Decoder with Nilay Patel
"All chaos and panic": Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions
18 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What feedback did the Decoder team receive from listeners this year?
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Chapter 2: How does Nilay Patel feel about being a guest on his own show?
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Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need.
Chapter 3: What are the main themes from listener questions about AI?
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge.
Chapter 4: What are the implications of AI on decision-making in business?
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, it's just like, if you sense the abject terror, here it is. Let's go.
Chapter 5: Why do listeners care so much about CarPlay?
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.
Chapter 6: What are the challenges faced by the creator economy in 2026?
It's actually a two-part question, Nilay. 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 about
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, Nilay, 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.
Chapter 7: How does Nilay plan to address the issues raised by listeners?
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 decoder questions are really interesting. So, you know, we started the show. I think we're five years into the show now. And podcasts are a forever project, especially interview podcasts.
You have to – Kate and Nick spend a lot of time trying to get guests to show up.
Chapter 8: What exciting developments can we expect from Decoder in 2026?
Like literally just show up on time and make their headphones work. Like 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 ever 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 they 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. 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. Most interestingly of all, they avoid telling us how their company is structured because it turns out that's a very political answer. 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 is signed.
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 the decoder questions, how they 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 the 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? But to me, the... 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 could 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.
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