Ford CEO Jim Farley talks with Joanna Stern about the company’s risky effort to rebuild its electric-vehicle strategy around cheaper, simpler cars, while arguing that software, tariffs and Chinese competition are reshaping the entire auto business. The conversation widens into Farley’s view that America’s bigger crisis is not just EV profitability but a hollowed-out culture that undervalues factory, trade and emergency-service work.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte says the company has outgrown its old role as a payments layer and is rebuilding itself as a discovery, hosting and community platform for creators squeezed by algorithmic feeds, Apple’s fees and AI-fueled slop. The conversation ranges from social media’s failures to the payment and moderation pressures of running a creator business that now competes more directly with Instagram, TikTok and Substack.

A weekend scramble over Anthropic’s newly released Claude Fable 5 became a test case for how the Trump administration may regulate AI: through formal safety policy or through panicked, personalized power. Nilay Patel and Verge reporter Hayden Field trace the model’s abrupt shutdown, the export controls that followed, and the industry’s growing fear that political risk now sits alongside technical risk.

Skydio chief executive Adam Bry argues that autonomous drones are moving from camera toys to networked infrastructure, with their most consequential uses in emergency response, utility inspection, and military reconnaissance. The conversation turns on whether the United States can build a domestic drone industry at scale while navigating bans on Chinese rivals, the politics of surveillance, and the moral limits of AI in warfare.

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch argues that legacy media survives by acting less like a magazine publisher than a portfolio of brands built for events, subscriptions, commerce, video, and adaptation. He talks through the company’s restructuring, the collapse of Google-driven traffic, the uneasy bargains of AI licensing, and why authority matters more than raw scale in the creator era.

Mustafa Suleiman argues that Microsoft’s evolving partnership with OpenAI has pushed the company toward model self-sufficiency, even as he insists the alliance remains central to its AI strategy. In a wide-ranging conversation, he defends the coming wave of enterprise automation, rejects claims of machine consciousness, and says the technology will have to prove itself by making people healthier, happier, and more capable.

Nilay Patel and New York Times reporter Ryan Mac sift through SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO filing to ask what Elon Musk’s ownership of X has actually become and why the company’s shrinking social platform may not matter. Their conversation turns into a broader indictment of a market structure that keeps rewarding Musk with more power even as corporate governance, shareholder accountability, and business fundamentals erode.

Recording Academy chief Harvey Mason Jr. sketches an industry already saturated with AI, where songwriters use models for everything from chord progressions to demo vocals even as the Grammys try to preserve a meaningful line around human authorship. The conversation also turns to the academy’s move from CBS to Disney, the politics of platform power, and the scramble to keep music culture visible in the age of TikTok.

Rivian’s top software executive sketches the uneasy marriage of startup speed and Volkswagen scale, as the companies build a shared EV operating system meant to underpin everything from the R2 to future Audis and Lamborghinis. The conversation turns just as quickly to Rivian’s in-car assistant, where voice control, safety limits and the long war over CarPlay reveal how much of the modern vehicle now lives in software.

Nilay Patel presses Sundar Pichai on Google’s AI reorganization, the rapid spread of Gemini and agents across search and software, and what those shifts mean for publishers, creators and the fragile idea of a common web. Pichai argues that Google is building toward more capable systems while insisting the open web remains essential, even as search grows more opinionated, personalized and self-contained.

Nilay Patel and Liz Lopatto sort through the spectacle and legal debris of Musk v. Altman, a trial nominally about OpenAI’s nonprofit origins but really driven by Elon Musk’s bid to punish Sam Altman. Their conversation sketches a courthouse circus, a statute-of-limitations defeat, and an AI industry where dishonesty feels less disqualifying than fully priced in.

As BuzzFeed sells a controlling stake to Byron Allen, outgoing CEO Jonah Peretti argues that digital media’s platform era collapsed into a deals business and bets AI can rebuild both the company and the products people use directly. The conversation turns over old wounds from Facebook’s broken promises to creator economics, then lands on an ambitious, still-fuzzy vision of BuzzFeed as an AI-powered media and social platform.

Brendan Ballou argues that forced arbitration has become a private justice system, built by courts and terms of service that strip consumers and workers of meaningful recourse. The conversation links that quiet legal machinery to a broader crisis of corporate power, public corruption and the feeling that ordinary people are locked out of real accountability.

Joanna Stern joins Nilay Patel to talk through a year of living with AI, the gap between flashy demos and useful products, and the privacy costs hidden inside convenience. The conversation also turns to her leap from The Wall Street Journal to her new venture, New Things, and what it takes to build an independent tech-media business around YouTube, newsletters and a mainstream audience.

A conversation about AI in schools moves past cheating panics to the deeper question of what education is for when machines can generate polished work on demand. Teachers and researchers describe a fractured landscape in which generative tools may save time at the margins, but also erode learning, judgment, and trust in the classroom.

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.

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.

UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon pulls back the curtain on the century-old safety giant behind the logo stamped on countless electronics, tracing how standards get made, enforced and ignored. The conversation moves from exploding lithium-ion batteries and e-bike rules to the far murkier challenge of testing AI systems in a market that resists being told no.