sure I keep asking them if the technology, as it’s constituted today, can actually do all of the things they say it’s going to do. I don’t think that answer is clear at all. You can listen to Yann LeCun, who used to be the head of AI at Meta, who got pushed out of Meta for saying he didn’t think LLMs could get to AGI. He’s still out there saying it. The latest argument that I’ve heard him make is that you can’t have an agentic system that’s taking action for itself when it can’t know or predict the consequences of its actions. And that’s just sort of the nature of the LLM, right? It’s going to do stuff and see what happens, but true intelligence is going to take repeated actions in a way that is predictable. Just like you and I would take actions and know what’s going to happen next. The LLMs are sort of reacting to the first impression all the time.
That’s a big conversation you can have, and maybe you can build some affordances to get around that sort of inherent fact of an LLM. I think there’s a bigger debate in this field than anyone wants to acknowledge because the market opportunity for the tools we have now is huge. So you have to say it’s going to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. I want to keep pushing on that. I don’t think that is settled at all. And I think making people say out loud what they actually think the technology can do and what its limits are is important.
The second thing I want to make sure we keep doing is talking about the polling, talking about the fact that this industry is demanding so much from everyone. All of the power, all of the land, every stick of RAM in history… for what? And it really cannot be that we’ve automated marketing. It just can’t. It has to be something better than that. And I keep saying it, and I know people argue with me a million ways about this, but ChatGPT has what, 900 million weekly users? Gemini is everywhere if you just blink at a Google product. Claude is famous now to a lot of people because it is also a political story. Everybody has seen slop on their Facebook feeds.
People are aware of this technology. They have made up their minds. You cannot market your way out of this problem. You cannot advertise people out of their honest reactions to what you’re putting in front of them. And unless you have a product that can overcome it, I don’t think you’re going to change hearts and minds. And there is not an AI product that regular people are using every day that they feel love for that overcomes this.
I can give a lot of examples here. Uber. You can list all of the policy criticisms people have had with Uber for years and years. There are labor concerns with Uber. There are safety concerns with Uber. At one point, Uber was getting banned in various cities. People really liked the product. They were able to overcome it because the product was compelling. And drivers like the product, as Uber will tell you over and over and over again. Some drivers don’t want to be full-time employees; they like the flexibility. To the point when Uber had regulatory problems, they were putting ads in the app, asking people to lobby their local politicians. This is a product that was compelling enough to make people take political action; AI is a product that is anti-compelling enough to make people take anti-political action. And there’s a long list of products like this.
You can overcome the policy objections and the societal objections if your product is compelling. I do not think there is a consumer AI product that people feel good about at the level that rises to the kinds of demands this industry is making. And you can’t be like, “This is great for business.” I don’t think that’s going to do it.
We’ve got a few questions left, Nilay. We’ll do these in more of a lightning round style about the current structure of the show and what to expect in the future. One question here from Joe Rodericks is that he really enjoys the occasional episode where Nilay is really fired up. He says, “I would love for you to consider a periodic debate-style podcast where two people’s views are pitted against each other.”
What do you think of this topic, Nilay? I know you’ve joked about starting a YouTube debate show at some points. Do you think this format works? How are you thinking about formats and the structure of Decoder itself?
We did one debate on Decoder at the very beginning; it was a very pro-Bitcoin executive, obviously, and then a very anti-Bitcoin professor. And they weren’t in the same room. I was sort of moderating them by asking the same questions to each, and then we edited it all together, and it was fairly interesting. Maybe we should do that more.
I think the pure debate shows, and I think I sort of side with Jon Stewart on this, are bad for society. I’m thinking about Jon Stewart talking to Tucker Carlson and Alan Colmes and being like, “You’re hurting America. Stop it.” Those shows rely on performance. They do not rely on substance. And so you can watch any random Jubilee episode, and it all comes down to how compelling the person in the chair is, not whether they are saying smarter things than the other person.
I like that people think that I’m interesting enough to hold one side of a debate. My job is not to advocate positions in that way. I think we have some clear values, which in America, in 2026, may feel like I’m advocating for stuff because we live in a crazy time. I’m just trying to ask questions and learn what people are doing and how they’re doing it. Sometimes what I’m saying is, “Hey, have you thought about making your platform less racist?” And that feels like I’m advocating really hard and being really fired up. “Have you thought about not stealing everything from everyone all the time?” That is like table stakes for me.
Maybe we should do more debates where I’m the moderator, but I think it gets weird if I’m the one taking a position. And I really have watched a lot of those debate shows on YouTube, and it feels like what people are getting out of it is performance, not substance.
That segues perfectly into a question here at the end that I wrote myself because I’m curious what your answer is. You have a Decoder book in the works. You recently announced it. It’s called How to Get What You Want. Why is that the title of the forthcoming Decoder book?
That title is a little bit of a joke. I think it’s a fun title. It is just what I say to my eight-year-old daughter all the time. She asks me for something, and I say, “How are you going to get what you want? What’s your plan?” So that’s the title. The book I’ve been thinking about since we started Decoder. I’ve said this before, but when you start a podcast and the premise is, I’m going to interview a CEO every week, that is just a forever project. There’s no end date to that project. You can’t mark any sort of success or failure. It just goes on forever as long as people are listening. And that’s a weird way to do things.
I wanted to have some kind of marker, some goal, and that’s why we structured the Decoder questions as they are. That’s why I ask everybody how to make decisions. It’s why I ask everybody how their companies are structured, because my feeling was that if I could get enough of those answers, if I could find enough commonalities, then when my niece and my nephew graduate from college — which they’re going to do next year — I could tell them how businesses work.
They’re going to graduate from college in a really weird time, and all of these kids are going to go off into their first jobs, and I don’t know what that job market looks like, especially now with AI. And none of these companies hold onto anyone for longer than 25 minutes. No one’s going to get trained. And I was like, “I should just make an instruction manual.”
And so one of the chapters of the book is just a Decoder trip. If you tell me how your company is structured, I can tell you 80 percent of its problems. I know that. I’ve proven that, I think, on the show. I think Decoder listeners know that the last 20 percent is really important. That’s the rest of the hour. But if you just say, “What is the org chart?” You can get a pretty basic understanding of where the priorities and the tensions of a company are.
I’ve talked to a lot of CEOs. I’ve asked a lot of very similar questions. We have tropes inside our show. Can I package that up and hand it to people and have them feel a sense of agency about what they’re doing in their professional lives? And so it’s called How to Get What You Want because I want people to feel empowered. I think a lot of institutions are going to be torn down by the time this book comes out. And a lot of young people with idealism and ideas are not going to have had the experiences of running anything. So can I just hand people a cheat code? Here’s how it goes. All the companies are the same. They’re all functional or divisional.
If you listen to Decoder, you know these answers. If you have a boss and they don’t know the answer to the question “How do you make decisions?” you should quit your job. It’s as flat out as I can tell you. There are answers to that question. We’ve heard a lot of them. So that’s the idea of the book, but How to Get What You Want is very much, it’s just me saying to my eight-year-old daughter, “How are you going to get what you want? What’s your plan?”
For the final question today, Nilay, who are your moonshot guests this year for Decoder? Is it Apple’s John Ternus? Is it still Sam Altman and Dario Amodei? Palantir CEO Alex Karp? Who do you most want on the show?
We’re working on Sam, we’re working on Dario. I hope they come through. As I said, it’s a game you can win; it’s also a game you can lose. I think everyone’s very aware of that, and they’re cruising towards IPOs. So I think they’re pretty risk-averse. They also love being on podcasts. So if you know these guys, tell them this is the most fun one to be on.
I’ve joked for years that I’ve never even asked for Tim Cook because I don’t think I can win media training. I really don’t. I’ve met John Ternus. He is pretty relaxed. He likes making products, and he likes talking about products. Maybe once he actually becomes the CEO later in the year, we can make that ask. That’d be great. Alex Karp, I think, would be just the funniest episode of the show. We should ask for that. But I’m also looking very much for guests who are using AI tools, in particular, in ways to actually run their businesses.
I think we’ve heard a lot from the model companies. We have not heard a lot from a new generation of business leaders who are actually using these tools in interesting ways that aren’t just replacing jobs. I know they’re out there. I’m just very curious to talk about them and talk about what it really means to use these tools in the enterprise setting, where I think they’ve found product-market fit.
I think that’s a great place to end it. Nilay, thank you for coming back on Decoder.
You’re very welcome. I should hang up in a rage just so people can see what it’s like. It’s the danger of every episode.
Yeah, you’re allowed to walk out whenever you want.
[Laughs] Yep.
Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!
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