MG Siegler and Alex Kantrowitz size up Apple’s unusually modest AI spending against the rest of Big Tech’s infrastructure binge, arguing that the company may be either prudently waiting out a commoditized market or dangerously ceding the future to rivals. They also trace the loosening Microsoft-OpenAI alliance and the murky reality of Stargate, where grand promises of owned infrastructure are giving way to outsourced capacity and financial improvisation.

Molly Graham talks with former Microsoft executive and Gates Foundation founding CEO Patty Stonecipher about the personal mission statement that has guided decades of career choices, from high-profile yeses to disciplined noes. Their conversation turns work into a question of values, asking how ambition, love, justice, learning and humor can shape a life rather than merely a résumé.

A live conversation with Maven VP of product Rishin Banker examines how AI and new tools are collapsing traditional product, design, and engineering boundaries at a lean startup. The discussion traces what happens when more people can build, how teams reorganize into smaller pods, and where speed starts to create new handoff and governance problems.

A Stripe design leader describes building an internal prototyping stack that lets designers, PMs, and researchers generate realistic product demos in the browser, complete with live data, variants, and design-system guardrails. The conversation tracks how AI is collapsing the distance between mockup and product, turning static reviews into clickable demos and shifting collaboration from staffing debates to the work itself.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sketches a company trying to turn its ride-hailing app into a broader travel and services platform, while juggling the trade-offs of hotel booking, personal shopping, AI tools and autonomous vehicles. He argues that Uber’s edge lies not in flashy demos but in handling the messy, probabilistic real world where reservations fail, drivers cancel and logistics have to keep working.

A family’s daily long-distance intimacy is severed when Iran’s government plunges the country into an internet blackout during war, leaving one daughter in the U.S. desperate for any word from her parents. The hour gathers smuggled voice memos from inside Iran, where ordinary life, political terror, grief, love and rage all continue beneath bombardment and enforced silence.

Max Schoening, Notion’s head of product, argues that AI is making the first draft of software nearly free while shifting the real differentiator to agency, taste and the discipline to make something obviously good. The conversation ranges from designers coding in terminals to the persistence of SaaS, all under a larger claim that the people who thrive will be the ones who act as if the world is changeable.

A jumble of AI signals comes into focus as OpenAI’s user growth cools, cloud providers post blockbuster numbers, and the industry lurches from consumer hype toward enterprise agents. Alex Kantrowitz and Ranjan Roy weigh whether generative AI is becoming ordinary infrastructure, a shaky consumer business, or simply a market still too expensive and too euphoric to understand clearly.

The Vergecast turns Elon Musk’s OpenAI trial testimony into a case study in how power evaporates under cross-examination, then widens into a sharper critique of AI’s shaky consumer appeal and the tech industry’s habit of mistaking compulsion for affection. Along the way, the hosts tour Microsoft and OpenAI’s retreat from the AGI fantasy, Brendan Carr’s latest FCC overreach, and a pile of gadgets that may or may not deserve Nilay Patel’s attention.

Ira Glass makes a funny, unexpectedly candid case against commencement speeches as a doomed genre, then explains why family history, old loyalties and one memorable Goucher dorm room changed his mind. The conversation sets up a 2012 graduation address shaped by skepticism, sentiment and a story about his grandmother meeting Adolf Hitler.

A veteran product leader argues that the best chief product officers set direction, understand customers deeply and keep reallocating resources as technology and markets shift. The conversation ranges from navigating founder dynamics and office politics to making riskier AI bets, protecting time to think and building products around outcomes rather than buttons.

Nilay Patel and Nick Statt turn Decoder’s own mailbag into a defense of adversarial tech journalism, using the backlash to a bruising Superhuman interview to argue for tougher scrutiny of AI hype and executive spin. The conversation draws a sharp line between enterprise use cases that may be real and consumer products that still feel coercive, unconvincing, and culturally corrosive.

Two Argentine founders are building AI order-takers for restaurants and hotels, betting that the most valuable automation in hospitality happens in the operational gaps rather than in the human moments guests actually want. Their conversation traces the leap from rough prototypes and painful onboarding to a system that can parse messy customer requests, integrate with point-of-sale software and quietly disappear into the flow of service.

Stripe’s Emily Glassberg Sands sketches an internet where AI agents are becoming buyers, sellers and developers, forcing payments, fraud detection and software tooling to adapt to machine users. The conversation traces the surge in AI-company revenue, the rise of compute theft and free-trial abuse, and the new pricing and checkout systems emerging for an agent economy.

Mario Zechner and Armin Ronacher trace the rise of AI coding agents from hobbyist frustration to workplace reality, arguing that self-modifying tools can be powerful while also making software flimsier, reviews harder, and open source harder to steward. Their conversation lands on a broader unease with an industry chasing frictionless speed, even as good engineering still depends on bottlenecks, judgment and the memory of pain.

Mark Cuban argues that artificial intelligence is not overhyped but already reshaping work, rewarding people and companies willing to rebuild around it while punishing those that treat it as a novelty. He is bullish on AI as a tool for learning, automation and entrepreneurship, even as he doubts the economics of the biggest model makers and warns that critical thinking will matter more, not less.

Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar argues that sudden upheaval can shatter the identities people build around work, but also open the door to a sturdier sense of self. Drawing on her own career-ending violin injury and research on resilience, she offers a case for anchoring identity to purpose rather than title, and for treating disruption as a chance to grow into someone new.

A lively conversation about why even wedding skeptics end up throwing weddings, and how consumerism, social media, class signaling and community needs have reshaped the ritual. Amanda Montell and Anne Helen Peterson parse everything from Princess Diana and Pinterest to child-free receptions, bachelorette parties and the false promise of “timeless” taste.

Derek Thompson and Ross Douthat map the fractures opening inside Trump’s coalition as the Iran war strains the movement’s old promises and exposes its internal contradictions. Their conversation tracks the growing fights over foreign intervention, religion, Israel, health politics and AI, and asks what kind of Republican Party might survive after Trump.

David Pierce revisits the Rabbit R1 and finds that, while the standalone AI gadget still cannot replace a phone, its stripped-down voice recorder and note-taking tools have made it unexpectedly handy. The show then turns to the OpenAI-Elon Musk courtroom circus and Framework’s increasingly polished vision for repairable laptops, treating both as tests of how the tech industry is maturing, or failing to.