Nick Statt

Are you interested in doing any episodes on libraries or free access to information?

We have to pause here for a short break.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

This is Decoder Senior Producer Nick Stapp, and me and my fellow Senior Producer Kate Cox are grilling Neeli with all of your questions for our end of the year special.

Before the break, we were discussing some popular topic suggestions from all of you.

But now we want to jump into the most contentious topic of the year, and one we've heard a whole lot of different opinions about in 2025.

That is, of course, artificial intelligence.

Yeah, I would say it was probably the number one topic for feedback we got all year long.

And probably the second one was don't talk about Trump so much at the beginning of the year.

And then it turned into don't talk about AI so much.

Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about AI.

People angry at AI, people who don't want us to feature it at all, people who want us to only feature it and light it on fire and burn it to the ground.

There was just a lot going on in the AI space this year, of course.

We got a lot of positive feedback about, for instance, Liz Lopato's CoreWeave feature, which we featured an episode on.

We got a lot of feedback about Alex Heath's guest hosting and Casey Newton's guest hosting this summer, which listeners felt they weren't critical enough of the AI industry, which I'm sure they hear that enough on their own.

We got a lot of feedback about Hayden Field's episodes where she talked about AI in the military and how the AI industry is cozying up to the military industrial complex.

We also got a lot of positive feedback about John Fort, a guest host this summer's interview with author Gil Duran, who writes a newsletter called The Nerd Reich.

He specifically criticized figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and kind of their connections to the dark enlightenment and kind of how it's all coming together in the AI industry and companies like Palantir in a way that feels really scary and weird.

So yeah, we got kind of the whole spectrum of feedback about covering the AI industry and kind of by extension, Silicon Valley billionaires and what their vision for the future is.