diff --git a/marimo/_utils/requests.py b/marimo/_utils/requests.py
index 926a71c9903..319693aa782 100644
--- a/marimo/_utils/requests.py
+++ b/marimo/_utils/requests.py
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ def json(self) -> Any:
         This assumes the response is UTF-8 encoded.
         In future, we can infer the encoding from the headers.
         """
-        return json.loads(self.text())
+        return json.loads(self.content.decode("utf-8"))
 
     def text(self) -> str:
         """Get response content as text.