Decoder with Nilay Patel

This is Hank Green, cofounder of Complexly. You might remember last year when I turned the tables on Nilay and interviewed him on his own show. That was a ton of fun, and it was so much fun that they’ve brought me back again. This time, I’m stepping in for Nilay to host the next few Decoder episodes while he’s out on parental leave. 

Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Sal was actually Nilay’s second-ever guest on Decoder, back in 2020. And well, a whole lot has changed since then. So I wanted to have Sal back on to ask what it’s like running Khan Academy today, in the aftermath of the pandemic. But also how online learning is about to change, in really dramatic ways, due to artificial intelligence.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Despite being one of the most valuable companies in the world, OpenAI is still technically a nonprofit. That’s what set the stage for the dramatic board coup in 2023 that briefly ousted Sam Altman as CEO. And now, OpenAI is trying to shake this nonprofit structure so it can raise even more money and, eventually, go public. There’s a lot at stake here, and not just for OpenAI.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Senior Producer Nick Statt. We’re on a small break for the end of summer, and, sadly, Nilay will still be out a little while longer when we come back. But we have an excellent slate of guest host episodes starting up next month, so stay tuned for those. 

In the meantime, we wanted to bring back one of our favorite Decoder interviews from earlier this year. It’s with Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter, who back in January launched a pretty bold ebook initiative to take on Amazon and Kindle. It’s been about seven months, but Bookshop has seen big results, including more than $1 million in ebook sales. So we thought it was a good time to revisit our conversation with Andy.  

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello! Decoder senior producer Kate Cox here. I’m afraid I’m still not Nilay, but I hope you’ve been enjoying our series of guest hosts this summer while he’s out on parental leave. We have a few more really great guest episodes coming up, before Nilay returns to the host chair later this fall, so stay tuned.

The production team is taking our own break this week, so while we’re off we’re excited to share this episode of The Gray Area with you. Students all over the country — including my own kids, thank goodness — are back in school right around now, and so we thought it would be a perfect time to revisit host Sean Illing talking with journalist James Walsh about how AI tools like ChatGPT have kicked off a new cheating arms race that’s proving extremely disruptive to college education. 

There are a lot of big Decoder ideas — and problems — wrapped up in all this. Okay, The Gray Area, with Sean Illing. Enjoy. 

Links:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. One of the biggest topics in AI these days is agents — the idea that AI is going to move from chatbots to reliably completing tasks for us in the real world. But the problem with agents is that they really aren’t all that reliable right now.

There’s a lot of work happening in the AI industry to try and fix that, and that brings me to my guest today: David Luan, the head of Amazon’s AGI research lab, a cofounder of Adept, and a former VP of engineering at OpenAI. David and I discussed the release of GPT-5, what Amazon wants with agents, and where he thinks the AI race is headed next.

Read the full transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Obsidian is a note-taking and productivity app that occupies the same "second brain" space as competitors like Notion — but in a lot of ways, it's also startlingly different. Obsidian's files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use.

Steph Ango, the CEO, is also different in a lot of ways: He's not an Obsidian founder, but instead came to the role from being basically a member of the fan development community. His take on software, productivity, and business is refreshingly old-fashioned in a lot of good ways, while he's also leading a very 21st century startup. 

Read the full transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt; our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today, I’m talking to a very special guest: Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT. 

While Sam Altman is definitely the public face of OpenAI, Nick has been leading ChatGPT’s development since the very beginning, and it’s now the fastest-growing software product of all time with more than 700 million weekly users. So, Nick and I talk about the backlash against OpenAI’s removal of its GPT-4o model, the future of ChatGPT itself, solving hallucinations, and why he thinks it eventually won’t look like a chatbot at all. 

Read the full transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. This is the second episode of my productivity-focused Decoder series I’m doing while Nilay is out on parental leave.

Today, I’m talking with Notion cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao. I’ve followed Notion for quite some time now — I’m a big fan, and I use Notion as part of my workflow with Platformer. So I was very excited to get Ivan on the show to discuss his philosophy on productivity, how he’s grown his company over the last decade, and where he sees the space going in the future. 

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was editor by Xander Adams. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. My guest today is GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. In many ways, GitHub Copilot set off the current AI coding boom. But since Thomas was on the show a year ago, the rise of vibe coding has shifted the buzz to newer platforms like Cursor and Windsurf. As you’ll hear in our conversation, Thomas is thinking a lot about the competition, and GitHub’s role in the future of software development. 

Links:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. I’ll be guest hosting the next few episodes of Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave. For the next three weeks, I’ll be talking to leaders in the productivity space about what they’re building, and how they can help us get things done. 

My guest today: Michael Truell, the CEO of Anysphere, the maker of automated programming platform Cursor AI. I sat down with Michael to talk about his product and how it works, why coding with AI has seen such incredible adoption, and what the future of automated programming really looks like. 

Read the full transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices