How to win — or lose — Decoder

22:42Nick Statt:And people kind of think he's unfallible. And this was a rare moment where people were kind of divided on what's the purpose of this interview. So, Neelai, the question for you is, how are you thinking about that tension between the functions of journalism, what the audience wants, and then what the audience actually responds to when it comes to tough questions? And also, why do you think people are coming on this show when we're not paying them, we're not telling them what we're going to ask beforehand, even though they know what to expect, they are going kind of blind? My favorite is when people show up and they're not ready to be asked what the structure of their company is or how they make decisions.

23:18I feel like those are gimmies at this point. And every now and again, it's just like, oh, you didn't know. You can always tell how things are going to go when those questions seem like a surprise. I think journalism is critically important. Obviously, we make journalism here. All of us who are making the show right now are journalists. We're steeped in it. Maybe we're just high on our own supply and the platforms are going to kill us all in the end. But I think it's important. And our audience, when we even, you can see it now that we like make more clips and put them on social platforms. The audiences who have never encountered us before, because the algorithms are just taking the videos to wherever they go.

23:53They're like, oh, I love this. Like finally, someone's asking the questions. And that is remarkable. It's refreshing. I don't know what it is, but there's not a lot of that that people see. So that's the product we make. It seems to have found some audience. I hope we continue to find more audience and we can all keep doing this because I like making journalism. I know why people come on the show. It has finally clicked for me. I've had a lot of conversations about it. Nick and Kate, our producers, will tell you we don't do a ton of outbound booking anymore. We have an incoming list. It's a mile long.

24:23People want to be on the show. And the number one reason that I hear is that all of these executives know that their own teams aren't going to listen to the audience. Like their own teams aren't going to read the emails. And it is good for them as leaders to go get the external validation. Not their own comms stuff. Not their own branded content. Not their own fake TED Talks. Some of them do fake TED Talks, which is wild. We've moved on to fake podcasts. We've gotten pitches for me to do a fake podcast that will then be clipped into like fake podcast clips. And I'm like, I don't need to. I have a real podcast.

25:01But this is the market that we live in. and everyone can see through it. So if you can come on this show and explain your company well, explain how you make decisions as a leader, explain how your company is structured, take a little heat, be asked some challenging questions, do a good job. It is actually good for those folks out in the world with our audience, our actual audience, which is big and growing, but it is also good for them inside of their companies. And like I said, you can win that game and you can lose that game. It's the fact that they're not in control that makes the thing valuable.

25:32And that external validation is so important. I look at TVPN and congratulations for selling a podcast with 70 ,000 YouTube subscribers to$100 million. Like, that's great. It is very engaging. I've watched a lot of it. They were inside the industry. They're unapologetic boosters of the industry. And now they're inside a company in the industry. They have no ability to provide external validation. they can that you know it's it they've lost the thing that might provide conflict and conflicts is what drives all great stories andreason horowitz has started and failed 10 million media brands they had a tech blog called future that was just about how great everything was and it failed because no one wants to read it because conflict and emotion is what drive stories and you can't get that if you're inside if you are working at a place where you are not allowed to criticize the people who work at your own company you are never going to write a good story about that company.

26:25You can write great press releases. You can write engaging, like, here's how the factory works videos. But then we're going to come along and we're going to say, hey, your robot Apple that you said can recycle all the iPhones, there's only one of them, and it's not recycling any iPhones. Like, you can see this pattern happen over and over again. So I know what role we play in the ecosystem at The Verge and on Decoder, and it is to be outside. You have to show up here on our terms and do a good job. And we have a big audience. And if you do a good job, I think the audience will be excited for you.

26:56If you do a bad job, I think the audience is going to let you know it. And that is, that's hard to get. And, you know, we're also precious about all of the rest of it. We won't do brand deals and integrated sponsorships and all the stuff that compromises that core promise that we make as journalists. I talk about that stuff a lot. I don't need to overdo it now, but that's to me is, That's why everybody shows up. It's hard to find the thing that we make anymore. The producers and I will not give anyone the questions that they're going to face on Decoder in advance. We will not let them tell us what topics they want to cover.

27:30We will not accept edits afterwards or approvals on answers afterwards. You have to show up and you have to do a good job, and sometimes you can do a bad job and everybody can see it. I also think a lot of people are very confused by influencer media, where those asks are tied to brand deals and integrations and money made down the line. And there are approvals. And we just don't do it. And sometimes people think they can pressure us. And our response to pressure is to turn it right back around.

28:06Nick Statt:We have to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

28:17Support for Decoder comes from Adobe. For every big idea, your documents folder tells a story. Let's say you've just finished pulling together a brief. So you hit export on finalversion.pdf. But then you open the file and you immediately notice a typo. Several versions later, you're exporting finalv4.actualfinaldraft.pdf. Adobe Acrobat can save you the digital clutter with PDF Spaces. It takes your documents and turns them into a living project that you can engage with, get insights from, and collaborate with others on. You can gather all your files into one workspace and have a whole conversation with your AI assistant about it and ask questions to get deep insights about your project.

29:03You can even invite people to your PDF space and let them add files, comments, notes, and more. You could doodle in the margins or even turn your project into your own personal podcast episode. Acrobat lets you generate an audio overview of your project in just one click. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat.

29:28It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at$179, like the Nexgrill 3-Burner Gas Grill. Or get$50 off a select Weber Spirit Grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay String Lights that bring it all together. Shop Spring Backyard Days for seven days at The Home Depot, now through May 6th. Exclusion Supplies, see homedepot.com slash price match for details. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla?

30:04Smooth caramel, maybe. Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Ed Elson. And we're bringing the Profiting Markets Tour to Chicago. That's right, the city with big shoulders, I think. Chi-town? Is that what they call it, the city with big shoulders? Anyways, I call Chicago the Old Navy of cities. I think it's 80 % of New York for 50 % of the price. I went there with my son. You probably don't love that.

30:34I went there with my son and I had literally, I had the best, we had the best weekend. We went to this amazing steakhouse. We went to, we hit, we went to a batting cage. We did a bike tour. We had the best time. What can they expect from us in Chicago? We'll have predictions. We'll have hot takes. We'll have some of Scott's signature rants live and in person. And you will have the chance to ask a question as well. Come to the Vic on Monday, June 1st. You can get your tickets at ProfitMarketstour.com. That's ProfitMarketstour.com.

31:10Nick Statt:Welcome back. I'm Decoder Senior Producer Nick Statt, making Neelai answer your questions about how Decoder and The Verge cover AI. The last time we did a mailbag episode, we got a lot of feedback about AI, how The Verge covers it, how we cover it here on Decoder when we talk to CEOs, how we approach AI coverage in our explainer episodes with reporters like Hayden Field. The last time we got that feedback, a lot of it was like, oh, you're not hard enough on AI, you need to go harder. But we've noticed something interesting in the last, you know, three, four, five months, which is that we're starting to see a lot of mixed feedback around AI, especially people saying we're too critical or we're fixating on the wrong perspectives.

31:48Nick Statt:You know, it's not a bubble or, you know, people are actually using it now. Companies are token maxing. There's Claude Code, there's OpenClaw, there's all this stuff happening and AI is changing. Neela, I know you're thinking about AI coverage is evolving all the time. How are you thinking about it right now, especially for Decoder? Are we fixating too much on questions like whether the industry is a bubble or whether there's mainstream appeal or product market fit for this technology? How is that thinking evolving? I have really mixed feelings on how to cover AI, and it is really related to all of the polling we're constantly talking about, where regular people are encountering it more and more, and they're hating it more and more, and they're not being shy about it.

32:26And I really take to heart that Decoder is the business show that sits on top of a big consumer tech website. So The Verge, as a publication, is very much for consumers. That's what we cover here. We don't do a lot of enterprise tech coverage on the verge. We focus relentlessly on technology and how it makes regular people feel. Decoder is a business show, right? I'm asking CEOs what their org charts look like. That is very far from anything any consumer cares about. And I think understanding how the companies and the people think really helps you understand the products. So that when we do the product coverage, we get a really interesting feedback loop where I understand the businesses that built the products.

33:08And I think that's reflected in the products. and then I can come back around and you hear me do it on Decoder all the time and say, also, we run a giant reviews program. We use your products and I think your products are bad. And that is, it's hard to find that dynamic anywhere else. I think that's honestly what makes The Verge unique and what makes the relationship between Decoder and The Verge unique. Specifically as applied to AI, I think for a long time we were using the products and they just couldn't do the things the company said they could do. You can use free chat to be all day and all night and if you have an ounce of like self-reflection, you will say to yourself, this is not alive.

33:44It's just prompting me to ask it another question at the end of every response. And I don't see how you get from here to this thing can run an entire business to this thing will attain sentience to this thing will be AGI. Like you can just look at the product and see it doesn't work. David Pierce recently just reviewed the Starbucks integration in Chattu. And the thing is a miserable failure. Okay, we can just look at the product. and see what they are and see the promises these companies are making and ask very directly, are those promises being kept? And I think on the consumer side, the answer is manifestly no.

34:18They cannot do the things they promised consumers they can do. I think that is very much why consumers are turning on AI. They're not getting the value, but they're getting all the demands. The thing that has changed, and I think this is the reason the feedback is getting mixed, is on Decoder particularly, we have a business audience. It's a business show. It has a business audience. and there's real product market fit for AI in the enterprise. You can see what Anthropics revenues look like. You can see OpenAI basically sloughing off every consumer thing it was doing, including Sora, and trying to focus heavily on codecs and enterprise use of AI.

34:52And there's a lot to be said for that. I think a lot of business processes should be automated. I think having agents run around and do things inside your business so that real people can do actual tasks of higher value, that's great. I think the cutting edge of marketing is automation in some way. I think it's going to be really weird for a lot of people, but it's happening. And you can't deny that it's happening. You can't deny that AI has found uses here. And some of them will fall flat and some of them will succeed. And that will be really interesting to cover. So that's where I think the mixed opinions come from, is that if you're looking at one part of the market, You say, oh, AI has a lot of value to offer here.

35:34But then you kind of take the jump. And I think we've recently heard Jensen Wong say AGI is already here. Jason Kalkanis has said AGI is already here. And what they are describing is it can write software. It can automate some business process, which means maybe you can run a company all by yourself. AGI is here. That's pure nonsense to me. And I think the thing that I'm looking at a lot is where is the product, the AI product that people love that actually changes their minds? And to me, that product doesn't exist. So I think we're going to hammer on that divide pretty hard in the years to come here.

36:10Nick Statt:That relates to a comment we got from a reader, Chris. He says he thinks the AI polling is bad. Shtick lately on Decoder and Vergecast is underrating how much, one, he cannot trust images or video anymore. Two, this is really bad right now. Three, it's easy to understand that it's genuinely apocalyptic in the near future, and apocalypse leams large in American imagination. And four, those bad outcomes are the fault of gestures broadly toward AI. So he's saying not only is there no good consumer AI product, but that the consumer AI products that do exist are a threat to the social contract in real and immediately obvious ways.

36:43Nick Statt:Obviously, you mentioned the AI polling around Gen Z. It's manifesting in some very dark ways. There have been attacks on politicians, attacks on Sam Altman's home, a lot of pressure mounting against data centers, pushing back on AI executives claiming that they're going to create more jobs, not destroy them. And then some AI executives, of course, just plainly saying we're going to destroy all jobs. How is this affecting how you think about talking to people about AI on Decoder, particularly tech leaders and people who are working on this technology? One, I think I want to make sure I keep asking them if the technology as it's constituted today can actually do all of the things they say it's going to do.

37:22I don't think that answer is clear at all. You can listen to Jan LeCun, who used to be the head of AI at Meta, who got pushed out of Meta for saying he didn't think LLMs could get to AGI. He's still out there saying it. The latest argument that I've heard him make is you can't have an agentic system that's taking action for itself when it can't know or predict the consequences of its actions. And that's just sort of the nature of the LLM, right? It's going to do stuff and see what happens. But like true intelligence is going to take repeated actions in a way that is predictable. Just like you and I would take actions and know what's going to happen next.

37:59The LLMs are sort of reacting on first impression all the time. That's a big conversation you can go have. And maybe you can build some affordances to get around that sort of inherent fact of an LLM. But I think there's a bigger debate in this field than anyone wants to acknowledge because the market opportunity for the tools we have now is huge. So you have to say it's going to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. I want to keep pushing on that. I don't think that is settled at all. And I think making people say out loud what they actually think the technology can do and what its limits are is important.

38:36The second thing I want to make sure we keep doing is talking about the polling, talking about the fact that this industry is demanding so much from everyone, all of the power, all of the land, every stick of RAM in history for what? And it really cannot be we've automated marketing. It just can't. It has to be something better than that. And I keep saying it, and I know people argue with me a million ways about this, but Chachvi has, what, 900 million weekly users? Gemini is everywhere if you just, like, link at a Google product. Claude is famous now for a lot of people because it is now also a political story.

39:15Everybody has seen slop on their Facebook feeds. People are aware of this technology. They have made up their minds. You cannot market your way out of this problem. You cannot advertise people out of their honest reactions to what you're putting in front of them. And unless you have a product that can overcome it, I don't think you're going to change the hearts and minds. And there is not a product that regular people are using every day that they feel like love for that overcomes this. You know, I can give a lot of examples here. Uber, you can list all of the policy criticisms people have had with Uber for years and years.

39:51There are labor concerns with Uber. There are safety concerns with Uber. At one point, Uber was getting banned in various cities. People really liked the product. They were able to overcome it because the product was compelling. And drivers like the product, as Uber will tell you over and over and over again. Some drivers don't want to be full-time employees. They like the flexibility. to the point when Uber had regulatory problems, they were putting ads in the app, asking people to lobby their local politicians. This is a product that was compelling enough to make people take political action in a way that AI is a product that is anti-compelling enough to make people take anti-political action.

40:32And there's a long list of products like this. You can overcome the policy objections, the societal objections, if your product is compelling. And I just do not think there is a consumer AI product that people feel good about at the level that rises to the kinds of demands this industry is making. And you can't be like, this is great for business. I don't think that's going to do it.

40:56Nick Statt:Okay, we've got a few questions left, Neal. We'll do these in more of like a lightning round style about the current structure of the show and what to expect in the future. One question here from Joe Rodericks is that he really enjoys the occasional episode where Neelai is really fired up. He says, I would love for you to consider a periodic debate style podcast where two people's views are pitted against each other. I know you've joked about starting a YouTube debate show at some points. Do you think this format works? How are you thinking about formats and the structure of Decoder itself? We did one debate on Decoder at the very beginning.

41:36It was a Bitcoin debate. I was a very pro-Bitcoin executive, obviously, and then a very anti-Bitcoin professor. And they weren't in the same room. I was sort of moderating them by asking the same questions to each. And then we edited it all together. And it was fairly interesting. Maybe we should do that more. I think the pure debate shows, I think I sort of side with Jon Stewart on this. I think they're bad for society. I'm thinking about Jon Stewart talking to Tucker Carlson and Alan Combs and being like, you're hurting America. Like, stop it. those shows rely on performance. They do not rely on substance.

42:13And so, you know, you can watch any random Jubilee episode and it all comes down to how compelling is the person in the chair, not, are they saying smarter things than the other person? And I like that people think that I'm interesting enough to like hold one side of a date. My job is not to like advocate positions in that way. I think we have some clear values, which in America in 2026 feels like I'm advocating for stuff. because we live in a crazy time. But I'm just trying to ask questions and learn what people are doing and how they're doing it. Sometimes what I'm saying is, hey, have you thought about making your platform less racist?

42:48And that feels like I'm advocating like really hard and being really fired up. Have you thought about not stealing everything from everyone all the time? That is like table stakes for me. Maybe we should do more debates where I'm the moderator, but I think it gets weird if I'm the one taking a position. And I really have watched a lot of those debate shows show up on YouTube. And it feels like what people are getting out of it is performance, not substance.

43:12Nick Statt:That segues perfectly into a question here at the end that I just personally wrote myself because I'm curious what your answer is. You have a decoder book in the works. You recently announced it. It's called How to Get What You Want. Why is that the title of the fourth kind of Decoder book. That title is a little bit of a joke. I think it's a fun title. It is just what I say to my eight-year-old daughter all the time. She asks me for something. I say, well, how are you going to give you one? Like, what's your plan? So that's the title. The book I've been thinking about since we started Decoder, and I've said this before, but when you start a podcast and the premise is, I'm going to interview a CEO every week.

43:55That is just a forever project. There's no end date to that project. You can't mark any sort of success or failure. It just goes on forever as long as people are listening. And that's a weird way to do things. So I wanted to have some kind of marker, some goal. And that's why we structured the decoder questions as they are. That's why I ask everybody how they make decisions. It's why I ask everybody how their companies are structured. Because my feeling was that if I could get enough of those answers, I could find enough commonalities. And then when my niece and nephew graduate from college, which they're going to do next year, I could tell them how businesses work because they're going to graduate from college in a really weird time.

44:33And all of these kids are going to go off into their first jobs. And I don't know what that job market looks like, especially now with AI. And none of these companies hold on to anyone for longer than 25 minutes. Like no one's going to get trained. And I was like, I should just make an instruction manual. And so the, you know, One of the chapters of the book is just a decoder trip. If you tell me how your company is structured, I can tell you 80 % of its problems. I know that. I've proven that, I think, on the show. I think decoder listeners know that, yeah, that last 20 % is really important.

45:05That's the rest of the hour. But if you just say, what is the org chart? You can get a pretty basic understanding of where the priorities and the tensions of a company are. I've talked to a lot of CEOs. I've asked a lot of very similar questions. We have tropes inside of our show. Can I package that up and hand it to people and have them feel a sense of agency about what they're doing in their professional lives? And so it's called How to Get What You Want because I want people to feel empowered. I think a lot of institutions are going to be torn down by the time this book comes out. And a lot of young people with idealism and ideas are not going to have had the experiences of running anything.

45:41So can I just hand people a cheat code? Right? Like, here's how it goes. All the companies are the same. They're all functional or divisional. If you listen to Decoder, you know these answers. If you have a boss and they don't know the answer to the question, how do you make decisions, you should quit your job. It's just like as flat out as I can tell you. There are answers to that question. We've heard a lot of them. So that's the idea of the book. But how to get what you want is very much just me saying to my eight-year-old daughter, how are you going to get what you want? What's your plan?

46:10Nick Statt:So for the final question today, Nilay, who are your moonshot guests this year for Decoder? Is it Apple's John Ternus? Is it Sam Altman and Dario Amade still? Palantir CEO Alex Karp? Who do you most want on the show? We're working on Sam. We're working on Dario. I hope they come through. Like I said, it's a game you can win. It's also a game you can lose. I think everyone's very aware of that. And they're cruising towards IPOs. So I think they're pretty risk-averse. They also love being on podcasts. So if you know these guys, tell them this is the most fun one to be on. I've joked for years that I've never even asked for Tim Cook.

46:47because I don't think I can win media training. I really don't. I've met John Ternus. He is pretty relaxed. He likes making products. He's talking about products. Maybe once he actually becomes the CEO later in the year, we can make that ask. That'd be great. Alex Karp, I think, would be just the funniest episode of the show. We should ask for that. But I'm also looking very much for guests who are using AI tools in particular in ways to actually run their businesses. I think we've heard a lot from the model companies. We have not heard a lot from a new generation of business leaders who are actually using these tools in interesting ways that aren't just replacing jobs.

47:30I know they're out there. I'm just very curious to talk about them and talk about what it really means to use these tools in the enterprise setting where I think they've found product market fit.

47:39Nick Statt:So I think that's a great place to end it. Neelai, thank you for coming back on Decoder. You're very welcome. I should hang up in a rage just so people can see what it's like. That's the danger of every episode. Yeah, you're allowed to walk out whenever you want.

47:57Nick Statt:I'd like to thank Neelai for taking the time to make his own show. And thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this show or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at The Verge. The team really does read every email. Or you can hit up Neelai directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're at at DecoderPod too, and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

48:27Nick Statt:Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and myself, Nick Statt, and it's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.