Today, I’m talking with Jennifer Scanlon, who is the CEO of UL Solutions. That’s Underwriters Laboratories – you know, the UL logo listed on all your electronics? That symbol means it’s been tested and found safe in a variety of ways. UL’s been around for 100 years. It started as a way for insurance companies to do fire and safety testing on electrical products just as electricity was coming into homes. 

But now it’s everywhere, and it’s one of those companies we really like to poke at here on Decoder that’s basically hidden in plain sight — that logo is on everything. But scratch the surface and the business of UL is pretty complicated. There are a ton of cheap electronics on Amazon, and maybe people just care about price and not certifications. The company is also now trying to do safety testing for AI systems; it just rolled out a new standard called UL 3115, “a structured framework to evaluate AI-based products before and during deployment.” That kind of standard requires a lot of companies and regulators to buy in — and for there to be a way to even reliably safety test AI at all. And then there’s the structure of UL, which — well, you’ll see. It’s complicated.

But sure, structure and whatever, we’ll get there, but first, I had to ask Jennifer if she got to watch stuff explode in the testing labs. Because to me that seems like the best part of working for an organization that sets safety standards. A lot of stuff blows up in the labs, and you’ll hear Jennifer say her office often rattles because of it.

But there are other complications: Right at the tail end of the Biden administration, UL got tapped to be the lead administrator for a new Cyber Safety program that was supposed to set a standard for connected devices — the whole Internet of Things. But then the Trump administration came to power, and good old Brendan Carr has been coming up with reasons — which of course never actually get articulated to anyone — why any company related to China is somehow now a threat. That, apparently, includes UL, which of course has safety labs in China, since that’s where the electronics are made. So UL lost out on that deal. I asked Jennifer about it pretty directly, since that’s really a microcosm of pretty much everything going on with safety, tech, and China right now.

There’s a lot going on in this one; I love when we get to bring hidden systems to light. I think you’re going to like it.

Okay: UL CEO Jennifer Scanlon. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jennifer Scanlon, you’re the president and CEO of UL Solutions. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you, Nilay. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

I’m excited to talk to you. Some of my favorite episodes are when we demystify a thing that everyone takes for granted and the UL logo is one of those things.

Absolutely. The UL mark is on billions of products, and yet everywhere I go, people look at me and say, “What exactly does UL do?”

Well, my understanding is that you just drop things off of cliffs and see if they explode. Is that your day-to-day?

We do have people who drop things off of cliffs and see if they explode, but really every single day, we have 15,000 employees around the world working for a safer world. They are testing, inspecting, and certifying products. They are also creating software to help our customers manage their risk and compliance environments.

You run a big testing facility. Describe some of the tests that are done and who gets to do them and what some of the wildest tests that you do are.

I always like to say we break things, we blow them up, we light them on fire. If you were to walk into our testing facility here in Northbrook, Illinois, in Europe, in China, in India, anywhere in the world, you’ll first see large electrical panels that are there charging and discharging products, batteries, and seeing what fails. Watching a lithium-ion battery the size of my thumb blow up is pretty terrifying. It’s amazing how wide that blast will go. So we do a lot of inherently unsafe things to test product safety.