‘All chaos and panic’: Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions

Welcome to our end-of-year Decoder special! Senior producers Kate Cox and Nick Statt here. We’ve had a big year, including nearly 100 episodes, a new YouTube channel, an ad-free podcast feed, and a slate of great guest hosts while Nilay was on parental leave. It’s been a lot.

We’ve also had a lot of great questions and comments this year from you, our audience. It’s now an annual tradition for us to turn the tables on Nilay for our final episode of the year, so we pulled together all the feedback we’ve received on topics like CarPlay, Monday episode guest suggestions, and — of course — AI. We also received a lot of great questions over the last few weeks asking about how Decoder is put together, what topics we should focus on in the future, and how we think about the format and structure of the show itself.

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So today, we welcomed Nilay to Decoder, to grill him on all these questions and more and also to get his thoughts on the past 12 months: What he’s liked, what he wants to improve, and how he’s making decisions for Decoder in the new year. 

When we did this last year, our top two most frequently asked questions were very straightforward. First: Why isn’t Decoder on YouTube? Thankfully, we fixed that one. We launched the Decoder YouTube channel in October, and we now publish full video episodes every week, starting with our classic Monday interview format. We also got asked a lot about an ad-free podcast option last year, and we’re happy to say that also since October, Verge subscribers now have access to ad-free audio feeds.

We’ve received some feedback about making our Thursday explainer episodes full video, too. Trust us — we’re working on it. It’s a little more complicated and resource-intensive, and so it’s going to take some time to iron out the kinks. Beyond that, we’re very excited to experiment more with format, video, and even live production in 2026. (Come join us live at CES on January 7, at the Brooklyn Bowl!)

If you’d like to check out some of the past Decoder episodes and news stories we talked about in this episode, check out the links below. Happy New Year, and thanks for listening! We’ll be back with all new episodes in mid-January.

• Answering your biggest Decoder questions, 2024 edition | Decoder
• The DoorDash Problem | Decoder
• How decision-making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy | Decoder
• Why GM will give you Gemini — but not CarPlay | Decoder
• Rivian CEO: ‘We’re really convicted’ about skipping CarPlay | Decoder
• How SharkNinja took over the home, with CEO Mark Barrocas | Decoder
• Why Tubi CEO Anjali Sud thinks free TV can win again | Decoder
• Disney accuses Google of ‘massive’ copyright infringement following deal with OpenAI | The Verge

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at [email protected]. We really do read every email!}