How to win — or lose — Decoder | Decoder

Hello, and welcome to Decoder, Nilay's show about big ideas and other problems. This is Nick Statt, senior producer. And I'm joined by host, very occasional guest, Nilay Patel. Nilay, welcome back to your own show.

Now, you have said that in the past, but I feel like there's also a version of you that says that that is the ideal version of this show, where you just get to not do anything and show up and talk about stuff. So, I feel like you are of two minds with how the show, of like what is the ideal version of Decoder?

A few months ago, we did our annual mailbag episode, which we were thinking of as like an annual thing that would happen around the holidays, where we respond to listener questions, feedback, criticisms, suggestions. But, recently, I think we thought we should just do this more often because we get a ton of great feedback and we do read all of the emails. So, we're here again. So, I thought we would just jump into it. Nilay, you ready?

So, by far our most popular episode of this year was also our most contentious. It was your interview, Nilay, with Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra. That focused heavily on Grammarly's expert review controversy. We got mounds and mounds of feedback about that episode. Most of it was overwhelmingly positive. There were a lot of interesting emails and comments and feedback we wanted to highlight here. Some of them were like, 'Damn, Nilay's questions are making me nervous,' was one of our top comments. Another said we need to make tech CEOs this uncomfortable more often. A Verge subscriber wrote in to say this episode was extremely uncomfortable to listen to, and absolutely the reason I became a subscriber less than a week ago. So, I think to kick this all off, Nilay, my first question for you is how did you feel about the reception to the Superhuman episode? Were you at all surprised by any of the reactions?

I hope we continue to make it. One commenter, Brendan G, actually wrote in about the Superhuman episode. He does media training professionally and so he obviously hates listening to media-trained executives. But he said either Shishir's media training was really good or he was just smart enough to ignore it and decided to have a real conversation other than occasionally hiding behind lawyers. Brendan also said that from his perspective it felt like you spent a lot of time grinding what felt like a personal axe. You sounded angry, although he doesn't know if that was a kind of performance that you were doing. And he said from a media trainer's perspective I would have loved that because it just makes Shishir in this case seem reasonable or calm. So the question for you, Nilay, is how did you decide to approach that interview and did you think of it as you having to kind of play a part on behalf of the people whose likenesses Superhuman had appropriated or were you just, you know, was your strategy just, 'Oh, I'm going to just nail him on this one part around like how much he owes me and then we're going to go from there'?

One commenter I think wrote something interesting about this, which is he said that in reference to you asking Shishir how much they should pay you, he said, 'I'm going to go out on a limb here and say they'll pay you zero dollars.' And in fact, they just did that. They got free publicity, and you didn't sue. To him, he won this round. Which of course, you're not part of the lawsuit yet, or we don't determine who's part of the lawsuit as journalists, but I think that relates to a question, Eli, that we get a lot of the time here on Decoder, which is: are we platforming people that don't deserve a platform? Are we giving them free publicity to hawk their product or push AI hype or whatever it is?

So, another episode that we got a ton of feedback about, Nilay, was of course our most recent one of our most recent episodes with Puck CEO Sarah Personette. In particular, listeners almost universally picked up on Sarah's evasiveness. A lot of listeners were divided on whether this makes for a good podcast or not. One listener, Alejandro Tauber, sent us a one-line email saying the interview was majestic. Another listener said, 'Excellent.' But we also got an almost equal amount of polar opposite feedback. One commenter wrote, 'When Nilay has a CEO who comes on who comes off as overly media-trained or maybe overly prepared, I have a hard time getting through it.' Another commenter said, 'Honestly, I couldn't listen through this one because of all the sidestepping, zooming out, non-answers.' Somebody wrote, 'This interview almost feels combative, but only because of the squirming to avoid answering questions is truly out of this world.' We get a lot of feedback about episodes like this where people are too overly prepared or they just kind of don't want to answer something. And some people can't handle it because it makes them too uncomfortable. It kind of sounds like they're watching like a cringe comedy. We heard this about Superhuman quite a bit. Some people said they couldn't listen to the whole thing because it made them too uncomfortable. The broader topic here, of course, is that we sometimes deal with challenging subjects that are either so trained or so boring or difficult to talk to, they're evasive, or they're uninterested in straying from their talking points, and that creates a lot of unnecessary friction that is plainly obvious to anyone who's listening to the interview. How are you thinking about those kinds of situations, whether you would describe them as adversarial or challenging, whatever? And have you been kind of tweaking your approach or your style in terms of how you get through these interviews or try to extract more insight out of them?

There's a real hunger from the audience for what you might call accountability journalism, especially in podcast form and particularly with the current tech and AI industries. The joke that you've said before is that the audience wants you to end every episode by arresting a CEO, and we've even had some commenters now referencing that as an editorial strategy. Some people are saying, you know, they want you to be tougher even. But this is running headlong into the idea that companies don't necessarily want to do these kinds of interviews all the time or even often. And that people don't like being put into unpredictable situations where they don't know the questions, they don't know what you're going to ask. And then audiences themselves are not really even all that interested sometimes in that kind of product, like the end result of that. Like Diary of a CEO is not hard-hitting journalism, even though it's very engaging. Acquired, TVPN is certainly not journalism, and whatever monitoring the situation from Andreessen Horowitz is not journalism at all. But I think we saw a version of this kind of play out recently with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Dorkish Patel, right? Where he's not a traditional journalist, but he asked some challenging questions, and it kind of broke people's brains because they weren't used to seeing somebody kind of check somebody like Jensen, a rich tech guy, but also head of the most valuable company in the world, and people kind of think he's infallible. And this was a rare moment where people were kind of divided on what's the purpose of this interview. So, Nilay, the question for you is how are you thinking about that tension between the functions of journalism, what the audience wants, and then what the audience actually responds to when it comes to tough questions, and also, you know, why do you think people are coming on this show when we're not paying them, we're not telling them what we're going to ask beforehand, even though they know what to expect. They are going in kind of blind.