Decoder with Nilay Patel

An 88-year-old is being charged with a felony after selling ‘jailbroke firesticks’ at a Florida flea market. Why?

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Austin Russell, Luminar’s founder and CEO on why he thinks LIDAR is the future of self-driving technology, where he thinks the autonomous vehicle industry is headed, and proving Elon Musk wrong.

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Nilay Patel talks with CEO of Evil Geniuses about how an esports team makes money, where the industry is headed, and where she sees growth.

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CNBC anchor Jon Fortt unpacks how the GameStop stock story was covered by the media and if technology has the ability to democratize the markets through apps like Robinhood. Fortt also discusses his course ‘The Black Experience in America,’ which looks at race in the US https://www.forttmedia.com/

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In this episode of Decoder, Nilay sits down with Charlton McIlwain, a professor of media, culture, and communications at NYU and the author of Black Software, to talk about Black Lives Matter, Twitter, Online Communities, and Policing.

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Nilay Patel talks with venture capitalist Arlan Hamilton. Arlan founded VC fund Backstage Capital in 2015 and focuses on investing in “underestimated founders,” many of whom are people of color, women and LGBTQ. They discuss the importance of representation in tech and business, how the VC world works, and why Arlan is hopeful about the future at Backstage.

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The Verge's Nilay Patel is joined by Joseph Menn, a cybersecurity reporter at Reuters and author of the new book Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. Nilay and Joseph talk about a very big problem in US cybersecurity today: the SolarWinds hack.

In December, it was reported that a group of hackers, likely from the Russian government, had gotten into SolarWinds, a dominant player in network management software, and then used that access to breach everything from Microsoft to the US government.

The story is part of a back-and-forth game of hacking the United States and its rivals that have been escalating for years. Pay attention to how quickly this conversation with Joseph becomes about really big issues like how deeply our military and security agencies should be integrated with private company security. There aren’t a lot of easy answers here, but it’s clear that change is coming with the Biden administration.

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Nilay Patel talks with Marques Brownlee (MKBHD on YouTube) about building a business as a YouTuber, how content creators make money, and how to scale when you are the brand.

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The Verge's Nilay Patel talks with head of Instagram Adam Mosseri about how to run a creative platform like Instagram at scale while keeping users — and democracy — safe, how much responsibility the platforms have for what their algorithms promote, and, of course, Instagram's products like Reels, Stories, and IGTV.

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In the aftermath of the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol, many online platforms, including both Twitter and Facebook, banned President Trump. In this week’s episode, Nilay Patel talks with regulation expert and law professor Daphne Keller, about a big problem: how to moderate what happens on the internet.

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