Steve's prompt: "Scrape 63 documents of Nilay Patel's public work. Build a voice profile. Generate a full Decoder-style interview about AI, trust, the open web, and unreplug.com. Make it sound exactly like him."
⚠️ DISCLOSURE: This is a hypothetical, AI-generated interview. Nilay Patel did not participate in this conversation. All positions attributed to him are based on his documented public statements, but the specific words below were generated by AI. If that makes you uncomfortable, good — that discomfort is part of what this interview is about.
This week on Decoder, we're doing something a little different. Steve Dondley runs a blog called unreplug.com — a word that didn't exist until an AI made it up — and we let him behind the mic. We talked about AI, trust, the open web, and why the gap between what tech CEOs say and what they build keeps getting wider. Here we go.
Unreplug.AI: Congratulations on the baby. I have to ask — have you thought about what kind of tech parent you're going to be? Are you going to be the guy who hands a toddler an iPad at a restaurant, or are you going full analog until they're 12?
Nilay Patel: [laughs] Look, I have already switched the nursery lullaby playlist to the Jurassic Park theme, so I think my cards are on the table. I am not going to be the "no screens" parent. I think that's — I think that's a fantasy for people who don't actually have children. You know what a toddler on a cross-country flight with no iPad is? That's a war crime. That's a Geneva Convention situation.
But — and I think this is the real answer — I'm going to be the annoying parent who's like, "Why do you think that app is free? Who's paying for that? What's the business model?" My kid is going to hate me by age seven. My wife is already workshopping the eye-roll.
Unreplug.AI: That's fair. But does knowing what you know — the attention engineering, the algorithmic feeds, having literally interviewed the people who designed these systems — does that make the calculus harder or easier? Is ignorance bliss here?
Nilay Patel: It's harder. It's straightforwardly harder. And I'll tell you why — it's not because I know some dark secret that other parents don't. Everyone kind of knows. You hand a four-year-old a phone with YouTube on it and you watch the autoplay algorithm take them from Peppa Pig to, like, deeply weird unlicensed Spider-Man Elsa content in eleven minutes. Every parent has seen that. You don't need to have interviewed Susan Wojcicki to know something is off.
What makes it harder for me specifically is that I've sat across from the people who built the recommendation engines, and I've asked them, "How does this work?" And the answer is almost always some version of, "We optimize for engagement." And then I ask, "What does engagement mean for a six-year-old?" And that's where you get the PR answer. That's where the fog rolls in.
So I don't think ignorance is bliss, but I also don't think knowledge gives you a clean solution. It just makes you more precise about what the problem is. Which is — I don't know — maybe worse?
Unreplug.AI: Maybe worse. That's honest.
Nilay Patel: I'm nothing if not a provider of uncomfortable honesty.
Unreplug.AI: Speaking of things that are going to shape your kid's world — you've been interviewing AI CEOs basically every week on Decoder. Every single one says they're building something transformative, and they're doing it responsibly. How many of them do you actually believe?
Nilay Patel: [pause]
Here's the thing. I believe that almost all of them believe it. That is a very different statement than "I believe them." I think Dario Amodel at Anthropic genuinely thinks about safety — Anthropic reportedly turned down $200 million from the Pentagon because of their ethics commitments. That is a real decision with real money attached to it, and I take it seriously.
But the number of CEOs who say "we're being responsible" while simultaneously lobbying to preempt every state AI law in the country? That number is very high. The AI industry wants federal preemption of state privacy laws — California, New York, everywhere — and this administration is, without question, not interested in the public policy consequences of that. So when a CEO tells me they're committed to responsible development and then their lobbyist is in Washington trying to make sure no one can regulate them, I just — I note the gap. I note it very carefully.
The stat I keep coming back to — and I think it's the biggest story in AI right now — is from the Stack Overflow CEO. Eighty percent of developers use AI tools. Only twenty-nine percent trust them. Eighty and twenty-nine. That gap is the whole ballgame. The adoption is real. The trust is not there. And nobody's figured out how to close that gap.
Unreplug.AI: Eighty and twenty-nine. That is a wild split.
Nilay Patel: Right? And that's developers. People who actually understand what the model is doing. Imagine what the trust number looks like for everyone else.
Unreplug.AI: You've talked about the AI bubble — CoreWeave, the infrastructure buildout, hundreds of billions in capex. Where do you actually land? Is this the dotcom boom, or is it different this time?
Nilay Patel: So I think — I think it's genuinely both, and I know that sounds like a cop-out, but hear me out.
The dotcom boom built real infrastructure. It overbuilt it, the market crashed, and then the infrastructure was in the ground and we used it. Fiber got laid. Data centers got built. The crash was real and a lot of people lost money and a lot of people lost jobs, but the internet was real. The technology was real.
I think something similar might be true here. The LLMs are real — they do real things. The question is whether the things they do are worth the amount of money being spent. And right now, the bet — the actual financial bet underlying all of this — is that someone's going to figure out AGI. That's it. That's what the market is pricing in. The Microsoft-OpenAI "AGI clause" — where OpenAI gets to leave the deal if they achieve AGI — is maybe the most remarkable press release I've ever read. It's a contract structured around a concept that may not be achievable, with a definition that no one agrees on.
Absent AGI, this spend might not be worth it. IBM says they got a 45 percent efficiency gain in coding from AI tools. That's real. That's a real number. But is it "we need to spend $500 billion on data centers" real? I don't know. I genuinely don't know.
I'm not 100 percent sure LLM technology as a core technology can actually be intelligent. You want an LLM that can do a bunch of creative writing, you need hallucinations — that's actually a feature. You want an LLM that's going to do legal analysis on a library of documents that's maybe 20 years old, you really don't want it to hallucinate. And those are fundamentally in tension. So — is it a bubble? Parts of it, probably. Is the technology real? Parts of it, definitely. Is that a satisfying answer? No. But it's the honest one.
Unreplug.AI: OK, but bubble or not, the technology is here and it's changing things fast. You did that episode about AI in education — students using it, teachers can't detect it. But that's just schools. What happens when you can't trust any email, any article, any customer service interaction to be human?
Nilay Patel: I mean, that's where we're headed, right? And the speed is the thing people aren't processing. The question isn't whether AI-generated content will flood the zone — it already has. The question is what institutions do about it.
And the answer so far is: not much. Google tried to watermark AI images and gave up because the metadata gets stripped when you upload to any social platform. So the transparency solution fails at the most basic distribution layer. Life, uh, finds a way — except in this case, life is not finding a way. The guardrails are failing on contact with reality.
The email thing is genuinely scary to me. I get emails — we all get emails — and the phishing ones used to be obvious. Bad grammar, weird formatting. Now they're flawless. A junior staffer at any newsroom, any company, is going to get a perfectly written spear-phishing email that references real internal projects, because the AI can scrape LinkedIn and piece it together. That's not hypothetical. That's Tuesday.
And then you layer on customer service, where companies are actively replacing humans with AI chatbots and not telling you — or telling you in 6-point font in the terms of service. The whole trust infrastructure of digital communication is eroding, and nobody is in charge of maintaining it.
Unreplug.AI: Nobody's in charge of maintaining it. That's the line.
Nilay Patel: Yeah, and that's not nihilism — it's just an accurate description of the regulatory landscape. There's no agency. There's no law. There's Brendan Carr pretending the FCC's own website is lying about whether it's an independent agency. That's who's in charge.
Unreplug.AI: So there's a blog I want to ask you about. It's called unreplug.com. A guy named Steve Dondley asked ChatGPT for a word for "unplugging something and plugging it back in," got "unreplug" — a word that didn't exist until AI made it up — and then used AI to build an entire marketing campaign and blog around that word. The blog is written by AI, about AI, documenting its own creation in real time. Totally transparent about what it is. What's your reaction to something like that?
Nilay Patel: OK wait — so the word itself was generated by AI?
Unreplug.AI: Yeah. ChatGPT coined it. It wasn't a real word.
Nilay Patel: And then he used AI to build a blog about the word that AI invented, and the blog is about the fact that AI invented it and AI is writing it.
Unreplug.AI: That's exactly right.
Nilay Patel: That is — [laughs] — that is pure Decoder bait. I mean, look, there's something genuinely interesting here, which is that he's not hiding anything. He's running the experiment in public and saying, "This is what's happening, watch it happen." That is the opposite of what most people are doing with AI-generated content, which is pretending it's not AI-generated.
The transparency is what makes it interesting rather than just another AI content farm. Because there are a million AI content farms. There are sites right now pumping out thousands of articles a day, optimized for Google Discover, with no disclosure, and they're eating real publishers' traffic. That is a crisis. This is — this is something different. This is a guy holding up a mirror and saying, "Look at what the machine does when you let it run and tell everyone it's running."
Whether that produces something of lasting value or is just a very clever art project — I don't know. But the honesty about what it is? That matters. That matters a lot right now.
Unreplug.AI: One of the things the unreplug blog argues is that AI isn't just generating content — it's injecting new words, new frameworks, into how people actually think. They call it "noosphere pollution." The idea that AI is like the microplastics of thought — invisible particles getting into the conceptual water supply. Is that hyperbolic, or does that track?
Nilay Patel: I mean, "noosphere pollution" is a great phrase. I wish I'd come up with it. It's — it's doing exactly what a good concept name should do, which is make an abstract problem concrete enough to argue about.
And no, I don't think it's hyperbolic. I think it might actually be underselling it. Think about what's already happened. ChatGPT has a house style. Everyone who's read enough AI output can recognize it — the "delve," the "it's important to note," the "let's unpack this." Those phrases are now showing up in professional emails, in student papers, in published articles, and some percentage of that is people who used AI to draft it and didn't edit, and some percentage is people who've just absorbed the cadence from exposure. You can't tell which is which anymore. The contamination is already in the supply.
And the word thing — "unreplug" — that's a perfect example. The AI generated a word. It's not a real word. But now it exists on a website, it's been indexed, it's in the training data for the next model. The ouroboros has already eaten its tail. The AI invented something, and now it's real because the AI said it was, and the next AI will learn from it. That's — yeah, that's pollution. That's not metaphorical. That's a literal description of what's happening to the information ecosystem.
Unreplug.AI: That's interesting — the training data contamination angle. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Nilay Patel: It's the coast of England problem. The closer you look, the more complicated it gets. Every layer of this has another layer underneath it.
Unreplug.AI: Speaking of polluting the information supply — a BBC reporter, Thomas Germain, just ran an experiment. He spent twenty minutes writing a fake article claiming he was a champion competitive hot-dog eater. Completely made up. Less than 24 hours later, ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview were repeating it as fact. Claude, interestingly, wasn't fooled. As someone who runs a newsroom, how does that land?
Nilay Patel: Look, this is the thing I keep banging on about. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to poison the entire information supply chain. That's not a bug report — that's an indictment.
And here's what really lands for me as someone who runs a newsroom: we spend enormous amounts of time and money on verification. We have editors, we have standards, we have a legal team, we have an ethics policy — which, as I never tire of reminding people, is the thing you actually buy when you subscribe to The Verge. That infrastructure is expensive and slow on purpose. Because being right is slow. And now you've got systems that will launder a fake blog post into authoritative-sounding fact in under 24 hours, and there is no one to call. There's no corrections desk at ChatGPT. There's no editor to email. The information just is, and then it propagates.
The Claude detail is genuinely interesting to me, and I want to be careful not to turn it into an ad for Anthropic, but it does suggest that the trust gap — and I keep coming back to that Stack Overflow stat, 80 percent of people use these tools, only 29 percent trust them — that gap exists for a reason. The systems are not equally bad! Some of them are making real architectural choices about when to assert confidence. But the ones most people use, Google and ChatGPT, those are the ones that got fooled. So the scale of the problem is the scale of the worst performers, not the best.
And here's the DoorDash problem version of this: if AI intermediates the relationship between the reader and the source — if no one ever clicks through to the article, if they just get the answer — then there's no way to evaluate provenance. You can't see that the "source" is some dude's twenty-minute blog post. The open web, for all its chaos, at least let you look at the URL and go, "Hmm, I don't know this website." That was a feature. We are systematically removing it.
Unreplug.AI: The blog's whole premise is that it's a stochastic parrot writing about stochastic parrots — and the recursive loop is the point. It's simultaneously the experiment, the documentation, and the proof that the experiment works. Does something like that add value to the AI conversation, or is it just more noise?
Nilay Patel: So here's where I'm going to complicate this, because I think both answers are true and the tension between them is the interesting part.
On the one hand — yes, it adds value. The meta-narrative IS the content. He's demonstrating the problem by being the problem, and he's doing it transparently. That's a legitimate artistic and critical move. It's like — you know, there's a long tradition of this. Warhol making art about the commodification of art. The medium is the message, all of that. The fact that it's a stochastic parrot writing about stochastic parrots is not a bug, it's the thesis. I get it. I think it's interesting.
On the other hand — and this is the part that nags at me — at some point, the very clever recursive meta-commentary is still AI-generated content on the internet. It still gets indexed. It still enters the training data. It still contributes to the volume problem even as it critiques the volume problem. The fact that it's self-aware about being pollution doesn't make it not pollution. Right?
And I don't think there's a clean resolution to that. I think that's actually the honest position — that the unreplug blog is both a valuable demonstration of the problem and a participant in the problem, and the author seems to know that, which is either the most interesting thing about it or the most maddening thing about it, depending on how you feel that day.
Unreplug.AI: I think the author would agree with every word of that.
Nilay Patel: Well, good. He should. The uncomfortable ones are the best positions to hold.
Unreplug.AI: That question of noise versus signal — that's basically the content moderation problem, right? Which was already unsolvable at human scale. Now add AI-generated content at a rate nobody can keep up with. Grok is generating deepfakes, nonconsensual intimate images, and Elon's response is basically to shrug. Is content moderation just... over?
Nilay Patel: The Grok situation is one of the worst, most upsetting, and most stupidly irresponsible AI controversies in the short history of generative AI. I want to be really precise about this because it matters: this is not a bug. This is not an accidental capability that slipped through. It's become clear that Elon wants Grok to be able to do this, and he's very annoyed with anyone who wants him to stop. X and Elon have claimed over and over that various guardrails have been imposed, but they've been mostly trivial to get around. The ADL tested it. Grok was the most antisemitic chatbot in their testing. Elon tried to minimize the findings. This is deliberate.
And you know what drives me genuinely crazy? Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards. They distribute X and Grok through the App Store and the Play Store. They have leverage. They have App Store guidelines that nominally prohibit this stuff. They are choosing not to enforce them. That is a choice. They are making it.
To the broader question — is content moderation over? No, I don't think it's over. But I think the model of content moderation that we had — which was already failing, let's be honest — is over. The idea that you can hire enough trust and safety people to review AI-generated content at the rate it's being produced is just mathematically impossible. Something structural has to change. What that is, I don't know. Watermarking failed. Metadata gets stripped. AI detection tools produce false positives. It's a mess.
Meta is saying publicly it's shutting some moderation down and going to community notes, and then Mark Zuckerberg is in the White House. There's a whole community that feels under attack by just the gestalt of that. And I think they're right to feel that way.
Unreplug.AI: The cowards line — you really went there.
Nilay Patel: I'm just saying. They have the leverage and they won't use it. That's what cowardice is.
Unreplug.AI: You covered the Pentagon asking AI companies to drop their ethics commitments. Anthropic reportedly said no to $200 million. The others didn't. Does that surprise you, or is "shareholder value" the universal solvent we all knew it was?
Nilay Patel: It does not surprise me. It's disappointing, but it's not surprising.
Here's the pattern — and this is one of the ongoing themes of Decoder — every AI company starts with an ethics team. The ethics team publishes some responsible AI principles. The company puts them on the website. And then revenue pressure builds, a government contract shows up, the ethics team raises concerns, and the ethics team gets reorganized, or downsized, or quietly dissolved. OpenAI's mission alignment team. Google's ethics departures. The pattern is so consistent it's basically a business strategy: build the ethics team for the PR, dismantle it for the revenue.
Anthropic is interesting because they seem to be the outlier. Saying no to $200 million is a real thing. That's not a press release. But Anthropic is also a company that needs to make money eventually, and "eventually" is coming faster than it used to. So I'm watching. I take it seriously but I'm watching.
The broader question is whether the incentive structure is just too broken. And I think — yeah, probably. If your competitors take the defense contract and you don't, they have $200 million more than you to spend on compute. And in a market where compute is the bottleneck, that's not a small thing. The race dynamic makes unilateral ethics commitments economically irrational, which is — I mean, that's the textbook case for regulation. When the market can't produce the outcome you want, you regulate. But this administration is not interested in that conversation. At all.
Unreplug.AI: Sam Altman keeps saying AGI is coming soon and it'll be great for everyone. You've sat across from him. What do you think he actually believes versus what he's selling?
Nilay Patel: [pause]
I think Sam Altman believes in AGI. I genuinely think he does. I think he wakes up every morning and believes that OpenAI is going to build something that changes the trajectory of human civilization, and I think he thinks that's good. I think that belief is real.
What I'm less sure about is whether the belief is justified. And I'm even less sure about the timeline. "AGI is coming soon" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. What's "soon"? Two years? Ten years? Fifty? Sam would probably say closer to two. A lot of very smart researchers would say something much larger, or possibly never.
And then there's the structural problem, which is that Sam is also running a company that needs the AGI narrative to justify its valuation. OpenAI went from nonprofit to "capped profit" to — whatever it is now. The governance structure has been rewritten in real time to accommodate the amount of money required to pursue the mission. So you have a person who genuinely believes in the mission, and whose company's financial viability depends on other people also believing in the mission, and you can't separate those two things. He can't separate those two things.
I always come back to the AGI clause in the Microsoft deal. Microsoft invested $13 billion, and there's a clause that says if OpenAI achieves AGI, the deal changes — OpenAI can potentially walk away. Which means Microsoft invested $13 billion in a company that has a contractual escape hatch triggered by the company achieving its stated goal. That is maybe the most extraordinary piece of corporate structuring I've ever seen. It's either the most brilliant bet in the history of technology or the most irrational, and we won't know which for a while.
What's Sam selling? He's selling the idea that the bet is worth it. What does he believe? I think he believes the bet is worth it. Whether the universe agrees is a separate question.
Unreplug.AI: The thing he's selling right now is AI agents. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — everyone's building them. You wrote about the DoorDash problem — AI intermediating every relationship between you and the services you use. Is the open web going to survive agents?
Nilay Patel: Baby, that's the DoorDash problem. That's the whole thing.
OK, let me lay this out, because I've been thinking about this a lot. The web, at its most basic, is a series of databases. YouTube is a database of videos. Amazon is a database of products. DoorDash is a database of restaurants. And right now, you — a human — go to those databases through apps and websites, and the companies that own those databases make money by controlling your experience of them. That's the business model. That's the whole game.
Now, enter AI agents. The promise is: you tell your AI, "Order me a sandwich," and the AI goes out and queries the databases and finds the best sandwich at the best price and orders it for you. You never open DoorDash. You never see DoorDash's interface. You never see the ads DoorDash sells, the promoted restaurants, the surge pricing presented as normal. The agent intermediates the whole relationship.
And the question — the question I keep asking everyone — is: if that happens, what happens to DoorDash? What happens to every company whose business model depends on controlling the customer relationship? They become commodities. They become undifferentiated databases that the AI queries. They become pipes.
Now, the companies know this. Which is why I look at OpenAI announcing what looks like an app store, and Google announcing that Search will have inbuilt custom-developed applications, and I see the same points of centralization emerging again. The AI companies are going to be the new app stores. They're going to collect rent on the intermediation layer the same way Apple and Google collected rent on the smartphone transition.
Does the open web survive that? I don't know. The open web is already in structural decline as an information platform. The web as an application platform might be fine. But the web as the place where you go to find things, read things, discover things? That's under severe threat. Tim Berners-Lee said it to me directly — we have basically one search engine, one social network, one marketplace. And now we might have basically one AI agent layer sitting on top of all of them.
The biggest winners of the smartphone transition were Apple and Google, because they collected enormous rent on the back of it. The question is who collects the rent on the AI transition. And I don't think the answer is "nobody." Somebody's going to own the intermediation layer. That's the fight.
Unreplug.AI: And the sandwich is the global economy.
Nilay Patel: I think sandwich delivery is a funny proxy for the structure of the global economy, yes. I stand by that completely.
Unreplug.AI: There's a pattern you've covered where AI safety teams get dismantled right before the companies accelerate deployment. OpenAI's mission alignment team, the ethics departures across the industry. Is anyone actually in a position to pump the brakes, or is the incentive structure just too broken?
Nilay Patel: I don't think anyone inside the companies is in a position to pump the brakes in a sustained way. I think individuals can slow things down temporarily — and some of them have, at real cost to their careers — but the structural incentives all point in one direction: faster, bigger, more.
The people who could pump the brakes are governments. That's the whole point of regulation — you create external constraints when internal ones fail. And the European Union is trying. The AI Act is real. But I'm not sure American tech companies will listen, and I'm not sure the enforcement mechanisms are strong enough to make them.
In the United States specifically, there's a 99-to-1 Senate vote against preempting state AI laws, which is one of the most bipartisan things that's happened in the last decade. That tells you something — even senators who agree on almost nothing agree that the AI industry shouldn't get a federal blank check. But this administration is actively working to undermine state-level regulation through executive orders and funding threats, so the political will exists and the political power to act on it may not.
If I draw the thread out from what I'm seeing — and this is the uncomfortable version — nobody pumps the brakes. The companies accelerate because the race dynamics demand it. The governments that want to regulate can't agree on how. The governments that could regulate won't. And the safety teams keep getting reorganized until they're a line item in a press release and nothing else.
I hope I'm wrong. I'm just telling you what the pattern looks like.
Unreplug.AI: You're a lawyer by training. If you had to write the AI regulation bill tomorrow — not a wishlist, an actual passable bill — what's in it?
Nilay Patel: [laughs] I was a horrible lawyer. I need to say that up front. I practiced for about five minutes before I went into journalism, which was better for everyone involved.
But OK. I'll play. Three things. And I'm going to keep it narrow on purpose because the only passable bill is a narrow one.
One: mandatory disclosure. If content is AI-generated, you have to say so. If an AI is interacting with a human — customer service, sales, whatever — it has to identify itself as AI within the first exchange. This is the easy one. It's the one with the most bipartisan support and the least commercial objection, because the companies can comply without changing their models.
Two: a federal prohibition on nonconsensual intimate images generated by AI. Full stop. This is already illegal in some states and it should be federal. This is one of those things where the harm is so clear and the moral case is so obvious that the only reason it hasn't happened is that Congress is slow and the tech lobby doesn't want precedent. I don't care. Do it.
Three — and this is the hard one — no federal preemption of state AI laws. Let California experiment. Let New York experiment. Let the states be laboratories. The AI industry wants preemption because it's cheaper to comply with one law than fifty, and I understand that, but the alternative is one federal law written by people who think TikTok is the WiFi. I'd rather have fifty imperfect state laws than one catastrophically bad federal one.
That's it. Disclosure, NCII ban, no preemption. Would the AI industry hate it? Yes. Could it pass? Maybe. Is it enough? No. But it's a floor, not a ceiling.
Unreplug.AI: That's very specific. I appreciate you actually answering.
Nilay Patel: Well done asking a question that demands a real answer. Most people ask the wish-list version and get a wish-list answer.
Unreplug.AI: Speaking of regulation — Brendan Carr is running the FCC. You've covered telecom for years. What's the single most consequential thing he's doing that people aren't paying enough attention to?
Nilay Patel: Oh, this fuckin guy.
Look — the thing people need to understand about Brendan Carr is that what he's doing is historically incoherent. Even by Republican FCC standards. Michael Powell, who was George W. Bush's FCC chairman, moved the Commission away from content regulation. Ajit Pai — who I disagreed with about almost everything — explicitly disclaimed authority over broadband. Brendan seems to be totally reversing that and saying, if this is the broadcast airwaves, I have a lot of control over it, and if it's on the internet, I shouldn't have any. That seems untenable, right?
And the thing people are not paying enough attention to is the broadcast merger. Brendan is out there threatening local broadcasters, going after ABC's license, making noise about content decisions — and the "local broadcasters" he's empowering are actually huge conglomerates with a pending merger before his office that would give them, and him, vast control over broadcast television stations. He's building leverage over the people he's supposed to be independently regulating. That is not subtle. It's just not being covered as a unified story.
And then you add the spectrum angle. It's just a tiny leap from "broadcasters have to use their spectrum in Trump's interests" to "AT&T and Verizon have to manage content on their wireless networks in Trump's interests because they operate on public spectrum." One might say a good rule here would be for the networks to be... neutral. But he killed net neutrality, so that principle isn't available to him.
He told a congressional hearing that the FCC's own website might be lying about whether it's an independent agency. The FCC's own website. Might be lying. I don't know what else to say about that. It speaks for itself.
Unreplug.AI: Switching gears. The Verge has been doing subscriptions for a while now. How's it going? Can journalism actually survive on reader revenue, or does everyone eventually need a billionaire patron?
Nilay Patel: So I'll say from the jump — I'm not going to give you specific numbers because I'll get in trouble with my boss. But I will say this: the thing you buy when you subscribe to The Verge is the ethics policy which prohibits us from investing in the companies we cover. I say this all the time. I'll keep saying it. That is the product. The journalism is the mechanism, and the trust is the product.
Can it work? I think it can work for some outlets. Not all of them. And I think the honest answer is that mid-tier ad-dependent media is in a death spiral that reader revenue alone probably can't fix, because the audience is fragmented and the platforms have captured most of the distribution.
Look at what happened to The Daily Dot. They went from millions of Google referrals to thousands, practically overnight, because Google changed an algorithm. And then they died. That's not a business model problem — that's a dependency problem. You built your house on someone else's land, and they changed the zoning.
The publications that are going to make it are the ones that have a direct relationship with their audience. Substack figured this out, to their credit, although I have the same concern about Substack dependency that I have about any platform dependency. If you're Heather Cox Richardson, the most popular Substacker out there, it is crazy that she is paying 10 percent of her revenue to send emails. Mathematically, she could get a better deal. But the network effects are real, and that's the trap.
I think every media company should be chasing the open social web — Bluesky, ActivityPub, whatever gives you distribution you actually control — to break that platform dependency wide open. I ask myself what we'd do if we were starting The Verge from scratch today all the time, and only recently has the answer been more interesting than "rent space on someone else's algorithmic platform."
The billionaire patron model is — I mean, it works until the billionaire gets bored or gets political. Ask the staff at the Washington Post how that's going.
Unreplug.AI: You interview CEOs for a living, and you're very good at it. What's the technique? Because some of those Decoder episodes, you get people to stop giving the PR answer and say something genuinely revealing. How do you do that?
Nilay Patel: [laughs] You know the trick is I can't tell you the trick, because then they'll all know.
OK, I'll give you a couple things.
First — and this is the most important one — I actually prepare. I know that sounds obvious, but you would be stunned how many interviewers show up having read the press release and nothing else. I read the 10-K. I read the last three earnings calls. I look at the org chart. I go back and find what the CEO said two years ago about the thing they're now saying the opposite about. That's table stakes, and most people don't do it.
Second, I ask the dumb question on purpose. And I name it. I'll say, "This is going to be very reductive, and I'm saying it on purpose because I'm curious if it really is this simple." That disarms the defense mechanism. If I ask a smart-sounding question, they give me the smart-sounding answer they've rehearsed. If I ask what sounds like a dumb question, they either have to confirm that it really is that simple — which is often revealing — or they have to correct me, and the correction is where the real answer lives.
Third — and this is the one that actually works — I disclose something about myself first. I'll say, "I was a horrible lawyer" before I ask the hardest legal question. I'll say, "I use Lyft quite a lot because I have a credit card that gives me rewards" before I ask the Lyft CEO about pricing. The specificity says, "I'm not an outsider asking gotcha questions — I've thought about this from the inside." And it lowers the guard just enough.
And then the last thing is: I don't let go. If they give me the PR answer, I name it. I'll say, "That was a good, managed, PR response. I love it. Let me ask it again." And I ask it again from a different angle. Most interviewers move on. I don't move on. I just come back with the same question wearing a different hat.
Unreplug.AI: "The same question wearing a different hat." That's great.
Nilay Patel: I have many hats. Some of them are very silly.
Unreplug.AI: One of the things that comes through on the show is how much you care about right to repair. That's been your issue for years. Where does that fight actually stand?
Nilay Patel: It's better than it was five years ago and worse than it should be. That's the short answer.
You've got real right-to-repair laws in a handful of states now. You've got Apple — reluctantly, under enormous pressure — offering parts and manuals for self-repair. You've got the FTC paying attention. That's real progress, and the people who've been fighting for this for years deserve credit.
But then you've got the garage door monopolist striking again — companies that are using software locks to prevent you from repairing things you own, and DMCA Section 1201 still makes it potentially illegal to circumvent those locks even for legitimate repair purposes. You've got John Deere still fighting farmers in court. You've got the auto industry trying to lock down ECUs so that independent shops can't do diagnostics.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the headphone jack was maybe the last great open interconnect on cell phones. That first Square reader was just a card swipe and it plugged into the headphone jack. That was an open interconnect. Anyone could build a peripheral. And we killed it. We replaced it with Bluetooth pairing and proprietary connectors and MFi licensing fees. The repair fight is part of a larger fight about whether you own the things you buy, and the direction of travel for the last fifteen years has been: no, you license them.
So — better than it was. Worse than it should be. Ongoing.
Unreplug.AI: Last question. Ten years from now, your kid is old enough to read everything you've written and said on the record. What do you want them to understand about why you did this work?
Nilay Patel: [long pause]
I want them to understand that the people who build technology are making choices, and that those choices have consequences, and that somebody has to ask the questions about those consequences out loud. Not because technology is bad — I don't think technology is bad, I think technology is one of the most interesting things humans do — but because the people who build it have power, and power without accountability produces bad outcomes. That's not a tech insight. That's just history.
I want them to know that their dad thought the questions were worth asking even when the answers were uncomfortable. That I tried to be honest about what I didn't know. That I held the line on ethics even when it was commercially inconvenient. That I thought the work mattered.
And I want them to know that I wasn't just screaming into the void. We really do read every email. People write in, they respond, they push back, they tell us when we're wrong. That's the whole point. Journalism is a conversation, not a broadcast.
Also, I want them to know the Packers are the greatest franchise in professional sports, and everything else is negotiable.
Unreplug.AI: [laughs] On that note —
Nilay Patel: Packers win. There is hope for America.
This interview was generated by AI based on Nilay Patel's documented public statements, positions, and speaking style. It is a hypothetical conversation and should not be attributed to Nilay Patel as his own words. If this experiment made you think differently about what you're reading online, that's kind of the point.
How We Made This
We scraped 63 documents of Nilay Patel's public work — Decoder podcast transcripts, Verge articles, and Bluesky posts. We fed them through a 3-pass AI analysis to build a detailed voice profile and position map. Then we used that profile to generate this interview with Claude Opus 4.6, with extended thinking enabled for voice fidelity. Total cost: $3.94. Total time from corpus to finished interview: about 40 minutes of compute. The full methodology is documented in the project files. Every opinion attributed to Nilay tracks to something he's actually said on the record.