Kate Cox

It was the most unhinged professional comms email I have gotten since I became a full-time journalist in 2012. And like, I spent the first half of my career at Consumerist ticking off companies every week.

Our work from home episode this fall also generated a lot of feedback from listeners. I think it was probably tied with Intuit, actually, for the most feedback we got this year. One email from a listener named Rohit Kabra really captured the sentiment.

He wrote, currently, I'm the founder of a growing startup and the work from home versus return to office debate is one I have frequently with other founders. He wrote that he favors a hybrid approach for his team and was excited to hear our take on it. But then he didn't like our take on it. He said our perspective felt a bit narrow and even dismissive by focusing primarily on a subset of society.

And he listed his concerns about the impact on interns and new workers who don't learn how to be in a workplace very well without one. He wrote about leadership quality, which is that maybe poor managers just really do do better with people in the office and you can't expect every manager to be great.

He wrote about cities and office culture, mental health, isolation, and the growing divide between knowledge sector work you can do with a laptop from anywhere and every other kind of job in the world that requires you to be hands-on. And the questions from this are, where do you fall on the remote versus in-office debate? And how does the decoder team operate?

A huge number of the CEOs we talk to are in California or Europe. Nilay is based in New York City. I'm based in D.C. And yeah, we could not go to New York or Europe or San Francisco for every week we talk to all these people.

We have to take a short break. We'll be right back.

because our interview with Rabbit CEO Jesse Liu also generated listener feedback. First time listener John wrote in to say he tried the Rabbit R1 episode and was not sure what to make the most of. He said the back and forth about scraping data and getting blocked by big companies was fascinating.

He said they're doing something super brittle, so it was really satisfying seeing the interview drill down on that. He adds that by the end, he had been won over to the CEO's way of thinking a little bit. They could still be crushed at any time. And he went on with basically the question, where do you think Rabbit goes from here?

Is this kind of thing going to fade away or are we just way too early for AI hardware?

So speaking of 2025, we here at Decoder are already very deep into planning our 2025 out. Since I am the person who has to be in charge of logistics, I can say we have booked interviews through almost the end of March already, and it's not quite Christmas. We can't talk about most of those guests yet for a lot of good reasons, but we have some big ambitions.

Nilay, who do you think we should try to get on Decoder in 2025?

All right. I think that's about it.

I'm really interested in exploring the topic of what the introduction of generative AI has done to education. I have two kids. One is in middle school. One is in first grade. And they are glued to their iPads at all times. And I am trying to teach them what search is. And it's real complicated. And so I'm hoping we can get some teachers on to talk about what the deal is for them.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS Generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS Generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS Generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud.