This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

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 and very occasional guest, Nilay Patel. Nilay, welcome back to your own show.

Hello. I hate being the guest.

Now, you have said that in the past, but there’s also a version of you that says 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’re of two minds about what the ideal version of Decoder is.

Being a permanent guest is a level of success that is hard to attain, where other people just want you to show up because they think you will be interesting. I would love to attain that level of success. At the same time, being the guest means you also have to be interesting all the time. Being the host, you’re just in control. You’re basically saying, “Can you be interesting over and over again for an hour?” And then you see what happens.

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

Yeah, let’s do it.

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, which 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, comments, and feedback we wanted to highlight here.

Some of them were like, “Damn, Nilay’s questions are making me nervous,” which 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 was a little surprised by some of the reactions. As Nick alluded to, Shishir was booked to come on the show well before any of the controversy, and I was really excited to talk to him. He had been both the chief product officer and the chief technology officer at YouTube; he’s on the board at Spotify. He was thinking about distributing AI through Grammarly, and distributing AI is actually a really hard challenge. You’re up against Google, you’re up against Apple, which is going to integrate AI into iOS with Google’s models over time. So there’s just a lot to talk about there in the creator economy and where AI is supposed to go and how it’s supposed to work.

And then this thing happened. I give Shishir a lot of credit for coming on the show. He knew what he was going to get. It’s not that we give people the questions. I think it was just obvious what I was going to ask about from the jump. And my feeling was that he could take the heat because he had these big roles at big companies. I don’t like taking young founders and putting them on trial for the whole industry, but given Shishir’s background, his depth of expertise, his enormous network, and his ability to just sit in there and answer the questions, I felt like we could do that with that episode, right?

Because of who Shishir was, it felt like I could ask him about the specific issues in the case as a proxy for the bigger issues with AI. And I think a lot of people were responding to that. The thing that surprised me was the reactions that kind of felt like, “You don’t understand AI. This is just how it’s going to be. You don’t understand what being a builder is like.”