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.