Nick Statt

They're also at DecoderPod, and they're a lot of fun.

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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 Decoded Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

See you next year.

Hello, this is Nick Statt, fellow senior producer on Decoder.

Yeah, and I thought the best way that we would do this is we would just grill Nilay with a bunch of questions. So yeah, in this episode, Nilay is the decoder guest. We ask listeners to send in some of their burning questions to answer. We also have a huge collection of emails from the past year. Yes, we really do read every single one.

We save a lot of them, and we pulled some of our favorites for this episode. But I think we're going to start with probably the most important question of all. It's the one, it's actually two related questions. very often. Some of you even have asked this question twice in the same week. We'll get an email one week, and then we'll get an email the next week with the same question.

And this is the big question. Nilay, why is Decoder not on YouTube Music?

We're going inverted pyramid.

That kind of brings us to a related question, which is why aren't we publishing full video versions of Decoder on YouTube? If that were, you know, people could get Decoder that way by just watching like they do on the Verge cast.

We have a process question. It's another process question. This is from Justin Perez, who wrote us an email. He wrote, whenever I listen to some of the interviews, not just on this podcast, I tend to have one or more questions I wish I or the host could have asked the person being interviewed.

His suggestion for the podcast for Decoder is he would really like it if the audience got a chance to chime in on a question for the upcoming guest being interviewed. It's very logistically difficult, but Nilay, why can't we easily solicit reader questions and are there ways we really could do this in the future if we wanted to?

One thing I thought of when I was reading this question was also the fact that sometimes with interviews, you want the guests to not know what you're going to ask them, right? I could imagine there's PR people who look at your Blue Sky feed, look at your Threads feed, and they go, oh, look, he's soliciting questions.

We've got to get him a full list of these right away so he knows how to prepare for these. I guess there's probably an element of that going on, too.

One thing we've been asked a lot in the last couple of weeks since the subscription launched is, of course, ad-free decoder. Is there a tier of the subscription that is going to include that? Is there something that people can do to remove the ads on decoder? Is that even financially feasible? How does that work?

We're back with Nilay and the Decoder team, answering your biggest questions and talking about what's going to happen in 2025. We're going to change gears a little bit here and start asking some bigger questions, less process, more about your thoughts on platforms and technology. So one question we have from Brian Penny on Blue Sky.