"All chaos and panic": Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions

Hey everyone! Decoder senior producers Kate Cox and Nick Statt here. We’ve had a big year, including nearly 100 episodes, a new YouTube channel, an ad-free podcast feed, and a slate of great guest hosts while Nilay was on parental leave. It’s been a lot! We’ve also had a lot of great questions and comments this year from you, our audience. So we pulled together all the feedback we’ve received on topics like CarPlay, Monday episode guest suggestions, and — of course — AI. And then we turned the tables on Nilay to ask him his thoughts on the past 12 months: What we liked, what we want to improve, and how he’s making decisions for Decoder in the new year. Links: Answering your biggest Decoder questions, 2024 edition | Decoder The DoorDash Problem | Decoder How decision making changes when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy | Decoder Why GM will give you Gemini — but not CarPlay | Decoder Rivian CEO: ‘We’re really convicted’ about skipping CarPlay | Decoder How SharkNinja took over the home, with CEO Mark Barrocas | Decoder Why Tubi CEO Anjali Sud thinks free TV can win again | Decoder Disney accuses Google of copyright infringement following OpenAI deal | The Verge 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 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

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• 1:34Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. No, I'm Kate Cox, senior producer at The Verge. And Decoder is Neelai's show about big ideas and other problems. That's why it has his face and voice all over it. My co-producer, Nick Statt, and I run this show, and it is fun for us every year to bring in Neelai to answer your audience questions. Neelai, welcome to Decoder.

• 1:56Speaker 05

  I really do not like being the guest. It's my dream to be the guest. I think being a guest is easier in some way, but I don't like it. I'm just saying, it's just like, if you, if you sense the abject terror, here it is. Let's go.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  The Decoder team has had quite a year. Among us personally, we've had births, deaths, marriages, and house purchases. We've been very busy. We've also been very busy making you lots of Decoder that you, the audience, have had lots of opinions about, and you have written to us, and we love getting those emails.

• 2:29Speaker 06

  We got a lot of incredibly positive feedback over the summer when Neelai was out for parental leave, so thank you for that. It was really awesome to see some other people in the Decoder chair and to see everybody have a lot of big thoughts on what those guest hosts brought to the show, what we should do differently, how we might improve. So, thank you for those.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  With that said, we're going to jump right in with some listener questions.

• 2:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, the first question we have is from listener Joe Rodericks. It's actually a two-part question, Neelai. It's, the first part is, "Do you really read all the emails? And that must be exhausting." His second question is, he gets a ton of value from the Decoder questions, which he's actually started asking candidates in job interviews, particularly how they make decisions. So he says, "I can't believe I'm going to suggest this, but I'd love it if there were more in-the-weeds Decoder-type questions about business decision-making." So his question is, "Neelai, what questions do you want to add to the Decoder question list?"

• 3:24Speaker 05

  Well, first, I will say, we do read all the emails, and I think we really enjoy reading them. The promise is that we read them all, not that we reply to them. That's where the work escalates to be too hard very quickly. But we love reading them, keep sending them. They're very useful. They shape a lot of the questions I ask in the episodes afterwards, so just keep sending them. We love them. We talk about them a lot. The Decoder questions are really interesting. So, you know, we started the show, I think we're five years into the show now, and podcasts are a forever project, especially interview podcasts. You have to, Kate and Nick spend a lot of time trying to get guests to show up. Like literally just show up on time and make our headphones work. Like, that's a lot to do every week unless you have some goals. And so one of my goals at the very beginning was to impose some structure on the show to

• 4:09Speaker 05

  try to learn something over time, to make the show, like, make a promise to you, the listeners, and deliver on that promise every week. So it's not just a forever project, what's covering the news. And so that's where they came from. Because I figured I could ask every CEO how their company was structured and how they make decisions, and they would have to answer. Like, it's not a gotcha question. The fascinating thing is it turns out to be a gotcha question. And I think Kate and Nick, we all have this experience. Every now and again, someone is just not prepared for the decoder questions. They cannot tell us how they make decisions. Or, most interestingly of all, they avoid telling us how their company is structured. Because it turns out that's a very political answer. So, I, we could add more to it.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  I think there's a lot to get from the decoder questions. There's a decoder book that's gonna come out, that deal is signed. I'm not gonna reveal too much about it, but it's based on those questions. And then the number one thing I would say is, it might be interesting for you, as the person who's hiring, or the boss, to ask the people who work for you, or might want to work for you, the decoder questions, how they make decisions. It is vastly more revealing to go ask your boss. And if your boss can't answer how they make decisions, you should run. You should start applying for a new job. That might be the biggest takeaway from doing this show is, boy, when somebody can't answer their questions, all three of us are like, oh, this episode is gonna go totally sideways. I know there's deeper in the weeds decision-making questions we could ask.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  I thought John Fort, when he interviewed Google's former chief decision scientist as a guest episode, super fascinating episode. And I thought a lot about, should I incorporate more of these kinds of questions? But to me, that getting the framework of decisions and then putting the framework into practice with what's actually happening in the company is so revealing. I don't want to get away from it. So I could definitely think of more. I'm eager for your contributions, or your thoughts. But actually, my suggestion is, go ask your boss how they make decisions and let me know how the answers go. Because I think that would be fundamentally interesting decoder episode all on its own.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  So should Nick and I be asking you how you make decisions?

• 6:12Speaker 05

  I have no framework for making decisions. It's all chaos and panic every single day. Sorry, Kate.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  That's not, not true.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  So one of the, I get asked this question a lot. I do think about how I make decisions. Fundamentally, my goal is to be predictable. Like, we run a newsroom. Newsrooms have to run really fast. If I am not predictable, then all the people who work in the newsroom are always like destabilized. All of us have worked in newsrooms before. We've worked in unstable newsrooms before. And like, that is just one of those things about working, like, The Verge Newsroom operates in basically 20-minute increments. Like, news happens, and then something has to happen on our site within 20 minutes for us to be on time. That means I have to be really predictable. So, I, you know, we are always joking that anybody who's been within 1,000 miles of Amazon headquarters

• 7:02Speaker 05

  gets like, infected like Pluribus. You know, like, they all just come out of it saying the hive mind thing about type 1 and type 2 decisions, and the decisions you can make quickly because you can reverse them, and the decisions you can't reverse, you have to go slow. The Verge Newsroom is almost entirely like a type 1 decisions newsroom. The, because we just go, have to go fast. Like, there will be another story tomorrow, we can try again. Type 2 decisions for us are like, what should the product look like? You know, like, how should we think about expanding to YouTube? And we did take a lot of time to make sure we got that stuff right.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Speaking of predictable, CarPlay. Eli, you talk about CarPlay a lot. Every time we have a car CEO, you ask them about CarPlay. We had Joanna Stern guest hosting for you this summer. She asked all our car CEOs about CarPlay. Also, you personally like cars, so we have car CEOs on kind of a lot. Listeners have a lot of thought about this. So, for example, listener Matt McCurdy agrees with you, and he said he finds it infuriating, that's a quote, "when CEOs don't seem to get why people want CarPlay." This is a very popular sentiment in our comments and our inboxes. In my house, my husband is buying a new car literally tomorrow. CarPlay was one of his top features that he had to have. But we also got an email from listener Joseph Quinn, who wrote to make the case for CarPlay not being good.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  And he wrote, CarPlay is a Band-Aid solution to make the best of a bad situation in the majority of cars, and there exists a lot of legacy entrenchment in that convenience. So they're both kind of right, but the overall question from the inbox is, Neelai, why do you care so much about CarPlay?

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Well, first, I need to know what kind of car are you buying?

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Hyundai Elantra Hybrid.

• 8:37Speaker 05

  Oh, sure. We should just do an entire episode about hybrids.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's replacing a 2011 Civic, so you know.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Very good. No CarPlay in the Civic. Okay, why do I care about CarPlay? I actually don't like CarPlay. I have it in one car. We don't have it. We had Mary Barra on from GM. I have a Cadillac, it doesn't have CarPlay, no one misses it, it's fine. I mounted a phone at the end. It solved its problems. Why do we talk about it so much? Why do we pay so much attention to it? One, the audience loves it, so that is easy. The numbers on CarPlay episodes are so high, it's remarkable to us even. Two, I like a fight, and CarPlay is just a huge fight, and you can see the contours of the fight if you've paid attention to computers at all over the past 20 years.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Who gets to own the interface? Who gets to own the apps? Who gets to take 30% out of every single thing you buy on this interface? And historically, the answer has been Apple. I think Apple wants to keep winning that fight. The carmakers all know that they should not give up control of things like maps to Apple and Google. They all know that they're bad at it and they're losing ground to companies like Tesla who are good at it. Upstarts like Rivian think they will be good at it, and then they are also making deals with Google to provide maps because they're not going to be good at making maps. And so you just get 500 different competing interests all in a screen, in an interface people can see and understand and have feelings about.

• 10:10Speaker 05

  And that's very unusual in tech. Like, I would love to do 50 episodes on the Fediverse, but I can't make you care about the Fediverse. Like, there has to be a thing that you care about, and people are very passionate about cars, and they're very passionate about CarPlay, oddly. Again, they're not passionate about Android Auto, they're passionate about CarPlay. And so you just see, here's this fight, this clash of titans, and in the center of it is something consumers care about a lot. So I personally agree with Joseph Quinn here, who says CarPlay is a crutch. It is a crutch. And it's a crutch because the carmakers are lazy, and they allowed Apple this big inroad into their product. And Apple's not giving up, and the consumers aren't giving up, and they've got to make something that's good enough for you to not want that. Can they do that? I do not know the answer to that

• 10:55Speaker 05

  question. I think a lot of you think you know the answer to that question, and the answer is obviously no. But there are improvements, there is a lot of incentive to figure it out, and that's why we keep talking about it, because honestly, getting a CEO on the show and saying, "Have you looked at your own product? It's not good," is like the prototype of a great episode of Decoder. This is why I keep wanting enterprise software CEOs on the show, and why they don't come. But carmakers love talking about their cars, they love talking to me for some reason, and saying, "Is your software good? Really?" Is like, that's it. I can do that for an hour every week for the rest of my life.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  So, we've gotten a bunch of good topic suggestions from listeners. One of them, Laura Cracknell, is a librarian in the UK. She says she would love for Decoder to talk to some information professionals about what it's like in the current moment. She says libraries are where lots of normal people end up for tech support in computing, they're a vital lifeline for people who might not have digital access, they're also at the frontline of the free speech war. She's also writing that in particular, in the US right now, public libraries are under siege, and they're a canary in the coalmine for the health of democracy. So, Neelai, are you interested in doing any episodes on libraries or free access to information?

• 12:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think we should definitely do an episode on libraries. I think that fascinating dynamic of Silicon Valley continuing to invent public goods and accidentally inventing libraries over and over again is at the heart of all that. Like, what does it mean to have like, the internet and access to information as a public good in the commons, supported by the state? Like...

• 12:28Speaker 05

  Boy, there's a lot of decoder themes in there, and it is under a lot of pressure. I think that the framing question I would ask, and I welcome the help on this, is how do you make the importance of a library in a community legible to people who might not be going, right? Because it's important whether or not you're going. It's important that there's a place for people to gather. It's important that communities just express that they care about knowledge in that specific way. But a lot of people aren't going, right? And so finding a way to make that turn seems really important to me. I'm interested for the feedback because I could use the help.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  I have a friend in Los Angeles whose job that is, and I think she's about to get goint into helping me with my job.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Stephen Ebsuri, who's a frequent correspondent, writes that he would love to see us do something on the ever-increasing issue of digital identity online, age verification, privacy with adult sites and social media. Ben Cooper suggested we should have folks on to talk about the tech scene in India and ask if maybe the next Xiaomi or Baidu might be coming out of India, which is interesting. David Jarman actually just sent us a link about the world's oldest known org chart from 1855, which was just very cool. All of these, Neelai, so when it comes to explainer topics, not guests, we'll come back to that, I promise, what would you like us to cover in 2026?

• 13:45Speaker 05

  I got to see this org chart. Also, I have to believe there are org charts older than 1855.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  I don't know. They claim it's the world's oldest org chart, but maybe it's just Britain's oldest org chart because it was a British museum.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, you don't think some like Roman emperor had like an org chart written down? And like Claudius is cool. It's, I know, I know that there's an older one than that. We should do that video. That'd be fun. So we should just do that one. And like, what is an org chart? Where they come from? I think that's fascinating. The other two are, we're going to do a lot of digital identity on the verge this year, and I think that will turn into decoder episodes over and over again. Tim Cook is in DC this week, and the week before lobbying against app stores having to do age verification. He does not want that to be his responsibility. That runs right into, do these platforms writers know who you are, which runs right into identity. At the same time, Tim Cook is like, put your driver's license into my phone.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  Put your passport into the phone. Like, I want to get rid of your wallet, but I don't want to know who you are is a very weird product stance to have, and that's Apple's product stance right now. So I think we're going to do a lot here. You can see country by country, state by state, there are so many laws that depend on knowing how old you are and what content you should access. Australia just banned everybody under the age of 16 from having social media. They need to know who you are. So we're going to see a lot there because the internet as we know it is built on anonymity for a lot of very good reasons. There's a lot of surveillance implications to changing that. So I can pretty much guarantee we will end up doing a bunch of identity and age verification,

• 15:21Speaker 05

  age laws in the context of kid safety on Decoder in 2026. That seems like a promise we can make, right, guys? The Indian topic is ultra fascinating. Obviously, all the big tech companies are there. They've spun off a lot of their own talent. There's a lot of money in India. The question of whether India can make its own giant multinational global tech firm on the order of a body or something kind of runs into India's own nationalism, America's nationalism, weird Chinese geopolitics that gets weirder day by day from what I can tell. We should do that episode. I just, it will take us a while to settle on a theme for that one because there's so many issues at play about whether that's possible today in 2026. Right? If you'd asked me five years

• 16:05Speaker 05

  ago, I'd say, obviously, this is going to happen. There's a bunch of Google millionaires in India who are going to start companies. But can you, can you start a new kind of multinational today? Big question.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  But also, the question was, do you have other explainers you would like us to?

• 16:21Speaker 05

  I, you know, I'm going to come back and say, I, I think we should do more episodes on what is happening to social media, what happens when AI slop overtakes social media, what happens to the creator industry when the supply of content because of AI goes through the roof. I predict that I, the creator economy is going to get rocked in 2026. I basically predict this every year, but I, you can see the cracks starting to form. You can see some of the rates dropping for brand deals, which I think is really interesting. And I think the users are going to rebel against AI and the social networks are going to have to do a form of really interesting content moderation to label that stuff that they do not want to do. So I think we're going to find ourselves doing explainer episodes about content moderation again in 26.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  But in the context of AI and creators, which will be fascinating.

• 17:12Speaker 05

  We have to pause here for a short break. We'll be right back.

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  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

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  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand when leads were slow." Yeah, it wasn't.

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• 19:12Speaker 06

  Welcome back. This is Decoder senior producer Nick Stat, and me and my fellow senior producer Kate Cox are grilling Neelai with all of your questions for our end of the year special. Before the break, we were discussing some popular topic suggestions from all of you. But now, we want to jump into the most contentious topic of the year, and one we've heard a whole lot of different opinions about in 2025. That is, of course, artificial intelligence.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Speaking of AI, we have a lot, a lot of audience questions and feedback and thoughts about how much we have discussed AI on Decoder this year.

• 19:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would say it was probably the number one topic for feedback we got all year long. Probably the second one was, don't talk about Trump so much at the beginning of the year, and then it turned into, don't talk about AI so much. Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about AI. People angry at AI, people who don't want us to feature it at all, people who want us to only feature it and light it on fire and burn it to the ground. There was just a lot going on in the AI space this year, of course. We got a lot of positive feedback about, for instance, Liz Lopato's CoreWe feature, which we featured an episode on. We got a lot of feedback about Alex Heath's guest hosting and Casey Newton's guest hosting this summer, which listeners felt they weren't critical enough

• 20:34Speaker 06

  of the AI industry, which I'm sure they hear that enough on their own. We got a lot of feedback about Hayden Field's episodes, where she talked about AI in the military and how the AI industry is cozying up to the military industrial complex. We also got a lot of positive feedback about John Fort, a guest host this summer's interview with author Gil Duran, who writes a newsletter called The Nerd Reich. He specifically criticized figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and kind of their connections to the Dark Enlightenment, and kind of how it's all coming together in the AI industry and companies like Palantir in a way that feels really scary and weird.

• 21:14Speaker 06

  So yeah, we got kind of the whole spectrum of feedback about covering the AI industry and kind of by extension Silicon Valley billionaires and what their what their vision for the future is. So Neelai, how do you think about AI on Decoder, about covering AI more generally? And also the fact that it seems like literally every single CEO we have on the show is basically tripping over themselves to say AI is the thing that's going to define our future, it's going to turn our business, it's going to supercharge our businesses and this is, we have to invest in it because if we don't, we're going to get left behind.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  Well, first, I'll just say something that I feel very deeply about the fact that we run a newsroom. Ignoring things does not make them go away. And so we could just do CarPlay episodes every week for the rest of the year, the AI industry is not going to stop. What we bring to the table, ideally as a publication, as a show, is a little bit of critical distance from the hype and the ability to have these people on and ask them the questions. I talked about the people who can and cannot answer the Decoder questions. I invite you to go back and see how revealing some of those answers are in this context, in the context of the AI question, because I learned a lot. And so I like to show my work. I like very much to say, like, I've asked the questions, I have my opinions, it's based

• 22:33Speaker 05

  on the fact that I've done the reporting. You can evaluate the reporting. You maybe think I'm too soft, too, but at least you can evaluate the reporting. So that's just the first piece. I don't think me personally ignoring the AI industry will make it go away or stop. And I don't think me paying attention to it, or us paying attention to it, accelerates it in any way. I really just don't think that's the function of our newsroom. We cover technology, and I fundamentally believe that there is something about AI that will create a new set of products. And I say this only because every single day we are pitched some products built on the enabling technology of AI. Do I think LLMs can get to AGI? I do not. We have published that piece, it's fascinating, it's called Large Language Mistake, it's

• 23:17Speaker 05

  by Ben Riley, it's very interesting. I think there's some hard limits on what LLMs can do, and I've asked a lot of our guests about those limits. I asked Sundar Pichai if he thinks language is the same as intelligence on the show and he was like, why are you doing this to me? So I want to keep asking that question. Underneath that are a lot of really interesting questions about how will the web work if you actually make agents go? How will anyone get paid? How are you going to think about labor? What is the next interface? I said, I like a fight in the context of CarPlay. If you really think natural language interface is going to dominate the computing industry, there's a lot of questions downstream of that. Then there's just the opening question is, is that a good idea? So I think we're going to keep covering AI. It's not going

• 24:00Speaker 05

  anywhere. Our attention or ignorance of it is not going to affect the arc of that industry. I think what we can get is smarter about what's real and what's hype. And you might disagree with me. I know a lot of people disagree with me, but this isn't to me the same as crypto, which we have all but ignored because it's boring and not useful. Right? Like, I don't know what else to say about that. I've, we've made that point on the show as many times as we can. It's kind of boring and not useful. AI is, doesn't feel like that to me. There's parts of it that are super hypey. There's parts of it where Palantir exists and Palantir's business innovation, as far as I can tell, is just they will do immoral stuff. And they'll do it on, they'll take some warmed over database

• 24:43Speaker 05

  tech and then do stuff that no one else would do. I don't know. We're trying to have Alex Karp on the show. I'm going to ask him that question if I can get ahold of him. We'll see what happens. But the core technology, the, the piece of the puzzle where you as a user can just talk to the computer and the computer can take some actions, or the, instead of APIs, we'll have MCP servers and the agents can just query a database and natural, like, there's something there that is going to build a new class of applications. I think it is very important to like, pay critical attention to it and figure out what's real and what's fake. So we're going to keep doing it. Again, I don't think the technology that we have today gets you to AGI. And I think saying that that's wrong over and over again is like, part of the promise I will make to you.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  But everything up to that is like, I think, up for grabs. And I think there's a lot of just interest, young developers, new companies, new structures that are fascinating, that we should pay attention to, beyond just talking to the CEOs of the thing companies over and over again.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  One specific AI challenge we discussed this year, we had your episode on the DoorDash problem, and you specifically asked our listeners and viewers to write in to us with their thoughts, and dozens of them did what you told them to. We have a few really interesting pieces of feedback about the DoorDash problem. So Angela Difley, who said she's a director at Coca-Cola, she said, "I believe perplexity has a fighting chance about against Amazon. Here's the tension. Restaurants currently lose up to 30% margin to delivery giants like DoorDash and Uber Eats. They've been clawing to bring customers back to native platforms, not just for margin, but for data.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  She asks, "If AI-driven ordering agents take over, will restaurants finally win, or just continue to lose margin to the next big disruptor? And when delivery becomes autonomous," which is a whole separate other problem that is a thing, "what happens to the economics of convenience?" And then Ian Yanicki also wrote, "You mentioned that retailers could have their customer connections severed, but is that necessarily bad? As consumers, do we actually want to be tracked across the internet just to satisfy a value calculation? Or isn't agentic shopping inherently more privacy first?" So it's only been a few weeks since the DoorDash episode. But all of our listeners would like to know, from the response, from their responses,

• 27:13Speaker 04

  did you hear anything else that has really surprised you or changed your thinking on the subject in that last few weeks?

• 27:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, one very surprising thing happened, and it, I want to answer our listener questions, but the episode on YouTube kind of broke containment and went into the broader YouTube algorithm a little bit. And then the comments were like, "I can't believe capitalists talk about owning the customer." And that, to me, it just represents a lot. Like Decoder is a little bit of a bubble. It's a business podcast. We use business vocabulary. We use acronyms. We're in the bubble of how do you run a business and how do you make money on the internet? And then you break containment on an algorithmic platform and a bunch of people hear you talk about owning the customer and they're like, this is horrible. Like, I don't, I don't wish to be owned in this way. And I think there's something very important there. Right?

• 28:04Speaker 05

  I don't think people want to feel like they're a customer that's owned, that, you know, the idea that you're perfectly surveilled, that there's dynamic pricing on DoorDash now, that people hate this. Something very important there. Can your own personal LLM insulate you from that by going out in the world on your behalf and prevent you from being tracked and deal with the restaurants directly because they've set up their own little MCP servers? That would be the dream. Is that likely? Right? Like, is it likely that we will all have our own little agent server in the basement running on a Raspberry Pi and every restaurant is going to have an MCP server and there's going to be an MCP discovery engine that's decentralized? Man, I hope so. If you are building any of those products, you give us a call.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  We will pay so much attention to you that you are, you have no choice but to be successful. But I don't think that's how it's gonna work. And the flip side of that, and I saw this in the comments on our site, I see this in comments on YouTube, I think it's reflected in Angela's comment there, people aren't happy with DoorDash. Right? They're not happy with these middleman service providers. But those service providers exist. Right? So if you, if you disrupt Uber, you get rid of Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and whatever else tomorrow, a lot of people whose income and livelihoods depend on those platforms get disrupted. So you have to make some trade-offs along the way. And you can say, man, I wish Uber never existed. But the problem is that it does.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  Like, there's, I can't do anything about that for you. So it exists and now you're saying, okay, it could change and could get disrupted. All the people who make their living driving for Uber today, what are you going to do with them? And so maybe the 30% should move back to the restaurants, but now you've taken away from the Uber drivers and you've moved it to robots. That is a trade off you could make. The technology could force us into that trade off over time. But I think our show is going to just put people in the complicated situation of having to make those trade offs, or at least work through those trade offs over the course of an hour long interview, because it's all coming. And I don't think the agents, they're not going to live in our basements on Raspberry Pis. They're going to live on big centralized cloud services operated by tech giants who have their own incentives. Understanding their incentives versus your

• 30:16Speaker 05

  own will be, I think, critical to preserving some consumer agency.

• 30:20Speaker 06

  One listener, Asif Sagi, wrote in about your prediction last year related to the creator economy, Neelai. So you brought it up a little bit earlier that you are kind of always keeping an eye on the creator economy, what might happen to it. He's asking specifically, do you think that with AI dominating the industry right now, will we even notice or hear the creator bubble bursting? Or do you think the creator economy has already corrected itself?

• 30:47Speaker 05

  I think there's been some correction in the creator economy already. Let me be specific about what I mean there. The creator economy is really expressed as brands can show up, pay creators to do endorsements and sponsorships, and that will drive some sales back to those brands. That's the whole economy. There's not a part of that economy where any of the platforms are paying creators high enough rates to survive. So if you are a YouTuber, or an Instagram influencer, or a TikToker, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are not paying you nearly enough money to eat. It's just not true. And so all of those creators need to get subsidized by brands. They need to do brand deals and sponsorships

• 31:29Speaker 05

  and find other ways to make money, because the platforms themselves don't pay enough. And this is the heart of the creator economy. The platforms don't pay enough money to support the content on the platforms. So advertising has to fill in the gap. And what you're seeing this year is the advertisers are not paying the same rates as they were, particularly in like the pandemic when rates shot through the roof because no one can measure anything. The advertisers are getting smarter about the return their money is delivering. So you can't just pay every creator. You can actually start to measure creators. We had the CEO of Shark Ninja on the show and he said they do very sophisticated measurement of engagement. They don't just want views, they want likes and comments. They're doing sentiment analysis on the comments on the videos that creators do to promote Shark Ninja products,

• 32:14Speaker 05

  to figure out what creators to work with over time in a relationship. That means rates are dropping, right? You're now measuring, you're paying for results. The inevitable result of metrics is you drop rates because you're only, you're not paying the, the margin for unknowns. You're only paying for what you want. That's fascinating to me. Then you have just the reality of Shark Ninja is going to a bunch of creators and saying, we're going to pay for exactly this result. And you have turned all these platforms into QVC. And audience engagement might drop. Then you flood the platforms with AI content, which is like pure engagement slop that you can make for $0. And you can drop those rates even farther. Then you have Mark Zuckerberg saying, you don't even need to make ad creative. Pay us money, we will AI generate you ads and deliver you business results, which is the thing he said earlier this year.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  I think that's going to drop rates even farther. So you just see the beginning of the pressure on this economy where because the platforms do not value the content, they literally do not pay enough to the creators, the creators to eat. They are wholly dependent on the dynamics of the advertising industry. And the advertising industry is both professionalizing and industrializing the creator economy and dealing with AI like everybody else. And all that means is the rates are dropping, the rates for our brand deal are dropping. And the middle class of creators is absolutely getting squeezed. So I, I think that will be a theme. It was a little bit of our theme of our coverage this year. It's going to be a big theme next year. And like I said, I think the platforms are going to have to start labeling and filtering AI content for a huge number of reasons. I think a revolt from creators is going to be one of those reasons.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  We have to take another short break. We'll be right back.

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• 35:46Speaker 06

  We're back. This is Decoder's senior producer Nick Stat and me and my fellow senior producer Kay Cox are grilling Nilay with all of your questions for our holiday mailbag special. We just spent a good chunk of time talking about AI, how we cover it here at Decoder and The Verge, and how that's become rather tricky as the topic only continues to get more polarized. Now, we want to take a look ahead, talk about some guest suggestions, and our plans for Decoder in 2026.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  That's the AI piece of it all. That really takes us to our Monday guest lineups because we've talked to a lot of AI CEOs this year and also every CEO we've talked to this year claims to be an AI CEO.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, without exception.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  Without exception, all of them. The next person we are interviewing is also going to do that. That's just what they are. We get a lot of our suggestions for who to talk to from our audience. When we talked to Unity CEO Matt Bromberg last year, that started with a listener email that subject line was literally, "Please interview my boss." I loved that. If you want us to interview your CEO, so we can ask them how they make decisions for you, absolutely let us know. Recent requests we've had come into the inbox this past couple of weeks include the CEO of Stripe, the CEO of Framework Computer, AI guy Jeffrey Hinton, and Linus Torvalds, which are all interesting suggestions. We'll see what next year holds.

• 37:05Speaker 05

  If you can get us Linus.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  Make the call. Let's do it.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, let us know, please. We would love to. Last year, we had a set of Moonshot guests that was, I don't know, we've, last year, we said, "Maybe we'll want to talk to Tim Cook," or "Maybe we'll want to talk to Bob Iger." I would still really like us to talk to Bob Iger. I want to know what he's thinking. Neelai, who do you have on this year's Moonshot guest list?

• 37:26Speaker 05

  That's a good one. Yeah, I'm taking Tim Cook off the list. I've said this on the Verge chat several times. I don't think he has anything interesting to say. Or if he does, he won't say it. I've watched any number of Tim Cook interviews over the past 15 years, and I have yet to think that I personally can crack the code because no one else has. So, just off the list. Like, unless, Tim, you want to blow it up on your way out the door, you know? You want to announce you're leaving Apple on Decoder. Now's the time. Off the list. Moonshots. I actually, I do think I should do more interviews with people I don't agree with or openly disagree with. So Alex Karp is high on my list. I have a lot of questions about

• 38:09Speaker 05

  What Palantir's technology actually is, if you watch any interview with him or any executive Palantir, they obfuscate the answers to what it is they actually make incredibly hard. And I don't think you can get away with that with me. So he's high on my list. I think we're overdue on Andy Jassy. We've had a lot of Amazon executives on the show. I'm dying to know what he thinks about the future of that business in the context of agentic retail, all those questions there, in the context of having to spend money on data center bill bats. Andy Jassy, you come on the show. Bob Iger, definitely on the list, especially now that he's asking Google to stop training on Disney IP and then he's investing a billion dollars in OpenAI so that they can use Disney IP. That seems very

• 38:52Speaker 05

  backwards. I would love to ask him about the mechanics of that deal and what he's thinking there. Dario from Anthropic, we've done a lot of AI CEOs. We should have Dario. We should have Sam Altman. I think Sam Altman is another one where asking what his actual plans. Can you describe the structure of OpenAI, Sam Altman? That's a challenge I'll issue to you. This is what this show is for. Everyone gets asked what their org chart is. Can you describe OpenAI's org chart, Sam? I welcome you on the show. And then I have to say this, Bridgecast listeners know this is on my list, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. I've been anywhere, anytime, anyplace, but if Brendan wants to come on Decoder this year, I think we have to take the shot. I think that will, that will be a very interesting episode. And it's not so much a moonshot. We've interviewed her before, but I actually think Lisa Su from AMD, we should have her back next year. She's in the heart of the

• 39:37Speaker 05

  chip conversation. She needs to compete for capacity with TSMC with Nvidia, which is a fascinatingly hard challenge. We should probably get Jensen on from Nvidia too, but I think, actually Lisa, every time we've been on, she's been refreshingly candid. And AMD is like mounting a little bit of a comeback. And I think that would be a really good episode next year.

• 39:54Speaker 06

  That was a perfect segue into our next question, which is about repeat guests. In particular, listener Ian wanted to know how that happens. He says, you often say to a guest at the end of an interview that it'd be great to have them back. But what's your decision making framework around actually getting them back? Do you wait for a new product, a book? Do you set a reminder like the one I have for 2030? And this person actually has a reminder, a screenshot of their reminders app where they say, "Contact Neelai Patel and remind him that the metaverse will have a great year in 2030."

• 40:27Speaker 05

  That's great.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  So he, yeah, he wants to know, how do you have a guest back and how does it work?

• 40:32Speaker 05

  I should ask you two because you two do all the booking. My impression of how Decoder works right now is that we do very little outbound. We have a lot of incoming. A lot of people want to be on the show. The joke I keep making is that it's a game called Neelai versus media training, which is a game you can win, but also a game you can lose. And the fact that it's a little bit challenging makes a lot of very competitive type A CEOs want to be on the show because they see their peers either win or lose and they think they can do better. By the way, this is not like some secret information. I say this out loud all the time and everyone knows this is how I think of the show and everyone keeps showing up. So that's great. That continues to work. There's a piece of the puzzle, which is really interesting. I've heard this from a few people.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  I'm curious if anyone wants to confirm it to us, where a lot of times the executives come on the show because they want to prove to their own employees that they can take the heat. And there's no way to do that in like the branded content universe or the softball interview universe or like the employee town hall. Like you can't have your own head of comms ask you a question that amounts to, "Do you know what you're doing?" But I'll do that. And so like there's something important there. So that's one reason I keep coming back. The repeat guests for me are when someone got a new job, when they're the new CEO or they're the outgoing CEO, super fascinating. They're a little bit more candid. They have to make some change. Anjali Sood, right? She went from Vimeo de Tubi, I love talking to her about that transition. I thought that was one of our best episodes ever because she learned a bunch of stuff at one place and she obviously worked

• 41:59Speaker 05

  another place. She didn't have to pretend that everything had gone well at the previous place. Like she got to be honest about what she'd learned. I think that's incredible time to bring someone back. And then there are structural changes in an industry that I think are a really good time to bring people back on. So I suspect we will have Sundar Pichai and Sachin Adella on the show on a cadence forever because there's huge structural changes in the industries in which they work. They are among the masters of the universe and they like explaining how they are approaching those changes. And I like hearing those answers. I think you can hear those interviews. I obviously disagree with their answers from time to time, but that dynamic is really important to me. Like, is there a structural

• 42:42Speaker 05

  change? Can you can you walk me through it in a way that's honest? That's the other time when I think a repeat guest is really important. Having a car CEO back every six months to say they haven't changed their mind on CarPlay, I think is of diminishing value. But so, yeah, big structural changes or new job, new role. If you've changed your org chart, you've restructured your company. I love I love those episodes because there's something very rich to talk about.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  I will say you threw it to us for a second. It is much more common for me and Nick to tell somebody, no, you can't come back. It's too soon than it is for us to have to reach out and say, will you come back?

• 43:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Which I think is interesting. I'm glad you mentioned media training, Neelai versus media training, because we had one very interesting email from Zach Yanni, who wrote, "My honest feedback is that Neelai versus media training isn't good radio. Neelai and the decoder format are one of the best attempts to make these PR stops interesting with the decoder questions and asking hard questions. Occasionally, Neelai even generates a really interesting moment when he backs them into a corner hard enough. But by and large, this is not a good format. It was a great experiment. If anyone could have done it, it would have been Neelai, but media training makes it boring." But he adds, "On the other hand, when Nilay talks to people who aren't selling a company vision, Decoder can really shine. There have been some truly great episodes of that format,

• 44:02Speaker 04

  and I bet leaning into that could get some even better guests." We've talked about this a lot inside our team. Nilay, I would love for our audience to hear your thoughts on our Monday guests overall and the whole concept of Nilay versus media trading.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  All right. Can I rewind the clock all the way? We do think about this a lot. I'm rewinding the clock to the very beginning of Decoder. And this show started as Kara Swisher's show, right? It was Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. And so she went off to do the next thing. She graciously said we could take over the feed. And I was like, I have to replace Kara Swisher. This is like, just imagine that. Be like, I can just do that. And so I made a list of all the things Kara did that were of value to the audience, and all the things I could do. And there's a whole bunch of stuff Kara can do that I can't do. Just make that list. Send me your list. Send me the list of things you think Kara can do that I can't do. And I'll tell you if it's the same as mine. And the one

• 45:02Speaker 05

  thing I could circle that was, I can keep this value to the audience going without completely cratering the feed and ruining everyone's experience, was I can interview CEOs. Right? This is where this all started. Like, what is Kara delivering every week on the show that I'm going to rebrand and try to do something new? And instead of being like, hey, it's totally different now. Like, I can continue on with some scrap of value and maybe earn your trust to do something else. And it literally was, I can get CEOs to show up and talk to me. There's a lot of reasons for that. I think, among them, chief among them is the version of product review site. And every CEO who makes tech products wants to be near product reviews. And I can do that. Great. So we can get the CEO to show

• 45:43Speaker 05

  up and talk about product. So that was step one. And then, I think that was successful. We didn't churn a bunch of Kara's audience away. And Kara went off to do all her amazing things that she does. And now we're doing something different. Right? And over time, we started doing something like really different things. I'm not at all trying to compete with Cara and all the things she does. Again, I think she's doing great. I think it's useless to try to compete with that. I'm trying to try to do my own thing. That's where you get decoder questions. How do I deliver different value? How do I make this meaningfully different? Casey Newton is always saying the podcast ecosystem is such that any person is always talking to someone else, and you can find that conversation. Like, you can pick two names out of a hat, they've done a podcast episode together. How are you gonna make it different? So we try to make it different with decoder questions by adding the sort of explainer episodes.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  And we have now gotten to the place where I think our own audience data shows, people like the episodes where I talk more than the episodes where the CEOs talk.

• 46:38Speaker 05

  That's a victory. I feel very weird about that, but we have it. We are hearing the feedback. Do the explainer episodes, do the DoorDash problem episodes. The problem with all that is that I am at my core still a reporter, and I need to show you my reporting. So if I just show up and do ranted out video episodes every week, it would be much easier for all of us. And as you can tell, I could probably just do it. But if I don't have the reporting, I won't feel good about it. And so to me, a huge part of the Monday episode is just showing my work. Here's how I do the things I do. Here's where the opinions I have come from. I allow these people to challenge my opinions as directly as they want. I challenge theirs.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  I've come to a deeper, more interesting understanding of how this whole industry works, of how the masters of the universe make decisions. And then I can show up on a Thursday episode and say, hey, I think that sucks. And I feel great about where that came from. And there's just some honest dealing about all that that's important. Now, does media training suck? Are there episodes where in the middle of it, I'm like, boy, I could just be talking to AI right now? Yes, I will try to do better at breaking that down. I think one of the big learnings we had this year as a team was, well, we do a lot of prep. Kate and Nick write amazing prep docs for me. And I spend an hour before every episode just inhaling them. And then the more I leave it behind, the better off we are. Right? Where I just let the episodes go to wherever I think is interesting,

• 48:06Speaker 05

  and I don't try to hit all the questions on the list. That's a thing that I'm going to try to push on to make the interviews more interesting. But I do think the core dynamic of everybody can see me doing the work. And that is the foundation for all the other stuff I say. That feels very important to me because if I don't show my work, I'm not sure how I can earn trust in a media environment that looks like this one. All right, what do you guys think? Should we just stop interviewing CEOs?

• 48:30Speaker 04

  I think you probably won, or at least came to a draw versus media training for like the majority of 2025. I can only think of a couple that like media training really, really won.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  I will say that we all know when we get someone from McKinsey on the show that it's going to be a fight. Like if you're a CEO and you spent time working at McKinsey, like I come ready for war against media training. Like startup founders, we love startup founders because they're all just raw. Like they're just ready to go. They will say anything. And there's a real dynamic there that I think is fascinating. But yeah, the consultant class and I, I'm still, it's consult, it's ex consultants and politicians, where I'm still working on it. I've taken to just swearing at the politicians.

• 49:16Speaker 06

  You said this before where you said that you think some portion of the Decoder audience just wants you to end every episode by arresting a CEO. I think that's a kind of useful frame too, because you know, as much as yeah, sometimes you get the McKinsey's, you also do every once in a while, get those interviews that do have explosive moments. And then those interviews, I do feel like add fuel to the Decoder frame for future interviews, right? Because if somebody sees somebody kind of melt down, they come on the show and they go, oh, well, I can't do that. I don't want to, I don't want to do what the Intuit CEO did because that's bad.

• 49:50Speaker 05

  I encourage more CEOs to come on and do what the Intuit CEO did. If you could, that would make my day.

• 49:55Speaker 06

  I think there is value in not, you know, not treating every interview like you're trying to, you're trying to create that moment, but like giving, giving enough room where that moment could happen with almost anybody, except for maybe the super, super well media trained folks, does create a good, a good enough dynamic that like it's, it's, you know, it's kind of like a will it happen kind of thing.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, I, I read the comments. We read all the emails. I get the criticism that this sometimes feels like free publicity for people who are just trying to increase the ferocity of the capitalist to hole in which we all live. Okay. I think my job as a reporter, my job as a person who runs this newsroom, is to ask the questions as directly as I can. And, look, I started my career without any access at all. I started as a journalist making $12 a post, writing about SD cards for Engadget, a division of AOL. And that might have been when I was happiest, to be perfectly honest with all of you. Nick has actually been a reporter in our newsroom. I'm like, we should write about SD cards more all the time.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  It's a recurring theme since the last 10 years. Being a gadget blogger might be where my heart is. I do not care about the access we have. I really don't. I think access is poison. I think it changes your worldview, it warps your incentives. And my firm belief is that the less access you need, the more you get. And that has been borne out across the entire arc of The Verge, it's been borne out across the entire arc of Decoder. We're at the point, I keep saying this, the audience is like, we just want you to talk. That is a very powerful position to be in. So we're going to keep earning that. But then I should use that to get the access that other people have to ask for, or can make concessions to get. And we don't have to do that. And I won't ever do that. And I think that puts me in a position where we can create more

• 51:42Speaker 05

  of these moments of conflict, more adversarial moments of journalism. But we also have to not be rude. The people have to want to show up and engage and be honest with me. And so I think sometimes people see decorum is concession. And there's nothing I can do about that. They have to open their web browser and look into a camera and talk to me. And the fact that often they're not even in the same room as me means leaving is trivial. It's like you're a Command W away from ending this interaction. And so you do have to walk the line a little bit.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  This actually brings us very well to the last question we have for you. Listener Jeremy Curl wrote in with frustration with tech journalism podcasts overall. And he writes,

• 52:29Speaker 04

  The tech industry is creating and exacerbating problems within society. Aren't we way past the point of looking at tech as cool and fun and definitively going to solve all problems? There is some deep, dark shit happening because of tech, and it has the power to really tear apart society. That's a very valid point. He adds, "We need tech journalism to be better at shining a light on these troubling issues, otherwise a podcast sounds like two people hanging out at a dinner party." So, based on that, what does the future of Decoder in 2026 look like to you?

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, I don't disagree at all, not one bit. I think the Decoder team shares that worldview in a very real way. The Verge is built on that worldview. When we started in 2011, the idea that technology would just change culture was not taken for granted. Like, this was, this was our pitch. Like, we, like, like, we're starting a new website. It's about technology and culture being the same thing. Everyone was like, "What are you talking about? It's, it's cell phones, right? You're doing cell phones?" It turns out, cell phones have changed the entire world. Like, we were correct. We, we, we bet correctly, but it was not obvious when we started, the way it is obvious now. That's still our foundation, that's still our thesis. We do a lot of that coverage. That's where a bunch of angry emails about covering Trump came from. We're committed to that coverage.

• 53:44Speaker 05

  You know, my thesis of the early part of the Trump administration and Doge was a bunch of tech bros realized the government runs on databases, and they could just take over the databases and delete them, and that would change the government. And it kind of worked. That, that, that's weird. That's just a weird outcome that happened along the way of the Trump administration being a political force that started on cell phones. So, there's some combination there. The thing I will caution you about, and I will caution everybody about, is if you make your focus relentlessly that, you will only attract an audience of people who care about that. You will narrow the amount of impact that you can have. And so we have a big audience of people who do like technology, who do think it should

• 54:28Speaker 05

  be used for good things, who are excited about the craziest Wi-Fi router on display at CES. I'm one of those people. We should do a lot of Decoder episodes about the Raspberry Pi that runs my smart home. I would love to do that. I think the trick is taking that audience that sees the benefit of technology, who loves it for its own sake, and saying, these are the consequences. These are the implications of the choices that are being made by the companies that are developing the technologies that you love. And there's a lot there. I'll give a really dumb example, and this is the very small thing that was the genesis of all of our policy coverage here at The Verge. Do you remember the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4 had bad service? They dropped a lot of calls.

• 55:11Speaker 05

  So we were running Engage at the time, and you're like, why does the iPhone drop calls? There's an antenna gate. And you start with, the iPhone drops calls, and it's not really iPhone, it's AT&T. Why does AT&T drop calls? It's because our 3G network is overloaded. It's because they don't have enough spectrum. And the government is actually going to shut down the analog TV system to re-farm 700 megahertz spectrum for LTE, and that will solve the iPhone's... And you end up at, now we cover the FCC. Very quickly, you end up at, here's how FCC auctions work. And that, to me, that's the link I want to make to people. Here's this experience you're having on your phone, and here's this entire structure that explains that experience. That's why the show is called Decoder. And a lot of that structure looks like capitalism. A lot of that structure looks like, here's how org trots work.

• 55:56Speaker 05

  But even more of that structure is, here's how it makes you feel. And here's how people are managing those feelings about the experience. You feel bad about DoorDash, you're still using DoorDash. That's The Verge, that's Decoder. We're going to keep doing it. Again, the caution is, you don't want to narrow your audience to people who want to feel bad. You want to expand your audience to people who love things and say, actually, your interest, your enthusiasm, that can be the push to make some of the stuff better.

• 56:25Speaker 06

  We'd like to thank Neelai for joining the show and thank you for tuning in not just today, but all year long. We hope you've enjoyed it and we're really looking forward to another great year with all of you here on Decoder. We also have some really exciting news. Decoder will be live at CES 2026 on Wednesday, January 7th, at the Brooklyn Bowl. We'd love for you to come hang out with us during the show and we have some very fun stuff planned. Stay tuned for more details on how to RSVP in the coming days. 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. We're at DecoderTheVerge.com. And we hope this episode demonstrated that we really do read every email. You can also go hit up Neelai on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube, as so many of you

• 57:08Speaker 06

  asked us for last year. You can watch full episodes at @DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're also @DecoderPod 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. The show is produced by Kate Cox and myself, Nick Statt. Our editor is the frankly incredible Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next year.

• 57:41Speaker 09

  Fall savings are happening now at The Home Depot. Save up to $500 on select appliances. Plus, enjoy free delivery when you spend $998 or more. From prepping to cooking to cleaning up, Frigidaire has you covered. The custom Flex Temp drawer switches from fridge to freezer. With more than 15 cooking modes, including stone baked pizza mode, you can enjoy restaurant-quality pizza in as little as two minutes. Then clean up with the Frigidaire dishwasher, featuring the industry's fastest normal wash cycle. Shop fall savings now at The Home Depot. Off ofvalued through October 21st, US only. See store online for details.

• 58:12Speaker 10

  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 in a 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.

• 58:41Speaker 11

  I work here. You know, that thing you have to wake up for every day? I know, I've made things a little difficult in the past. Okay, a lot difficult. But I got some help from UKG. And finally, I understand. Now I'm making work, work better. I've even got AI agents helping me find new ways to help you, your people, and your business. Because when work works, everything works. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.