Nick Statt
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
It's funny you say all that because kind of a cornerstone of the decoder research process is going to a search engine, typing in some information, and finding an article from 20 years ago that tells you the date of when something happened or, you know, a merger from 2002. And that's really, really important to have that information available to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
And it does feel like that is harder and harder to find the further out you go. Which ties into our question from Ty on Blue Sky, who said, with instability increasing in a number of areas, will a focus on permanence see a renewed push? All our digital things are only as good as stability allows.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
And this is the big question. Nilay, why is Decoder not on YouTube Music?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
Well, listener Mike Espinosa had thoughts about what we could ask guests. He says he seems to remember, Nila, you asking a bunch of people, when do you read email? He misses hearing that question. He thinks it would be especially good with repeat guests. He also gives his personal email philosophy. So he wants to know, what is your email philosophy? I'm curious, what is your email philosophy?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
Are you an inbox zero person? Are you reading your email all day long? More importantly, should we start asking guests this question again? Do you think we'd get interesting answers?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
So Mike's email philosophy is he doesn't, he says, my answer for the last few years is he doesn't read his email. He filters anything that was sent to me outside of his org and not addressed to me. Even CCs are filtered.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
For the most part, nobody notices, and when they do, I just say the truth, which is that I get so much email that sometimes I look at something, and then I forget to respond to it, and it gets buried. Nobody ever questions him on that, and nobody stays mad, he says.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
He archives everything, so if it does come up, he can search for it and pretend like he read it, which this honestly sounds like a great email philosophy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
We're back with Nilay and the Decoder team answering your biggest questions and looking ahead to 2025. So a lot of listeners have written in with, of course, their thoughts about AI, the coder's most explored theme of 2024. John Pickerton wrote saying that he would love a dedicated podcast or miniseries on something like the intersection of AI and software engineering.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
He was a big fan of the GitHub episode. He says there is a lot going on in the space, including lots of people himself exploring running models locally on their own GPUs. Cam wrote in that there is a topic he would love to hear more about on the Decoder podcast, and that's AI in the defense sector. He says he doesn't hear a lot about that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
He would love if a podcast explored a lot of the questions around AI and the defense sector, like investments, if the tech is working, who's benefiting from it, the ethical questions around it. But the question to you, Nilay, is what do you think are the most unexplored AI topics right now? And what are you personally interested in exploring about AI more in 2025?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
So Jordan from blue sky gave us the perfect wrap up question for the Q and a portion of this, which is Nilay. What do you think might be the overarching theme for tech in 2025?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
We're also heading into almost the one-year anniversary of our second episode. Eli, what do you think we should be covering in the second episode, and why are you excited about that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
I would love to do more about robots. I think robots are a fascinating industry and I think they're going through a lot of changes right now. I just read a fascinating profile actually in the New Yorker about generative AI tech being applied to robotics in a way that is fascinating. Achieving some interesting breakthroughs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
I think there's going to be a lot of really fascinating stories happening at the intersection of AI and then the things that we want AI to do in the real world, which are historically very constrained by how bad robots are at maneuvering the real world. But that could change. And I think there's a lot of fun stories to be had there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
A lot of really challenging stories, too, about what a world of robots will do and what that means.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
And that's it for our 2024 end of the year wrap up. I'd like to thank Nilay for being the Decoder guest for a change and Kate for joining me on the show. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. We had a lot of fun and we're going to do this again next year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
If you have thoughts about this episode, what you'd like to hear more of or answers to those questions we discussed at the end, like who should we have on the show in 2025 and what our second episode should focus on, please do email us at decoderattheverge.com. We hope this episode proved that we really do read every email. You can also hit up Nilay directly on Threads or Blue Sky.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
He's reckless1280. We also have a TikTok. Check it out at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you really love the show, give us that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
Our producers are Kate Cox and myself, Nick Statt, and our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
Hello, this is Nick Statt, fellow senior producer on Decoder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
The Verge was one of the more prominent media outlets on threads, but for the past month, it's clear you're all in on Blue Sky much more. What caused this change? And it can't be just that meta deprioritizes news because that was true for the past year and you were all still using it as your main platform anyway. So what's going on with Blue Sky?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Answering your biggest Decoder questions
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.