Why the current tech backlash feels different

We’re back with another Decoder mailbag special. This time, we focused on feedback to Nilay’s “software brain” video essay, our ongoing coverage of AI and Big Tech backlash, surveillance, interviewing politicians ahead of the midterms, and more. Remember: we really do read every email, so please keep sending us your feedback, and letting us know what you think of our coverage and how we can improve. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: How to win — and lose — Decoder | Decoder Mailbag (2026) Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions | Decoder Mailbag (2025) Answering your biggest Decoder questions | Decoder Mailbag (2024) Sundar Pichai on AI, search, and the future of the web | Decoder (2026) The people do not yearn for automation | Decoder Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble | Decoder New York Governor Kathy Hochul thinks AI should be ‘less evil’ | Decoder Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Gregg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:52Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Decoder, Neelai's show about big ideas and other problems. This is Nick Statt, senior producer, and I'm joined by our brand-new supervising producer, Greg Ott.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  And hi, Neelai. Neelai is here, too. He is the person who hosts the show, and his name is also in the show, so it makes sense.

• 2:08Speaker 05

  It's true. We don't insistently say my name in the show enough. We should do it all the time. Like, I should do it. Welcome to Decoder with Neelai Patel.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  You have your name behind you in the video. We could get you a name tag, too. Like, all those sports announcers, they just have the CBS logo on their chest and their on their breast pocket, like, not a bad idea.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  I'm not yet at branded polos, but, actually, no, even thinking about it for one second, and we never will be, is what I would say.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Like Nick was saying, this is Neelai's show, and we are doing a Mailbag episode. This is where we go through all the feedback, as I'm sure you've, because you listen to the end of every episode, we know you do. We do mention that we go through every single email that we get. Nick, you can verify that. We get a ton of email, and we do read through all of it. Is that true?

• 2:53Speaker 03

  We now get YouTube comments. We get many, many Verge comments. We get Spotify comments, and the Spotify comments, I read everyone, because those are specifically pretty pointed.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're kind of like uncut gems, like, because they're trying to build this little community, it's like, somebody might read this, because it only gets like six comments as opposed to like 600 for a YouTube video.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  We last did a Mailbag episode in April, and we said we were going to do more of these, so we're back again. This is September. We've had a few months. We've had a lot of really big interviews. So, yeah, let's just get into it.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  All right, we're going to kick things off with the Software Brain video you put out. This was one of the biggest things that people have commented on, and it is far away like the most talked-about episode in the past six months. Hundreds of comments on the Verge website, hundreds of comments on YouTube, single-to-double-digit comments on Spotify, and lots and lots of emails. One thing we wanted to talk about, though, is something a reader brought up about the idea of the Neelai rant, and you, you know, effectively pulling out your inner Dennis Miller and really giving us like your take on something. And for this one, like, one listener wrote, "Just listen to the people do not yearn for automation, and all I can say is the people do yearn for more Neelai rants."

• 4:09Speaker 04

  So, we want to know, like, what is the origin of this type of rant? And then, how much of like the show's DNA do you think is built around this idea of you giving us the rant and just like the idea of, basically, you giving us your hot take on something really, really well thought out, as opposed to like the interviews we usually do?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  I feel like I should make another riff on the people do not yearn for automation, but as Dennis Miller.

• 4:38Speaker 05

  The power of AI means Dennis Miller can deliver Software Brain now.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Let me tell you something, Sam Altman, the last time he was sitting in a Whataburger.

• 4:46Speaker 05

  We could just do it. We could just do it. It'd be great. I'm sure we wouldn't get sued for that.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  They're just essays. Like, I know they're rants, and they're delivered on YouTube, and they're very pointed in particular ways, but that's just what I would have written as a column 10 years ago, before we'd had podcasts this way. It has just been very obvious to, I think, everyone that you can't just write a column and expect it to have impact. You have to stare at the camera and do it. And then, we're very good at, like, publishing that as a column, and then having a transcript and polishing it and delivering it all the other ways. So, that's the origin of it, is I, is for all the podcasting I do and as little writing as I do anymore, in my heart, I'm still a writer, and taking all of the reporting and all of the ideas that we hear and all the conversations we have, and synthesizing them

• 5:36Speaker 05

  into ideas that you can grapple with, is the point. Like, it is really the point of running a magazine like The Verge. So, that's where that comes from. Now, can I do it as often as I want to do it? I obviously can't. The reason I did Software Brain in that moment is I could see the hype cycle around AI failing to contend with the lack of verifiability in every domain except software. And that's getting a little blurry now, but, you know, lots of companies are just databases. Software engineering is verifiable. You can run it through the compiler and see if it works. And AI has obviously gotten really good at making software. And if you believe the world is just software, that means AI has gotten good. It's done.

• 6:19Speaker 05

  And you can see the labs are talking about how they've achieved AGI, or they will very soon, and it is very much connected to the ability of AI to write software. And I'm just not discounting that that's important. I'm just saying, once you get outside of software, verifiability gets way harder, right? And so, you can see it, we just the episode with Robert Hart and math. There's an amount of verifiability in math, and you can burn a lot of tokens, we don't know how many, and solve some unsolved math problems. There's probably verifiability in various other science domains. It is really interesting. Is there verifiability in generating novel drugs? No, you got to inject a bunch of people with novel drugs.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  That's, what are we going to do?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  That's why they got so many rats in cages somewhere. It has to be, like, it has to be done.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Right? Like, there's just some other thing that's going to happen in the next 10 domains that is going to be really, really challenging. And so, that's where I just, I wanted to put the marker down and say, I have been swimming in this water for a long time with these people, and the power of software is not to be denied. It has remade our world. But if that's the only framework, or you think that is a universal framework, you're going to run into these walls. I think there's like lots more of those we can do, but I, I mean, I want them to hit. I only want to write hit singles. And importantly, they're all born of the reporting, and that's always been the dynamic on The Verge. It's certainly dynamic on Decoder, is, you know, the data can get to your head.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  The episodes where I just talk sometimes outperform the episodes when there are CEOs. That's not good. Like, that's a bad incentive loop for me, because I want everything to come out of the fact that I've talked to all of the people, and you can go check my work. And you can go see what those conversations are like, and you can see that they are genuine and honest and all the things they should be. And that's where then I feel like I not only have the depth and the foundation to write Software Brain, but I can send it to those people and say, this is, this is how I feel about it. And they come on the show, and they talk to me about Google Zero or Software Brain and all that stuff, and that conversation gets really, it gets much bigger than me just ranting.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  So, my reaction to that, Neelai, is that you feel like your thesis has kind of borne out over the last few months for Software Brain. We did get feedback from people who kind of, I guess, disagreed with some of the premise. It wasn't that they say that people aren't unhappy with AI, but they think that we're wrong about why they're unhappy with AI. One reader, Josh Vanderburgh, he wrote in to say that he thinks people, it's not that they hate AI as a technology, but rather that they don't like their current economic situation, and they're kind of pushing that onto AI as a, as a, as a thing to, to project on. He's pretty sure that we'll eventually embrace natural language as the superior way of doing things on a computer. His, his response was this. He said, "AI modern computer interfaces suck hard.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  We're forced to map our fluid, non-deterministic creative selves onto hierarchical menu systems, and that no matter how intuitive and discoverable, we constantly fail to find the tools that we need." He uses Canvass CEO as an example of somebody that deeply understands the problem, and they realize that AI can provide the user interface we've all been yearning for. He goes on to say, "People definitely yearn to just tell Photoshop what they want done in words and forget everything they ever learned about that horrible user interface." We had a few other similar comments, like, "People do not yearn for automation. They yearn for cheap stuff, and when AI gives them cheap stuff, they'll be happy." A third person wrote, "Software Brain misses three things regular people actually care about: control, agency, and meaning. We like doing things. The doing is where the meaning comes from."

• 9:56Speaker 03

  I'm curious, you know, just from those particular comments and also the other feedback you got from Software Brain, how you kind of respond to those criticisms?

• 10:04Speaker 05

  Let's take them in turn. Josh, this is a very thoughtful comment, Josh, and I don't disagree that all modern computer interfaces suck hard. I've used Liquid Glass. I agree with you. I refuse to upgrade this computer to Tahoe. I'm just not doing it.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  There, there's some confusing thing happening in user interfaces, probably related to how much all of our devices have turned into shopping malls or SaaS products or whatever it is, right? Like, there's something broken there, and I agree that that's bad. I think I disagree that natural language is a perfect substitute for everything, or can become a universal interface. And I say this as somebody who is writing a Decoder book, based on all the interviews in Decoder, and I've used Whisper Flow to just get as much out of my head onto the page as I can, and that is incredibly powerful. And you can see why people like it. And

• 10:58Speaker 05

  I also have to edit every single word it generates because it insists on formatting my thoughts in ways that I find completely bananas. Like, all these systems are like, you think in bullets. And I'm like, I am not thinking in bullets right now. I'm just pausing between sentences. There's something there where you can take the natural language input. And what we as people are reasonably good at doing is taking everything else with it, the context of our body language, the tone of our voice, and creating other meaning out of it. Computers are really bad at that. Maybe they're gonna get better at it, but they're currently very, very bad at it. And I'm using my Whisperflow example. It's just like one, you can see how it's bad at it. So it's not just you're being creative to a computer or talking to a computer that's gonna do what you say and you don't have to push all the buttons. It's, it's lossy.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  It's lossy in a very important way that using a mouse to click on a button is not lossy at all. It is very, very directed and it will do exactly the thing that you want it to do. Ordering from Grubhub with your finger on a phone screen is 100% accurate, unless you're drunk, which I've been. But talking to an agent to have it go, to go do something is lossy. It is error prone in very specific ways. And I just, I think these things are gonna exist together, right? And that to me is the balance that we're gonna have to strike, that all of the hype around AI assumes that what I want is another person instead of a specific thing to happen.

• 12:25Speaker 05

  And, you know, you can talk to lots of designers or professionals who use these tools and they will all complain about these tools. We use this app called Riverside to produce the show several times a week. Every single person on this team can issue a PhD thesis in, in all of the problems with Riverside because it's the tool we use. And it sucks in very specific ways. It is also still the tool we use every single week to make the show. If anybody uses Photoshop, anybody uses Pro Tools, the, the books that can be written about people's feelings about Pro Tools, uh, fill a library. But they're the tools because they get the job done in specific ways. Making that lossy or making that non-deterministic is actually gonna make people less effective. It will democratize access for a lot of people, I think.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  And that is a huge opportunity. I don't think that opportunity outweighs the cost of making things more chaotic in like specific ways. The cheap stuff piece, uh, yeah, I think people like cheap stuff. Like, there's a reason TVs are permanent surveillance devices in everyone's home because they cost $500 and they're just watching all the time. But I actually think the industry is coming around to my point of view. The products aren't good enough. And I know this, uh, because our friend Alex Heath just interviewed Sam Altman and he asked him why people don't like AI. And Altman's response was that he thinks that the way to win hearts and minds is to deliver value. We actually have a clip, we can run it.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  Generally speaking, I think the right way to get people to like something is to deliver them value. Probably if a lot of people use that, which they will over time, and understand that it's not actually like

• 14:00Speaker 05

  Better Google search and that's it?

• 14:01Speaker 06

  You know, fusing and destroying huge amounts of water or whatever, um, then, then there'll be more excitement.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  So, you know, I watched that. I think Alex did a good job talking to Sam. My view of that is, oh, that's a concession that Sam Altman knows ChatGPT is not delivering enough value to consumers. The, the, these free versions are not communicating enough what they could do, or they're not doing enough, or they're hallucinating too much. And that's why consumers dislike them. And I continue to believe that talking about how everything can be turned into a database that can then be automated by agents is not gonna win anyone any hearts and minds. Maybe that's the technology that creates products people love, but the technology itself is fundamentally uninspiring. It's the products, it's the experiences you have that change minds and software brain is just inherently alienating, in my opinion.

• 14:50Speaker 05

  And then the last one, software brain misses three things people care about, control, agency and meaning. Yes, I agree with that. I would connect that actually to buttons in cars. We've gone through this horrible period where all of the controls in cars became virtualized onto a screen and there's been furious pushback against it and all the buttons are back. I think people want deterministic actions, even from computer-like things. And this is maybe the, the single best market-driven evidence that you can't just virtualize everything. You actually have to give real experiences to people that do the things that are printed on the label of the button exactly when you push the button. And that is control, agency. I don't know about meaning in changing an H-trac in a car, but it's definitely control and agency.

• 15:34Speaker 05

  Uh, and meaning, I think, comes from having to struggle through doing the work yourself, not just letting AI do it for you. So I agree with all these comments in different ways. Uh, I just think the industry has gotten completely lost in the sauce on what you can do if you turn everyone into a database, which is what I call software brain. And they've missed the human connection. A really good example, I'll give you a little preview of an upcoming episode. We had the CEO of Cloudflare on and he just, you know, fired a bunch of people at his company, uh, because he says AI can do a bunch of those jobs. And his whole thing is he can identify rising talent in the company by having the AI look at all the things they're doing. And then he thinks that's good because he can make a phone call and say, hey, you're, you're a young superstar. And that, you know, maybe that is a good thing.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  In order to accomplish that goal, every single thing that happens at that company needs to happen in a database for an AI to review and then communicate to him. I will not, I will, I will just, that's the preview. We had a whole conversation about that because I think that is one of the more fascinating ideas in all of business right now.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  Boy, I hope, I hope that doesn't roll out to the verge. I'll have to get one of those mouse movers or something. You're gonna have to start figuring out like what I'm doing all day.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  We are, we are maybe insistently human. If we could automate Riverside, I think that would be, that would be good.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, good luck. They, they did roll out the option to build an AI twin of you so that the, the features we've been asking for, not better microphone connections, not better uploading. It's like, no, we need to duplicate the people we're speaking to.

• 16:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. Can we turn off the auto level control? No, but AI twins are here.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Hey, there's actually a, a request for a, uh, what a, an essay style thing, a video essay that is a riff on the software brain, uh, titled, "The People Do Not Yearn For Surveillance", back to the whole, uh, you know, watching what you're doing at work type thing. Uh, is that, is that something that's kind of in your head right now with especially like all the Flocks, uh, all the flock cameras everywhere, all the controversy around that? Um, maybe with like a software brain formator framing, um, or just a bigger picture thing? Is this kind of on your, in, in your mind right now?

• 17:29Speaker 05

  It is in my mind. I will candidly admit that some of it has taken me by surprise, just how bipartisan it is. And some of that, I think, is just, it's an election year and people are angry about cameras, so all the politicians are trying to channel that anger, maybe the same way they're trying to channel the anger about data centers. There's action in, in, in red states to ban surveillance as well. And there's action in more Republican communities to take down the cameras, which I think is fascinating. And it's not just limited to brands like Flock. It's the idea of these cameras watching. And I think the, the piece of the puzzle, the reason that it caught me by surprise is that for better or worse, my formative political experiences were like 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Right?

• 18:13Speaker 05

  That's when I was in college. And what do we do? We passed the Patriot Act. We militarized the police. We started doing warrantless wiretaps. We, we, we ran our way all the way up to the Snowden revelations and then we did nothing about them. Right? And it, literally none of that stuff caused this amount of panic. So it's, that's just my framework, right? And so this is a shock to that system. Like, it's surprising to me that people care now. And I think it's because the cameras are visible. I think it's because the, the understanding that there's an AI chatbot that you can talk to that can just go generate an answer and the cops now have it for cameras that are tracking you everywhere. And you can literally see the cameras and you can connect it to an experience you've had.

• 18:58Speaker 05

  And there's Flock who we are trying to get on the show. Um, and their CEO originally tried to do a bunch of like MAGA-coded messaging around this stuff and he would call his critics terrorists and that didn't work. Like, all that is new if you are born of the things that I was born of. Right? Like, all of these are criticisms of the Patriot Act in 2001. And we, we just did it anyway. And so I, I, I'm curious for the feedback from the, the audience, like, what do you think shifted that made a bunch of stuff that we were happy to do in the past feel like one of the more potent political issues of our time?

• 19:35Speaker 04

  I tie this to like the Meta glasses right now with the, the way those cameras are being received, like, compare that to like how Google Glass rolled out and the, and if you talk back to like the Patriot Act days and your formative years of like tech is like, that's back when like cellphone cameras were kind of seen as a joke. It was like, ah, what, I'm gonna take a photo on my phone? Yeah, right. Now it's like, the only thing I, I think I would take a photo on is my phone because it's the best camera I will ever have with me. And I find that to be a really interesting evolution, especially tied to the AI of it all, when it's like, no, no, these cameras now can connect to this network and have all this extra information. It's not just some file living on your thing that you can put somewhere with your discretion. It's like, no, no, it's out of your hands now.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  And I, I wonder if, you know, part of that's the, the anxiety around things like the cameras, uh, the flock cameras and, and the glasses cameras and all that.

• 20:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I definitely think there's some amount of anxiety of I'm being recorded without my consent. I think there's a lot of anxiety around the intent of the people, particularly wearing Meta glasses. There's a reason they're called perfect glasses. And some of the biggest influencers in the world have posted videos complaining that they get stalked at the airport and people wearing Meta glasses film them coming off of planes. This is very bad. It was Olivia Dunn, I think, who posted a video like that. And she specifically called out Meta glasses, which is not a great rep for those products to have, right? And there's something about that. There's something about how intrusive the phones are and the cameras are and the idea that everything is recorded and meant to be shared. But we've been living in that for a long time. I'm just saying there's something that happened now, recently, where the very notion of

• 21:10Speaker 05

  the police having a network of cameras that are all connected to each other and they can do an AI-powered search has just flipped over. And we're gonna go and, and cover them up with spray foam. Or we're gonna tear them down. Or we're, you know, 404 Media, which is excellent, has done so many videos finding clips of people at town hall meetings yelling about Flock cameras and being shouted down by their own elected officials. There's something there that's new. We're obviously gonna cover it. I'm, I'm not saying it's so surprising we can't engage it. I'm saying from my worldview, like what, the dirt that I was raised in, it's just more, it, the thing is the same as it ever was. And that's why it was surprising to me. The, we, we could have had this conversation about the Patriot Act.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  We could have had this conversation about the existence of the TSA. Any number of things. And we did. We could have had this conversation about the Snowden revelations. Something flipped and it, to me, it's just, it's cause for investigation and also reflection.

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• 24:58Speaker 03

  I think that's a good time to switch gears to talk about our most popular episode of the year. That was, of course, our sit-down with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. This is our fifth year in a row talking to Sundar at Google I/O, and it always generates a lot of feedback. This year, we had commenters write in to say, "There seems to be an underlying answer of, well, we have to do all of this even if it's bad or irresponsible." And that person also said, "It's a bit odd talking to him without getting some stronger concessions from Sundar." Another said, "This interview is great, but I think Sundar got away with not having to answer the root issue of Google Zero," which is, in this example, how Conde Nast are seeing a reduced click-through rate because of AI summaries.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  So I guess the question here for you, Neelai, is, do you feel like Google is kind of getting away with not being held responsible for what it's doing to the web with AI? And do you think Sundar has a sense of Google's culpability for the swath of destruction that's being left in the AI era, in the wake of the AI era? And do you think he's ever going to address or acknowledge this? Or is he still going to disagree with the premise five years from now?

• 26:05Speaker 05

  That's a lot of questions. I'm going to just issue the caveat, I think that comes up in every single Mailbag episode. Sometimes it feels to me like the audience is mad that I don't arrest the CEOs on Decoder.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  I said, "Arrest over riverside." Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 05

  Maybe one day. Well, I was in person with Sundar. We could have cuffed him.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  That's true. That's right.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  Maybe one day I'll be granted this power. I'll be deputized by the internet police to arrest the CEOs. All I can do is ask the questions. And, you know, it has been five years of talking to Sundar. I hope he comes back next year. You know, I think it's remarkable that he's the one who comes and takes the heat. And we, you know, we ask them all, and I can't make them show up. They have to decide to want to do it, and he decides he wants to do it. So I appreciate that he shows up and takes the heat, and that he's willing to do it. The thing that I get, let's use the Conde Nast example. I asked that question before a bunch of publishers started saying to other media outlets that they were going to stop letting Google index their sites. Right?

• 27:12Speaker 05

  That's the last turn, when they are so clear that it's not worth it for their content to be stolen by AI because they're getting no search traffic, that they just turn off the Google indexer, the Google crawler entirely. And I think that conversation would have been different if I had had that in my back pocket. Right? I'm looking at these reports from various big publishers like USA Today and People Inc., and they're all the way at, "We're going to stop letting you index our sites because the traffic isn't coming." I don't know what he would have said. I just think that answer might have been different, or that the tenor of that moment might have been different. What I have been taking from Sundar these past five years, and which I agree with, is

• 27:56Speaker 05

  the sense that these publishers got addicted to Google and they didn't do anything about it. Right? He, his, the shape of that conversation, or his frustration, if you ever sense the flash of frustration that I sometimes sense, is, well, the web is really big. I can measure the, Google can measure the web, right? They have Chrome, they have all this data about the web. And the web is getting bigger, and some parts of the web are really, really vibrant. And if you listen to, I don't know, Amy Lanzi, the CEO of DigiHust when she was on Decoder, she's like, "We're getting more calls from our clients, more requests to make web pages and landing pages than ever before." So some part of the web is growing, and Google has that data. And I think Sundar is like, "And these publishers are constantly complaining that I'm taking

• 28:40Speaker 05

  their business away, and they had, they did nothing else about it." Which, if you, you know, there's, every time I talk to a publisher, I ask them, "Why didn't you do anything about it?" I agree with that. And I think there's some sense that Google bears the responsibility for making the people who built a business on their platforms successful. I think every platform eventually kills every business that's built on it. I think YouTube will eventually kill YouTubers. I think Instagram will eventually kill Instagram. Like, if you're a Decoder listener, you know I think this. I'm always asking creators what they're going to do about platforms, and platforms, when they're going to kill creators. And the web is just a platform for Google. So do I think that Google's getting away with not being held accountable? Sure, a little bit. But the mechanism of accountability is not letting Google index your site.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  And I'm very curious to see if these handful of publishers, who have started making noise that they're going to de-index their sites, actually go through with it and actually impose the leverage on Google, that I feel like the company has kind of been daring them to impose. Again, I don't want to preview the CloudFlare conversation too much. There are other mechanisms, and there's other ways of doing it. And that was part of that conversation as well. But there's something here where just the straightforward, "You were sending us traffic for free, and we were giving you content for free." That exchange is gone. And I don't know that you can provide accountability such that Google doesn't just have to still compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. Like, they have to.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Hey, speaking of publishers and web traffic and all that, do you need to drop in a very nice little disclaimer about our new company, the PMX/PMC situation?

• 30:20Speaker 05

  Oh, this is so complicated. So through a series of what only can be described as divorces and remarriages, our Vox Media has split itself in two, and The Verge is now part of something called PMX Global, which is a subsidiary of PMC, which is the Penske Media Corporation. PMC is suing Google, I believe, over AI overviews and traffic. PMX and the thing formerly known as Vox Media are all in ad tech antitrust cases against Google. I'm telling you this because it is a disclosure we should make. You can tell how much I know about them. They are happening very far away from this newsroom, but it is true that our companies are involved in active litigation with Google about all this stuff.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  Pivoting to something different, we had a listener talk about how our AI skepticism, or broadly on Decoder, is Western-centric, and it's pointing out how a lot of AI adoption in China is actually different and faster and more welcomed in other ways. This is from Alex Wong. "Have you considered Asia, and more specifically China, whereby outward appearances, AI rollout, adoption, and image seem to be faster, deeper, broader, and more well-received than in the West? Do you find this to be true? If so, what is the difference? And if so, why the difference? And if not, what are we not seeing? What are your Asian sources seeing and saying? Should you have more Asian sources? Is it time for Decoder and The Verge to expand beyond Silicon Valley?"

• 31:49Speaker 04

  This is a US-based show. Neelai is based out of New York. The production team is scattered, but we have New York offices where people come and shoot stuff. Do you think there's room for more non-Western perspectives? Can you speak about, like, the differences that, you know, are evident between, like, the way China is kind of approaching AI development versus, like, in the United States? And is Can we really, can we really cover such a massive transcontinental gap like that? Like, that's a, it's a lot.

• 32:19Speaker 05

  Uh, well, first, I, I do want to point out, as you said, we're in New York. I actually think we need more Silicon Valley perspectives. I think we, we can be myopic. New York is all about money. You know, to be successful in here, you gotta like, where's the, literally the money? In San Francisco, less so about the money, more about the, the big ideas. And notably, the AI companies are not making money and running into some harsh realities here in New York from time to time. Um, so there's that. I'm not going to speculate too much on my understanding of, of Chinese culture. I will just offer two guesses and they are just pure guesses. One, uh, we can only know what the Chinese state media wants us to know, right? There, there are speech controls in that country.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  And so whether or not there's massive discontent is not something that would ever come to me. And so that, that's just a gap and I'm just cognizant of that gap. I agree that what we're seeing there is a bit more excitement. We're seeing a bit more investment and I would connect that to, and this is my second guess, is there is a literally a much stronger social safety net in China. And so the idea that this will be a threat, like an existential threat to your job or your career or your livelihood or your health insurance, or whatever it is, is maybe ameliorated by that stronger social cohesion. That is a guess. I, I really hesitate to like overthink that. I would love to hear from people with closer perspectives to that, but those are the things that I'm always thinking about.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  And I have said to leaders of big AI labs in this country, I think people would like you more if you would just pay for health insurance. If you could just find a way to support Medicare for all with your excess profits and your trillion dollar TAMS, like maybe people would shut up and they've all been like, interesting. And I, I, I would just offer that connection because maybe the best thing AI could do for everyone is make it easier to go start a business, right? To make it easier to have agency over your own life. And the number one reason my friends with children don't start businesses is because they need health insurance. And so I, that's the connection I would drive. Again, that's a very Western perspective, a very US centric perspective specifically. But that's the, that's why I went directly to social safety net, right?

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Maybe you're more excited about this thing that lets you do more things because the risk is limited in some other ways by the very nature of the country you live in. I'm open to feedback on that. That is, I'm, I'm, I'm responding to the question with my series of guesses and assumptions. I agree. We do now work for a much bigger company and hopefully that means I can put some reporters in China or in the region and we can get some firsthand reporting. But I'm curious for feedback from the audience because that, those two things, one, it's hard to, it's hard to tell how people actually feel, given the speech controls that exist in that country. And two, is it just a different sense of possibility because the risks of existing are different?

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Do you think Sam Altman, uh, actually supports universal basic income? Is OpenAI gonna fund UBI?

• 35:16Speaker 05

  I don't know the answer to that question anymore. Um, I think they've all learned to stop issuing pronouncements about the future of society as loudly as they had been and spend way more time focused on enterprise adoption and software engineering and like agentic marketing solutions and potentially like, here's how everyone will become rich, not here's how everyone will lose their job. And so I, I don't know the answer to that, but you know, UBI is one of those things that it, it's an idea you have because you think no one will have a job. And I think they've all needed to stop talking about that.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that actually ties very neatly into, uh, something we wanted to end on this particular segment on, which is a pretty prescient email from a reader, um, Tom's Bernard's Callahan, specifically around tech backlash. Um, so he wrote in, "The algorithmic fragmentation of content consumption disrupts any organic large-scale organization. Yes, there are rallies, but no pointed policy pushes feeds are purposely placing users into niche consumer groups and the news is a hard time permeating across these groups." He says, "He thinks the irony here is that algorithmic fragmentation will make the backlash worse because when the dam breaks, the masses will be quite angry and it'll be a large cohort of people."

• 36:35Speaker 03

  So he wrote us that email in April and I, I do want to say it feels like something has definitely happened. It feels like something definitely broke over the last three to four months, um, since we got that email from him. It feels like there is a large bipartisan cohort of angry people. Um, and we see this, of course, like Florida and Texas banning flock cameras, the upcoming Florida governor's race being about data centers. What do you make of this, Neelai? And specifically kind of this moment of tech backlash that we're experiencing and how The Verge might cover this from the perspective of algorithmic fragmentation or the perspective of, you know, this creating a bipartisan coalition that could kind of permeate through your filter bubble or the, you know, the feeds that your algorithmic feeds?

• 37:18Speaker 05

  The thing that really strikes me about the backlash right now is it's a backlash to imposition. And I, not to speak for all Americans, I, I, Americans don't like being told what to do. And you have to accept these data centers, even though you're telling your local governments you don't want them, is an imposition that is just easy to be opposed to, regardless of your political alignment. These cameras are gonna watch everybody all the time and we have records that cops are watching kids in gymnastics centers is the most incredible imposition of all time. Like, the nation was founded to rebel against this kind of imposition. It's, it's in the Bill of Rights. Of course, that's gonna overcome algorithmic feeds.

• 38:02Speaker 05

  You can't, you can't turn the knobs on TikTok enough to overcome that, right? Like, no one can hear a fake AI influencer talking about how much they love flock cameras and believe it's true. Like, it's just not in our national character in a very specific way. So that, that's that is like you telling everybody what's gonna happen to them and it's power being imposed on them or in the case of data centers being made more expensive for them. It, it's like natural that that would overcome some algorithmic fragmentation. The other issue is, I don't know, right? I, it's an election year. I think we see politicians scrambling to still play culture war games. I'll call it Ben Jordan, uh, who's a musician and a researcher who's done really incredible work on flock cameras. We've interviewed him in The Verge before.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  He was just on the Tucker Carlson show. Their views do not align. I, I think Ben even his was like, why, I can't believe I'm here. And they were there to talk about flock cameras and surveillance. That's bananas, like just purely bananas. And there's something about that that I would just connect to. At least with other big tech impositions, it felt like market driven in some way. Like, Facebook is gonna be big and you're gonna be mad that Mark Zuckerberg is listening to you, but you have a desire to use Instagram. And boy, does it turn out that people's revealed preferences are for Instagram to keep happening, regardless of whether or not you think the ads are listening to you, right? And there's no market preference that's gonna take away that away from you or there's

• 39:30Speaker 05

  a network effect so strong that something else will happen and then we'll try to regulate it. The market is still gonna speak. Like, people are still gonna want to use this thing. That's not true, flock. There's no consumer use for flock. It's diffuse. It's, you have to prove the crime went down somewhere else later, but you can see it right now. It's watching you right now and the cost is available. AI has mostly been imposed on consumers. Every time I open Google Meet, it insistently tells me Gemini is here now. And I'm like, I don't need this to be here in any way, shape or form. And so that imposition where we're claiming all the usage status is so high, when in many cases it has just been put in front of us, there's something about that that feels like it can transcend the algorithm.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's something to what you were saying a few minutes ago about the Patriot Act of it all of, there's such a lack of legislation on a lot of these important things that people feel like they've had no input on. And so because they're just rolled out and it's like, well, take it. I, I feel like that, to your point of like, these, these people who you wouldn't expect to go be a guest on the Tucker Carlson program are, it is this scrambling of a, of an alignment because people don't feel that agency that they can't really, nobody's representing them on their behalf in a lot of ways.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  I mean, like what, it's an election year. What are you gonna do with the fact that Donald Trump is running around saying that data centers are money printing factories and you're stupid for opposing them? Like, that is just as...

• 40:55Speaker 04

  He called the golden goose. You, that's the golden goose. You, does everybody want to be poor? That's what, that's what he said the other day.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I certainly cannot predict elections and how they'll go, but that just seems totally out of step with everybody. And there's something about that that I find utterly fascinating and it, to me, it just comes back to Americans don't like being told what to do. And if you put yourself in that position, boy, boy, do a lot of things sort of like fall into place.

• 41:26Speaker 01

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• 44:59Speaker 04

  Well, keeping that Gadsden flag in the air, I've got a transition here to your, your interview with Kathy Hochul, who was on the show last week as of recording time. One listener wrote, "Great interview job, very pointed questions. Little surprised that she didn't seem to have thought through the ID verification implications these social media laws will lead to." Some other Hochul feedback was pretty negative, predictably. Every single answer she gave could be summarized with, "It's a campaign year. This interview was unbearable. Politicians don't give answers to questions. They just give self-aggrandizing stump speeches." You said that you are honing your politician interviewing skills. What was your takeaway from this whole experience with her? And how do you think you should inform How Decoder interviews politicians?

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Do you think we should have more of them coming into the midterms and the 2028 election? How do you see this whole politics of it all?

• 45:48Speaker 05

  We definitely need to have more politicians on this year. I'm very sorry. But as we have been discussing, the tech policy issues in this election cycle are almost overwhelming. There might not be other issues. There's the war in Iran, there's data centers, and there's surveillance. Somewhere in there is healthcare.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Those are the ones, at least in my opinion. And as we talked about with Governor Hochul, a lot of them are connected. Surveillance and AI are deeply, deeply connected. Age verification and surveillance are deeply, deeply connected. It's funny, some of the feedback we got on this episode was, "Facebook knows so much about you, why can't it just tell you your age?" Surveillance, it's AI, it's age verification. It's all just a remix of the same ideas. Like, how much of your computer should someone be monitoring to allow you to do some things? That's the 3D printer debate in that conversation. So I suspect we will end up talking to more politicians because the opportunity for realignment is so high. And I honestly hope we get some conservative politicians

• 46:52Speaker 05

  to talk about data centers and surveillance because I would like to understand the realignment from that perspective. That said, I don't think I'm great at interviewing politicians. I think I'm good at interviewing founders. I'm good at interviewing product CEOs. I'm bad at interviewing McKinsey CEOs. I'm getting better. And I'm worse at interviewing politicians. And you can just, the amount of media training, just, it rises, right? Like, that's, that's the thing that I'm describing here. We've always described the show as Neil I versus media training, and I'm always trying to fight to a draw. I think I got to a draw with Governor Hochul. I think we, we got her to concede that she was out of her depth on some of these issues, particularly around age verification. And I thought the moment where she said,

• 47:33Speaker 05

  "Tell Cody we're going to get ahead of him next on 3D guns," was very revealing. Because I don't, one, it's a great spiky cowboy thing to say. It's the quote you want from an interview with a politician. But two, and this is the feedback in the comments on the transcript of that, that's not even like the right shape of an answer, right? It's, most people can't actually print a 3D gun part that will withstand firing a bullet. Like, you don't need to do this, right? And so I thought that interview went well from my perspective because it just demonstrated, it's easy to talk about what tech policy should be,

• 48:14Speaker 05

  and it's very hard to talk about how you would actually implement the details of that policy. And I think we did a good job there of even illustrating for the governor where the gaps were because she conceded it several times. I understand it's frustrating to listen to, and maybe one day I'll just be full cable news anchor and just repeat the same question 10 times in a row. But I don't think anybody wants me, like, cable news anchors exist and they do a good job of that thing. I'm trying to do something else here.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  On the topic of interviewing styles and techniques, Neel I, we, we had an interesting interview last month with Blue Sky CEO Tony Schneider. One aspect of that interview that really touched a nerve is when you asked him what he thought about Blue Sky's reputation as a liberal bubble. This is what he had to say.

• 48:58Speaker 10

  Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. I mean, there is, it certainly wasn't designed to attract, you know, one specific group of people. It works for anyone. We're an open network for anyone. And we don't, we don't want to serve just one, one type of user base. I've seen it already in the last few months, really, trend in the right direction where we just have more and more people show up and build their own corners of the network. And it sort of balances out over time.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  One listener email, they wrote in to say, "The idea that this one specific, very active group of people is an imbalance to be straightened out rather than the very reason the platform is what it is, is the mistake that Blue Sky will come to regret. What a shame." Some of the feedback on Blue Sky itself was predictably harsher. Somebody said, "Go ahead and attract other people, but the second we start seeing fascist stuff in our feeds that we haven't subscribed to, you're going to lose your base." Somebody says, "Tony doesn't even understand Blue Sky's own user base." Another person says, "Cool, I'll just delete my Blue Sky like I deleted my Twitter." Looking back at this exchange, it does kind of feel like he artfully dodged it. It's kind of hard to tell what he really thinks about Blue Sky's reputation and the liberal politics of it all.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  In moments like that, Neel I, like, do you think it's better to push people to be, for a follow-up, to be clearer on what they think? Or is that a case where like the backlash became evident after the fact? And it was better that you just kind of let him say his piece? And you weren't really, you know, trying to get, you weren't really trying to bait him into any one direction?

• 50:38Speaker 05

  I wasn't trying to bait him into any one direction. And I understand the backlash from the Blue Sky user base. I think maybe I also understand what every social product CEO is struggling with, which is that you have to grow. And you can run out of people. Like, you can run out of people who want to be in that bubble. You can run out of people who only want to talk about one sports team. You can run out of people who want to be in whatever bubble X has become. We actually are seeing X run out of people who want to be in that bubble. The platform is shrinking. And so if you want to grow, and you can... You can describe that as like the capitalistic urge to grow, but I think the platform CEOs also just understand that to remain vibrant, they have to constantly be attracting new people.

• 51:22Speaker 05

  Then you almost have to issue an answer like this, which is we're a platform for everyone. And then I think Tony's riff on it was like, and we'll give you the moderation controls to craft the experience you want to make the big platform feel small. I don't know if they're successful in communicating that to people. I think that the big disconnect with Blue Sky, in my opinion, this whole time is that it was started by a bunch of ideological, technical people who wanted to build a standard called app protocol to enable interoperable social networking. And because of X, they accidentally got, they accidentally got a user base. And they've been in conflict with that user base ever since, um, which is fine. And I, it's obviously reflected in, in these comments. But I think Tony's job is to make the thing a product.

• 52:07Speaker 05

  Like, I think that's why he's the CEO. And I think these answers, they just track every other social product answer we've ever gotten. And I, I don't know if he's okay with like the bubble he has drifting away. I know that we can see in the stats that it's getting smaller. I'm sure there's going to be some revolt when they monetize it in ways that he's described monetizing it. Um, but if you, if you're a social product and you aren't growing or trending towards growth, then in fact you are dying. Like there, there's something about that that will not allow you to persist. And we, we, that is a pattern that's pretty repeatable and pretty understandable. Maybe because we've spent so much time talking to social platform CEOs, I knew what he was

• 52:50Speaker 05

  getting at, like I, I, I've internalized that answer in many different ways. I probably should have made him say it out loud. Right? And that, that's like a good note for me, but that's what I was hearing in that moment is like, you have to grow and that means you have to appeal to many more people.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  Well, speaking of appealing to people, we want to appeal to our audience. And so they have some more thoughts on the show Decoder in and of itself, not just wanting more rants from you. We've got feedback from listeners who want to know about the kinds of relationships that you and we have with the companies that are covered on the show. This is from Len Art, who emailed to say, is there a possibility for you to make an episode about different ways that companies try to pressure The Verge into editorial changes? I don't mean you to out all the company names or people making the requests, but just hearing concrete examples of how the requests come in and how they're being dealt with could be a very compelling episode. I think that's what Len thinks. What do you, what do you make of that? And then do you worry, um, there's such a thing as too much transparency as, as we

• 53:49Speaker 04

  make a thing like this with?

• 53:51Speaker 05

  How do I put this? We are old enough and famously spiky enough that this stuff doesn't happen very often. And so you, yes, there's the idea of too much transparency. My worry about too much transparency is it would just be boring. Like we would be like Nick and Kate spend hours scheduling. Cause that's actually the hardest part of making the show for us at this point is it's CEOs, it's their comms people, it's whatever news cycle they want to be on. It's my schedule, which is bananas. Like that honestly, I'm, I'm telling you, and you can believe it or not, like that might be the most complicated thing that we're doing. Like we only make so many episodes of this thing a year and a lot of people want to be on the show. So we're lucky. I think that's very lucky.

• 54:36Speaker 05

  There is pressure, you know, uh, yeah, big tech CEOs want to be on the show. We, it's not that we don't ask them. They just are pretty honest sometimes that they think it would be too hostile of an environment. They want to be more in control of that message and can see where they go instead. Do I want to play that game? I don't. And you can see that we just haven't. So we're, we're pretty direct, but I think if you listen to the conversations we have, the CEOs come on because they're all competitive, they're all type A, and they like being challenged. They, they come here for a reason. We get, I think, almost more inbound requests to be on the show than we go out and ask. And like meaningful, not just like random cold PR pitches, but like stuff we take, like pitches we accept.

• 55:20Speaker 05

  Um, and it is because all of those folks, they hear the show, they hear their, their peers on the show and they, they want to beat them. And I've asked about this a lot because in the early days, like, why does anyone come on the show? I should understand it so that we can, you know, craft better and more compelling pitches for all the people we want to, uh, come talk to us. And a lot of the answers I get were because it is journalistically independent, the conflict is real. And that means not only does the audience listen to it, but our own staff will listen to it. So if you, if there's some message that some CEO wants to get out, it is more likely that the staff will listen to it, their employees will listen to it on Decoder than in an all hands meeting. And I think that is just like the funniest thing in the entire world, but it, I think it's also true.

• 56:04Speaker 05

  Uh, and I've heard, I've heard a version of that many, many times. So yeah, I mean, there's pressure on the verge, but we're just old enough and we are famously spiky about things like being on background and off the record enough that sometimes it comes to our younger reporters because they are testing to see if the younger reporters know. And then they, the younger reporter is like, I'll call in the line. It goes away. Which is fine. That's, that's my job in this newsroom. And then I think a lot of that has been offloaded on the creator economy. So it is not easy to pressure us, but it's easy to go to some young creator who doesn't even know that they shouldn't be pressured or is excited about accepting conditions on access.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  And I, I see that left and right, all over the place. And I, you know, I don't mean to call out anyone specific. I just think it is, we play a role in the ecosystem where we are known for not doing that. And I hope, you know, and I talked to young creators who are on the come up. We just, Ben Smith was just on the show and he was noting that they're all getting better at making journalism because the conflict is interesting. And I, I see that ecosystem developing in parallel, but that's where the pressure has really gone. It has not come to us very directly, or it has stopped as we've gotten much older.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Thank you, Neelai, for being a guest here on Decoder and thank you all for listening. More importantly, thank you for sending us your feedback. We'll have another mailbag episode for you very soon. And as we said at the top, we really do read every email, so please keep sending us those at [email protected]. And also please keep commenting on YouTube, on Spotify, on The Verge comment section, threads, Blue Sky, all of it. We really do appreciate it and it helps us make the show better so we can keep covering the stories, the people and the companies you really care about. Reminder, you can watch full episodes of Decoder on YouTube at at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram, they're at DecoderPod2 and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  The show is produced by Kate Cox, myself, Nick Statt and our new supervising producer, Greg Ott. It's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.

• 58:16Speaker 11

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  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only at homedepot.com.

• 59:17Speaker 13

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.