When it comes to home improvement, even the most experienced DIYer has a limit. I'm not going to come in here with the blowtorch and get it hot and solder and put the copper pipes account. I call it very nice. When to call the experts and when to do it yourself. That's this week on Explain ItToMe. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
🎵 Music
Disease is one of the fastest growing threats to human health around the world.
Often difficult to diagnose. It may be difficult to treat, and now we have a vaccine that is safe and effective in preventing it.
That is
We had a vaccine back in the early 2000s. But then the Lyme vaccine became a cautionary tale. That's this week on Unexplainable, wherever you get your podcasts.
🔇 Silence
From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels from Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. Today we are talking about media and politics and AI. Which is kind of most of my shows these days, but this is an extra good one with two great guests. First up, CNN's Brian Stelter, walks us through what has been happening and might happen with Barry Weiss at CBS News in 60 Minutes after a tumultuous couple weeks there.
Tumultuous even by the standards of Barry Weiss and CBS News in sixty minutes? Brian is excellent on this stuff. He's been covering TV and TV news since he was a literal child. He's been working in TV for many, many years. He's got a very good sense of the strength and power of that medium and why that power could be imperiled in the future.
I also asked him what it's like to cover Paramount and CBS, knowing that Paramount is almost certainly gonna own his company in the coming months and combine it in some way with CBS News, probably run by Barry Weiss. Okay. And then I talked to the Virgis Neely Patel, who I've known forever but somehow have never had on this show. So here we are. Neely went to Cupertino to see Apple's new push into AI via its annual developers conference.
Absolutely.
Apple, as many of you know, thought it had an AI strategy two years ago. A year later decided that approach was not working, now it has a new plan. So we can talk about that and more broadly, what AI can do for and do to Apple. It's one of those double edged swords. And also what a normal person does and doesn't want out of AI. Okay, that's a lot and this really is good. These guys are both knowledgeable and great talkers. Here's me talking to Brian Stelter.
I'm here with Brian Stelter. Brian, what is your title?'Cause you do everything at CNN.
Chief media analyst, because you know that's what I do. I analyze the media just like
You go on T V and do it, you send out your newsletter and then occasionally take time to talk to me. So thank you for joining.
Good to be here. This is the fun part.
Um, w I feel like we had this conversation recently, and I looked and we did in February of this year. We were talking about the future of CBS News and Sixty Minutes and Here we are again talking about that conversation. Um, tons of coverage about this. And I want to go big, big, big picture, first of all. Is this story that that everyone in media has been talking about about Barry Weiss and Nick Bilton and Scott Pelly and David Ellison?
It seems like it has broken containment from the media world and is a larger national story, but I don't know. You work for a national uh cable outfit. Is this story something that normal people care about?
It is. Why? It is. It is the rare media story that has broken containment. I see it in the the most red list on CNN dot com. I see it in the engagement on Instagram. And Peter, I also see it in my inbox, you know, hearing from readers who I I almost never hear from. Why is it broken containment? I I think because 60 minutes is bigger than a single hour on television. It's an American institution.
Uh and what we've been covering in Trump two point oh are American institutions under pressure in the Trump era. It's also broken through because it's it's a boss versus employee or an employee versus boss story.
lot of people have fantasies about speaking up and speaking truth to power to the boss. And on one level that's what Pelley did. So people have lots of opinions about that and what's the right way and what's the wrong way. And you know, but I do think the the broader reason why this is breaking through
is because there is anxiety about where news is coming from, is news trustworthy, are newsrooms under pressure, what's going on inside a place like CBS News, all of those threads are really interesting. I mean
My gut is this is very much a Trump story for a lot of people. This is just a way for people who are concerned and or angry about Donald Trump to to clock in. I mean, to be clear, CBS is a sixty minutes is a huge show. by twenty twenty six standards, that's nine million people. It's not a show that everyone watches. I think prior to this week most people couldn't tell you the correspondence at sixty minutes. They certainly I could tell you the executive producer or who runs CBS News.
And now normal people are talking about Scott Pelley and and Barry Weiss and who is this Nick Builton character? Uh it's it's kinda wild. You are you literally have just been typing about this before coming on. Um for the people who are not covering the blow by blow, uh I think most people know that Scott Pelle was fired slash fired himself last week.
Um if you're following it pretty closely you might have heard the remaining three correspondents at sixty minutes have announced they're gonna stay. We're recording this Tuesday morning. People will hear this Wednesday. What is the latest today right now?
I think the latest today is about what all of this turmoil means for the future of CBS News. And let's just put it out there before we go any further. Also what it means for the future of CNN. Uh, because uh as you said, many people view this as a story about Trump, Trump's relationship with CBS and parent company Paramount, how Paramount has tried to cozy up to President Trump.
how the CBS Newsroom has still been providing aggressive coverage of Trump despite the corporate parents relationships. Uh Paramount of course trying to buy CNN and the rest of Warner Bowl's discovery. Uh Paramount urgently trying to get that deal approved. Uh, where is resistance to the deal coming from? It's coming from state attorneys general, maybe from Europe as well. So there's this political cloud that hangs over everything. And with that shadow being cast, what's the future of CBS News?
What's Barry Weiss doing at CBS? She essentially blew up sixty minutes by firing people, firing correspondents, firing producers, bringing in built in. You know, all of that happened in a way that uh has created distrust, has created concern and anxiety among C B S viewers. And also, of course, then anxiety about what might happen to CNN if the merger goes through. So
You know, there are all of those threads now. I I guess I'm proposing more questions than answers, but I think that's where we stand now today, nearly two weeks after the first firings of 60 Minutes. Is that sound right to you? You're the one on the outside covering.
Sixty minutes is not on the air. We won't see it again until the fall. Um w our understanding is there are three remaining correspondents at sixty minutes. Presumably they will hire some more. Um I think you and others have raised the question of like how are they even gonna like produce a show uh next fall? I assume that the it will air in the fall, but
What's interesting to me is that Barry Weiss and then Nick Bilton said sixty minutes and all of CBS News has to change. We have to blow it up essentially. They s blew up half of it over the last couple of weeks. They also said, Oh, the remaining Old fixtures of of sixty minutes. We need to keep those. Those are very important. Do we imagine they're gonna have an entirely reimagined sixty minutes in time for the fall? Or is it kinda look like sixty minutes was this year?
I think it will look mostly like 60 Minutes this year. And and here's why. Yeah, Bilton said to me, you know, when he was first hired, the core of 60 Minutes will remain 60. He said the Sunday show will not change. Of course it it will have to to some degree because he needs to hire correspondence. And Barry Weiss is excited about that part. She wants to bring in new talent, new outside voices and energy. Uh I think she probably wants to use some resources from the free press, her startup.
And to the extent it'll be interesting to see to what extent she actually does that, to what extent that fits into sixty minutes and or does not. But for the most part, it's still gonna be three mini documentaries every Sunday. What Built in is definitely gonna do though is try to expand online in new ways.
And there's an interesting tug of war going on now, Peter, between folks at Sixty Minutes and CBS who say, Hey, we were doing well online. We were making TikTok videos. We were we were publishing on social versus another side, the the Barry Weiss side, who says,
you you all need to push much more aggressively in that direction. You know, you all think you were online. You need to do so much more online. And Building says he has lots of ideas for doing that. So there's definitely a tug of war going on there about what is sixty minutes digital strategy. What was it? What is it gonna be? But I think on Sunday nights the show will basically look like what it looked like. The the real um concern I think among viewers, certainly among media critics, is about
Whether the show is gonna go soft in some way. But Weiss has said to her friends, she wants the show to go hard. She wants hard-hitting investigations. And Bilton has said he is greenlighting stories about the Trump administration. So I think viewers, critics will watch closely in the fall to see if they are living up to those pledges.
The other thing that happened in the last week is that Scott Pelly who was fired. At the beginning of the week, sat down for the New York Times for a pretty extraordinary interview. You don't normally see people sort of spend an hour after they've been publicly fired. Lots of discussion about that interview. What what is what is you may have more than one take. What is your take? What are your takeaways from that interview?
Uh there are moments where he sounds self indulgent. There are moments where he sounds theatrical and performative in the way that Sixty Minutes correspondence always have been. They've both been beloved and criticized for that, g dating back to the days of Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt.
It's a good point to remember. Like the uh sixty minutes is not just a news show, right? It's a it's an entertainment and the the part of the entertainment is watching these anchors sort perform.
One hundred percent. And and it's okay to to talk about that and not not avoid it. And television I I I You know, I used to anchor on CNN, I'm now back on CNN almost every day as an analyst. I think about it the following way. It's like a Venn diagram. There's television on one side and there's journalism on the other. And in the middle of that Venn diagram, there's a big chunk of television journalism.
But the reality is some of what happens on TV is just TV, right? It's entertainment. And some journalism doesn't happen on TV. You know, some journalism does not translate well to TV. Sixty Minutes tries to exist in the middle of that Venn diagram. It's supposed to be really good television and really good journalism. And you can see that from Pelle, and you can see that in his emotions on uh you can see that from Pelle in his emotions uh in the New York Times interview.
There were moments that I found hard to believe. You know, Pally says that he had never heard of Barry Weiss until she was hired. That's hard to believe, given how prominent she was.
It's impossible to believe'cause even if even if even if even if Scott Pelly was not paying a lot of attention to media news, which should be a little weird. Um, the fact that Barry Weiss was gonna take over CBS News has been reported for a long time.
Even if that's not the kind of thing you would normally pay attention to, if you work at the n at the company and the new boss is coming in, you absolutely pay attention. And if you're a hundred percent checked out, maybe you shouldn't be doing the news. I find that that was a real tough one.
Thank you for saying that. It also didn't make sense to me that uh He claimed he didn't think he was gonna be fired after speaking up to the boss. Uh yeah, everyone was on firing watch, expecting him to be fired at any moment. There there were some there were some parts I thought that were that were strange, but overall he he made a really important point directly to Paramount.
He said what many of his colleagues still at CBS feel. He said to the leadership, he said, this can be fixed. He said, Barry Weiss is a lovely person who's been put in the wrong job. You can still land this plane, he said.
And Peter, that is something I've also heard from sources inside CBS today who who are glad Pelley said it. That's how they feel as well. So he was articulating something real, although I I understand the critics who say, gosh, he really sounds sanctimonious in the interview. He's overly emotional, et cetera.
also a little confused where he said, Well, Sherry Redstone, she was very bad. Uh she she made us cough up sixteen million dollars to Trump. I I agree with that sentiment. But then well David Ellison, he's a he's a good guy. He he To me that there's a direct connection between those two things into maybe that's just how you have to have to talk about the new boss and the guy who owns the company.
Well, it's like Pelly's trying to say, We were giving them a chance. We were giving the new owners a chance and it hasn't worked out. And and he's really really emphasized this idea that There's been political influence, he claimed, CBS denies, but he says the bigger issue is incompetence, uh inexperience on the part of Weiss. And that is really, I think, the focus this week. So again, almost two weeks since the firings. The question now for Paramount CEO David Allison is.
Is Barry Weiss too much of a distraction? Is this getting in the way of him getting the Paramount W B D deal approved? Is it too much of a distraction?
We get to the Ellison part, just one more thing on the Pelle thing because lots of folks keyed in on the idea that that Pelle had said, look, I have
I I have direct evidence of Barry Weiss interfering with our with our content in a way that is politically motivated. That's the second time someone from Sixty Minutes has said that out loud. Um And in both cases, I think a fair-minded observer can go, that sounds bad, but also I'm not a hundred percent sure that what he says is political bias is necessarily political bias.
It sounds like he's saying, you know, they did a story about uh federal agents murdering Renee Good, and and his interpretation is that Barry Weiss wanted that piece balanced in a way that somehow uh benefited the Trump administration.
Um
But I can imagine nuance and you say, just look, are we covering all the angles? Are we dotting all the eyes? And also what we say in an email is not what we put out uh as a report and I I can see a little bit of nuance there. And I'm not someone who is very sympathetic to to the way Barry Weiss has treated the Trump administration generally.
I think you're you're hitting on this tug-of-war between one side saying it's political interference and the other side saying, no, this is just how newsrooms work. We're just having editorial discussions. And
There should be a push and pull. There should be a back and forth. That push and pull makes the final product healthier in many cases. Uh so I I'm with you on that analysis of uh looking at his his descriptions, understanding why it was concerning to him, but not knowing if it adds up to a real thumb on the scale, the way he says he says there's been a thumb on the scale for the Trump administration.
Um now, Ellison, there's been this idea that this the the sixty minute stuff is might be too much for Ellison to bear. Either it's embarrassing or maybe it's a problem with regulators. I guess my counter to that is David Ellison's father is one of the fourth or fifth richest men in the world. Uh he's a young man. He is g gonna presumably own Paramount and uh what used to be called Time Warner for decades.
And that if he wants to, he can have a very long view and doesn't really need to worry about what people like you and I are saying on podcasts in in spring of twenty twenty six. D do you think there's any reason that he he says actually uh the Barry Weiss experiment is a failure or needs to be changed in some meaningful way?
I don't know. I don't know. I'm intrigued just like you are. I look at David Ellison, who is a new generation, younger generation of media mogul, who is coming in looking at this country, looking at profound distrust in media. I urge everybody to go back and reread his memo from October when he Aqua hired Barry Weiss and he brought the free press into Paramount. He talked about how polarized the country is, how destabilized our politics feel, how the extremes are winning out.
And how companies like Paramount have a responsibility to help people know what is real in the world, what is true. To help the folks that are in the middle, that he describes as the 70% or so of Americans who are reality-based, who are sort of in the center, who who want to know what is going on in the world. He he said a lot of really powerful things in that memo about restoring trust. Has Weiss restored trust in media is then the fair question to ask nine months later.
Yeah, I mean I I I have a real problem with that seventy percent argument. Like because it what it says it what it says is CBS is a bunch of leftist lunatics and we need to move them to the center slash move them to the right so they can regain the trust that they have squandered. by being, you know, Jacobins. Uh
Um and has CBS done that? I don't see a lot of evidence that CBS has markedly dramatically changed on television or online. By the way, I said uh nine months, it's been about eight months. You know, maybe it's too soon to evaluate what's happened at CBS News. I hear from some staffers who
barely know Barry Weiss exists. Uh, for example, in the DC Bureau. You know, then again, I also hear from staffers who are constantly getting ideas and messages from her. I don't think the content has changed dramatically. So I say to folks, judge the programming, not the people. There's lots of drama with the people. We should judge what actually airs and CBS is producing strong journalism every day, but is that because of Barry Weiss or is that in spite of Barry Weiss?
On on the business side, uh this is something Pelle talks about in his interview. Look, he says sixty minutes doing CBS News has not done well, uh compared to its peers, but sixty minutes is a strong show, uh nine million viewers at its peak. Yes, a lot of that is football, but even when football's not on, sixty minutes still gets millions of viewers.
Um it is a working television show. You know, uh when when Paramount cancelled Colbert, their argument was it loses money. There's a debate about that, but they said, you know, it was not uh financial their argument is it was a financial decision. This this argument that sixty minutes needs to be blown up, it's a melting ice cube, that's Nick Bilton's language, that we need to move it into the future.
Um let's stipulate that yes, the future's coming and we should all embrace the future. On the other hand, uh a successful broadcast television show that that attracts millions of viewers is not nothing. How where do you come down on the sixty minutes needs to be blown up slash reinvented slash? Actually we could just sort of ease our way into something now.
So I find it to be a very persuasive, compelling argument that Sixty minutes and and I acknowledge this is mostly the Weiss camp saying this on background. That 60 Minutes is really powerful, but it's out of date. It's archaic. It's too insular. Yeah. Everyone knows it literally operates from its own building across the street from the rest of CBS News. Historically, CBS News bosses have wanted to get involved with 60 Minutes.
but have been basically told to to to stay out. And uh there have been these battles in the past. Never has it blown up to the degree that it has in the past two weeks though. Weiss clearly determined to make her market sixty minutes and and and not allow the the the the historic insularity of sixty minutes to continue. You know, it comes down to a question of so so So I think there are some really strong arguments for why you should
evolve now from a position of strength while the show is still high rated rather than wait for the ratings to erode. You know, the line that Builton and Weiss used internally was if you don't disrupt yourself, you will get disrupted. I think the history of media shows that is true. But it always comes down, Peter, to not whether to do it, but how you do it. How do you execute on the plan? Isn't this the story we cover over and over again? People doing the right things, maybe in the wrong way.
I say all the time, the New York Times in twenty ten, reasonable people said this thing looks like it may not be around. It may go bankrupt, and it is now the
To work there back then.
Uh financially.
So an example of taking the right action early before it was too late. but then executing carefully, methodically, over a period of years to achieve a desired outcome. That's the New York Times story. At CBS, um, I think there are a lot of folks internally who say, You could have done this in a very different way that it would have been much more comfortable, much more constructive. Uh maybe wouldn't have led Scott Pelly to to erupt in a meeting and get fired, you know.
Maybe and or maybe some of the old guard is upset because they do get moved out. Kiitos kun katsoit!
Two weeks ago, the intent of Weiss and her inner circle was to keep Scott Pelley in the fold. They wanted him to be part of the future of 60 Minutes. So let's back up two weeks. Is there a world where instead of ousting the top producers all at once in a very sudden way? Could could this have been handled differently? Yes, Sharon Alphonse's contract was gonna be
allowed to expire. It was clear that Weiss and Alphonse were not going to see eye to eye. That relationship was going to end. But did Tanya Simon and her direct reports have to be fired the way they were? You know, one of them was out of the country when it happened, uh Pelle has said that Simon did not see this coming, e even though, you know, rumors about her fate have been swirling. Did it have to be so harsh?
Wasn't there a world where Nick Bilton could have been brought in to bring some outside energy with Tanya Simon? You know, maybe he could have been put on top in some sort of layered role. Th th in other words, Peter, there were lots of ways to do this that could have Less disruptive.
There's a Leslie Stahl interview from the weekend where she says, Uh, my producer I'm I was flying out of the country to do reporting and my producer was fired while I was flying out.
Right. Th th this happened in a very sudden, very dramatic way. That created a lot of hostility and a lot of distrust. By the way, the distrust was already there. You know, Weiss did not trust the sixty minutes folks. Sixty minutes tr folks did not trust her. This was bad from the beginning, but it became so bad two weeks ago that You now have people wondering if it's too much of a distraction for David Allison.
One one last attempt at at this. Isn't this what David Ellison wanted when he brought in Barry Weiss? who has zero television experience and is an ideologue and says, I want you to run this news organization including sixty minutes and I want you to blow it up
Isn't this what you isn't this what you're asking for? If you're not asking for the details, you are asking for there's a tree stump over there. I want you to get rid of it. I don't care if you use dynamite or a saw or a ch I don't know how you remove tree stumps. I well I need the tree stump removed. I don't care how it gets done, you go do
The implication to your question involves President Trump and Trump's anger about sixty minutes and his past law.
Or just or just
Yes.
Partly Trump, yes, but also just I just don't think this is an asset that I think this asset needs to be completely overhauled. Uh, and it will be messy. And I'm gonna hire you to do it. And by the way, you report to me. You don't report up to the news or
I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying, and I have perceived from people close to Weiss that she looks around CBS News, she was shocked by just how obsolete some of the operations were but back when she arrived last October.
shocked by how out of date the building is on West 57th Street, and looked around and said, Look, these programs, not 60 Minutes, but yes, the evening news, the morning show, these are third place morning shows, third place evening shows behind MBC, behind ABC. She looked around and she said, This place has been failing. This place has been losing. So I'm not gonna be tethered to what you were doing for 10 or 20 years. It wasn't working.
And she had a lot of latitude and sh she has and does today have a lot of latitude to say that, thanks to Ellison. But Ellison also said in his announcement the day that she was hired. He said, We're gonna make CBS News, quote, the most trusted name in news. We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact based and we want CBS to be their home.
The issue now, Peter, in June is a lot of these actions, a lot of these controversies, they have eroded trust. They have not built trust back.
Yeah. And if the premise is as as some folks think is that what we're really gonna do is build sort of a Fox News competitor because we think there can be more than one what they consider main center right, mainstream right organization. Um I don't know that you're gonna get those viewers to CBS this way, but we'll see.
You can't out Fox Fox. Yep. And and I think Weiss knows that. And let's give Weiss her due. You know, CBS News is covering stories that I don't know if it would have a year ago. CBS has been devoting more time covering cases about fraud. They've been on the immigration beat really aggressively. I think CBS has put some points on the board, and I don't want that to get lost amid all of this noise about 60 minutes.
Noted. Um Let's go back to where you started. Uh you're covering this at CNN.
Oh where did I start? Oh CNN.
Uh what give me the vibe at CNN as you guys are Both reporting this and and watching this, saying, uh these people are gonna probably own us. Uh this person may or may not be our boss. How what's yeah, what's what's the vibe in the room?
Yeah. Uh yeah. You know, full disclosure, right? I I'm covering the Paramount saga from inside the company that Paramount is trying to acquire. Uh I am very happy to say though I have full autonomy to do so. No one is influencing my reporting. No one's reviewing what I'm saying on TV. I'm sitting here in my basement where I usually do my live shots.
Uh my live shots are usually unscripted, you know, so it's it's really just me as well as my editor, Andrew Correll and and we're just the only ones that are that are reporting on this story and and figuring out how to do it and and what to say and how to frame it. So I am I'm really blessed to have that autonomy.
And and I'm aware that CNN's a much bigger organization than CBS News. So let's play this merger out for a moment. Let's say that Paramount does win all the necessary approvals um and then CNN and CBS are owned by the same company. There are a lot of great opportunities. You know, I see a lot of potential. It makes a lot of sense.
you know, as both a viewer as well as an employee of CNN. There's a lot of potential to bring those assets together. But nobody knows how it's gonna work. And, you know, you asked where the story goes now. A lot of the news coverage this week has revolved around what might that look like. There were reports Tuesday morning from Axios and Variety about Paramount trying to bring in a business side partner for Barry Weiss.
Uh I think there's some reasons to be skeptical of those stories, but it just shows the amount of uncertainty that exists right now about what that post merger landscape looks like. And I I know the other angle of all this that you're interested in is Whether the state AGs take action. These democratic state AGs, some of whom are up for re-election, are under tremendous pressure to file a lawsuit to try to block the merger. And I suspect that's gonna consume some of our summertime news coverage.
Yes, we will write about it. And there's always extra angles like uh the head of uh Paramount's chief lawyer saying that people who are opposed the mergers are anti Semites. You can go read my coverage of that in Business Insider. Um Brian When you're done reading my coverage in Business Insider, you should go then read Brian's newsletter'cause I was telling Brian before we're on the air he he writes my favorite media newsletter and I pay for many, so Thank you for joining us. Appreciate your
Thank you for that. Up to it.
Thanks again to Brian Stelter. In a minute we're gonna hear from the Virg's Neli Patel, but first a word from a sponsor.
Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough Podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week, model sports illustrated cover girl and entrepreneur Ashley Graham. talks about the time she almost quit.
I called my mom and I said, mom, I just, I'm not gonna do this anymore. And she told me, no, you are going to stick this out. Your body is going to change someone's life. Every decade, you're gonna go through something different. So be really happy with who you are right now because things change.
Check out Pretty Tough new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app.
🎵 Music
So the 2026 midterms is shaping up to be an all-out brawl. But the biggest fight may not be between Democrats and Republicans, but over the congressional maps itself.
Gerrymandering's not a good thing. We don't like it. And then all of a sudden we're going out and telling people vote for this.
So I'm in Ashland, Virginia, a small town just outside of Richmond, which calls itself the center of the universe. And that checks out because it's the center of the political universe, at least when it comes to the 2026 midterm. That's because Ashland sits in Virginia's first congressional district, which is one of only about 35 or so that are actually.
That makes for J.
particularly important when it comes to the question of gerrymandering.
Is a major problem. But it's not like Democrats drew first blood with this one. Donald Trump doesn't think he should be held accountable by anybody, so he's trying to change the rules because he doesn't like the game.
Now let's keep up the push.
America actually will be in your feeds and on YouTube. with an interesting interview in politics or culture.
Big news this week for all my Gordon Geckos, my Robin Hooders, my Claude Squad, Anthropic, which is newly the most valuable AI company in Severald, announced it would be going public. That news follows reporting that OpenAI plans to go public as soon as September, and that that news follows reporting that SpaceX, which Also considers itself an AI company, will be going public in maybe just a few weeks from now. Welcome to the era of the
🎵 Music
You're about to see millionaires. Billionaires and yes, probably even the world's first trillionaire.
Created
And yes it's
Yes! more bureaucracy.
Bros who are gonna make all the money, they need our money way more than we need their products. I'm gonna remind you why on today Explained from Vox.
🎵 Music
I'm with Neely Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. It is early June. You are in a hotel in Sunnyvale. That can mean only one thing. You've been at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Lots of hand was there hands on stuff at this point or is it just watching movies? There was.
They they were very insistent that we try the AI demos ourselves to prove that they were real this time.
All right, I've stepped on my intro, but what I was gonna say is you've seen Apple's Developers Conference, you've heard from them and um this is one of two really big Apple events, maybe the biggest Apple event every year now. That's sort of where they lay out
Here's what's coming with our operating systems or software. They'll show off a new iPhone in the fall. Usually that looks like every other iPhone, but the spring announcement is usually when they say, Here's sort of where we're headed as a company. So I think it's pretty interesting. Two years ago they said, Hey, we're gonna do some AI stuff.
Sounded kinda cool. I remember talking to Ben Thompson about it. It kinda seemed like a smart way for them to play AI, which was to let open AI and the other L L Ms kill themselves and sort of rent space from Apple on your phone. And they were gonna do this cool thing where they would use a limited amount of AI to sort of dig through your email for you and make your life better. It's called Apple intelligence.
And then it turned out that never showed up. But now they're saying it's here for real. Did I get that right?
Something like that. It it's here. It is real. I I think the sum total of what they've announced is a replacement for the free tier of chat GPT. You know this term Sherlocking? Apple developers love this term. Uh it's when
But explain it to the rest of us.
I there was this app called uh Watson a long time ago. It was like a search tool and Apple built a thing called Sherlock and just destroyed it. Right. And so every year Apple does this in their operating system is they look around the ecosystem of cool third party apps and they just build the feature into the operating system.
Cool feature. Why don't we just make it our own thing and you'll never have a reason to buy this app again.
Yep, and that's called Sherlocking in the Apple developer community. And here what they have just nakedly done is Sherlock the free version of Chat GPT. It's slightly better in some ways and you know the way it's architected is more private in in Apple's version of events.
Um we can talk about their CapEx and the fact that they're running on NVIDIA chips in Google Cloud that we can come to that. But like fundamentally the announcements add up to why on earth would you use free chat GPT when Siri is right here behind a button on your phone and it can do all the same stuff?
And so to back up even further, I can't even remember when Apple introduced Siri, but at first it seemed pretty interesting and then it's been a long running joke that it's sort slow and not useful and w most people just forgot that Siri existed. And then when ChatGPT popped up in late 2022, we're like, oh, this is kind of what Siri should be, this thing that can answer questions for you in a helpful way. Um, and then there has been this ongoing idea that
Apple should one be embarrassed about Siri, and two, it is behind NAI. And so what it did again a couple years ago is seemingly said, Yeah, yeah, we can't ever catch up to the L LMs. We're just gonna let them do the thing that we oughta do. Um, and that kinda seemed reasonable to me. Did that make sense to you at the time?
It didn't, it didn't. I two years ago we were in a entirely different AI paradigm and I I think Apple's approach mirrored their approach to everything, which is let's see how this plays out and then we'll make a great product out of it. And
I think what happened instead was the models got ever more capable and the product turned out to be writing code for you. There isn't like a another great consumer AI product, at least as far as I can tell. There are either are the chatbots and you can go ask the chatbots to do a bunch of stuff. But there's not some great AI pendant that is a threat to the iPhone. Right. That thing has not yet emerged.
Yeah, stop there because um uh you know, the the Chat GPT and and and the and its derivatives and its competitors, um sometimes people are dismissive of them. Sometimes people say, Well, it's just kinda like Google search but I think it's a great version of Google search. It's way better than Google search for me. That seems like a pretty good product, right?
It does. I think all that stuff happens on your iPhone or your Mac. OpenClaw is a thing that sells Mac minis. Uh Apple's point of view here is like great, you made software that sells our hardware. We're very happy.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's where I was going, which it sort of seemed like Apple could say, We don't need to play in AI. We have the iPhone. Everything you wanna do with AI will involve our phone. You can either pay us to be on it or We're gonna participate in this some way. It just won't involve us spending gazillions of dollars on servers and twenty four year old AI experts, and you can just use our phone, which it remains the best phone. Right.
The problem in the long run is all of those chatbots will start doing things for you in the class. And you will disintermediate the app model. And you could disintermediate Apple services revenue, which is their big line of revenue. It drives their whole business. And so if
You can talk to Gemini and G Gemini can run around a you know, a bunch of cloud services and get you the Uber and place your DoorDash order and shop for you in Chrome all running on Google's cloud. None of that stuff is happening on your phone.
Doesn't it? And then but it's still you're using your phone to access that. Everyone wants to develop glasses and pendants, but right now it's the phone. The phone remains undefeated.
So and I think this is why Sherlocking the free version of Chat GPT protects the phone right now. The problem is that long run view of how computing might go. And that's why I'm saying the killer app for AI right now is that it can do software development. 'Cause once you can do software development, you can maybe do anything digital. Right? You can write uh you know, Goo the future of Google search is custom search results that write code for you and build you a trip planning app or something.
All of that is a threat to Apple's model, which is you will pay$9.95 a month for Tripit or whatever, and Apple will take 30% of that revenue. And so I think right now what they're doing is they're saying we're going to reclaim the first cut of the interface. We're going to reclaim the chatbot. and then
Yeah.
Whatever the next app model is, we will make sure we participate.
I don't normally do this but but I just want to take one more run at it. Yeah. I use Gmail on my iPhone, I use Google Maps instead of Apple Maps, I use Spotify instead of Apple Music. Apple would obviously prefer if I use their homegrown versions of those things, and they also don't care. 'Cause I bought a thousand dollar phone from them last year and I'll buy another one
X number of years from now. Yes, they'd like me to buy to spend money on apps and stuff, but I'm not doing that. I'm I'm gonna continue to use an iPhone until there's no reason for me not to use an iPhone. And I get that one day they could be usurped by something else. But as long as there's a device involved.
They they would have to make a device that usurps their own phone, which they are maybe that's the thing that they're working on. Maybe that's what John Turnus is the CEO in order to figure out. Right? They picked up they very much picked a product guy. This is the narrative around John Turnus. Maybe that's his whole job is to figure out the next paradigm. What they can't do is assume the phone will hold for another ten or fifteen years.
Mm-hmm.
And so I think next year at the phone holds and the year after that. But if you believe that user interface paradigm shifts are what leads to new hardware, the scroll wheel brought us the iPod, the multi-touch screen brought us the iPhone, and on and on it goes. then oh you can just talk to an agent and it can go get things done for you leads you to any number of hardware form factors. One of which Johnny I is attempting to build at Open AI. Right. And so you see at least the industry is
mounting the threat and Apple needs to respond. And I think this version of Apple intelligence is a very much, oh, we can't, we have to at least protect you can talk to the phone. Because if you're not using Siri, you might use ChatGPT. And if you use ChatGPT enough or Gemini enough, then when they have the hardware, they can say, you're not even using the rest of this phone.
Bye.
So point and shoot camera and our little pendant and you'll be set and you won't have social media to distract your kids.
So I use chat all the time. Right now I use the enterprise version because my employer is a partner. with OpenAI. So they pay the fee. Will I still want to use chat as much next fall when the software rolls onto my phone or will I swap it out for Apple Intelligence? Can can it do?
If you're on the paid versions of these tools, I I don't think Siri is gonna be all that compelling for you outside of the fact that it has better access to your messages, your iMessages on your phone. Um or if you are an Apple Photos user, it has a better access to the
Index of photos on your phone. And they did re-architect a lot of that stuff, right? That its understanding of the content in Apple's ecosystem is much better than it was before. It's much faster than it was before. We've all tried to search photos and had it just beach ball out.
Can't even search email.
Yeah, that stuff is cl th they are claiming that they have fixed that and that's why Apple Intelligence wants better personal cost. So I think what you're gonna see is talking to Siri about things inside the Apple ecosystem will become vastly more compelling than talking to the other chatbots about things in the Apple ecosystem. Hey, someone texted me this. Can you find it? You're gonna want to use Siri for that. Everything else.
where you have these like long running agentic tasks or go do deep research for me because I'm on the paid tier of ChatGBT or the paid tier of Gemini. Apple's nowhere close. And even their demos aren't even trying to pretend that they're close to that.
Right. Th this is why I keep making reference to the free version of Chat GPT. That's about where they are. And even their technical specifications for the models, that context window size, all the stuff that they're actually revealing indicate, Oh, this is actually on par with the free version. It's not the million context window size that Google is very proud of, for example.
And what is their thinking, that that they're going to now belatedly spend billions of dollars and catch up and build their own L L Ms and eventually they'll reach parity or close enough to the to the big guys?
One of the most interesting parts of all of WWC, uh, is that after the keynote, which is, you know, their pre taped infomercial, they they brought all the journalists and influencers and creators, a very small group of people, into another theater and
Craig Frederig, who runs software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who runs Siri, and two of their product managers were on stage with them. Uh Tim Cook was in the front row, which had to have been nerve-wracking, uh just watching them. And they they gave it up.
Like I'm done presenting.
That was my last one.
That's a presentation. I'm done.
Uh and it was on the one hand, it was just cute. Like they're out of practice. They haven't done live events in so long that they were They weren't as polished as I've seen lots of Apple events. They're usually very polished. This was a little rougher, and I think they wanted it to be a little rougher. And they took some questions. They were obviously pre-screened on, you know, we had to submit it beforehand, but they got into it.
This is how it works. Here's the architecture slide of how Apple intelligence works versus how Gemini or OpenAI works. And the point they were making is you all think we're running on Google Services, but we're not. We use Gemini models to refine our models, Apple foundation models.
And we've re-architected our private cloud compute system to run on NVIDIA hardware and Google Cloud, but those belong to us and Apple devices only talk to Apple code. Everything is signed. This is a closed Apple ecosystem. They're just our hardware vendor and like model refinement provider. Now, how much do you believe this, right? Like we have to like s actually see and test the claims and verify it.
But the CapEx question is really interesting there. Sure, they're not doing the big data center build out, but they're paying Google enough money to support Google's big data center build outs in data centers full of NVIDIA chips.
They're kinda spend aren't they paying what are they paying Google every year?
It's a billion a year to license.
Oh, so nothing. Okay. Yeah. All right. And then me and then it's great'cause then Google is paying Elon fourteen billion for It's a big great daisy chain.
The antitrust pressure on the you know, the Google search default deal is still very high. So maybe that number goes down and you can set new search defaults, but the AI number goes up. There's a lot here, but the fact that Apple didn't pick Google TPUs, which Google's very proud of its own chips, they picked NVIDIA GPUs inside of Google Cloud Services. Like Apple has a CapEx bill for AI now, right? There's hardware that they are funding to support running its own.
We're just doing it in a way that is sort of de risked.
And and is the I've always been confused watching what we now call the Frontier Labs. the the AI guys spend gazillions of dollars every year to move make their models incrementally better, then to get matched by their competitors and then for whatever innovation they've created to become commoditized six months. 12 months down the road. And I get there's reasons why they think they need to be on cutting edge, cutting edge, cutting edge. Does Apple need to be on cutting edge for this stuff?
It depends on where. So if you look at Xcode, which is the platform that m Apple developers use to write iOS apps. All of the frontier models plug into that. So if you are an open AI codex person and you write all your code in codex, you use cloud code, you can use those models inside of Xcode, their software development platform, and they have to be
They they cannot lose developers to vibe coding platforms or agentic tools. They have to integrate those models. I don't think they have to make their own models in those cases. I think they they give you the choice. You could pick your model in the drop down, but they have to participate. I think in the parts of
the ecosystem where AI is disruptive already, Apple has to participate at the frontier. I think in the consumer world, I will just keep coming back to this, there are not great consumer products yet.
There are not products that make it obvious to every consumer in the world why we have to support data center build-outs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the energy prices go up. Like that product does not yet exist. And I think Apple's approach is to start layering on the capabilities until that product comes into focus.
Yeah, put a pin on on the the product idea. I want to come back to it. But um speaking of consumers, um after uh they uh prematurely announced Apple Intelligence in twenty twenty four, they made an ad campaign with uh the actors was it from uh
Last of Us?
Yeah. And they got sued.
It got sued, took the ad. And anyway, they they they were promising Apple intelligence in these phones, and I know because I know some normal people that even though they had no idea what Apple intelligence was, it sounded good, and when I told them I got a new phone, they said, Oh, does it have Apple intelligence?
And they were at least vaguely interested in the idea. Do you think that when Apple intelligence comes around for real next fall, that that will induce anyone to buy an iPhone who might not have bought one or to get it that much faster, or do you think this has no effect on iPhone?
I think it has no effect. I was talking to my friend Casey Newton, who was at WWDC, and he's like, It's interesting to be here, it's interesting to meet these announcements. At the end of the day, nothing Apple or Google announce at these events convinces anyone to buy an Android phone over an iPhone or convinces anyone to buy an iPhone over an Android phone. These install bases are huge.
Moving the needle is you gotta hire a hundred million new iPhone customers or fire a hundred million customers. Like you can't do it. I I think it's too hard to move the needle. They are very protective of their market share and they're protective against churn and that's why you see all the carrier deals and promotions. That stuff is all defensive at this point. The install bases are huge, everyone's minting money.
When there's great new hardware, new colors, they sell more phones, but there's not a killer feature every year.
Well remember when they introduced the talking poop emoji? That was a big deal. Yeah.
That was really good. Uh big form factor changes. The iPhone six sold a lot'cause the screens are big. I think we're all expecting a folding phone this year. Maybe that'll do it.
It's not
Those are upgraders. Those are people who have held on to phones for a long time and so sales are pulled forward or pulled uh
Yeah.
Yeah.
of success. They make such good products. Everyone has them. In fact, they hold on to them longer because they're so good. There's no need to upgrade them every year.
I think what you're gonna see though is with the thing they will market is not Apple intelligence, it's Siri. This is now an app on your phone. It is a thing you can talk to. It's a brand people know and trust and recognize. It is very marketable. It's tangible. It's coherent in a way that Apple intelligence never was. And so I think
Maybe is different than saying we've added a a six uh sensor to our phone, which you didn't know existed anymore.
Yeah. The reframe of photo, expand the background, get rid of the drunk. But I think all of that will be secondary to you can now talk to Siri and it does what you expect after all this many years of Chat GPT.
existing. What does it mean, uh, that OpenAI was their chosen partner? And now seems to be so unhappy that that they're someone is leaking to Business Week that they're considering suing Apple because they're so unhappy with the deal. Does that tell us anything about Apple or OpenAI?
I think it tells us something about both companies. From Apple's perspective, the thing that they are proudest of is they have rebuilt a system that is on par with the free chatbots. in a privacy focused way. So they have a system called private cloud compute. It is very technical, but basically protects your data. It runs on their servers and on NVIDIA chips and Google Cloud.
They can look at your email and text, no one else will.
The servers can, but no one else can and there's no data being stored. And you know, there's all these ways to protect your privacy and your anonymity and that in the in the way the data is transferred and stored. And that's all open to researchers and they want that validated. And so they spent a long time building that capability. I think Google has been their long-term enterprise partner for a lot of things, particularly the big search shield that has pressure on it.
There's a lot of reasons you want to just walk away from that antitrust litigation and say, look, the future isn't even default search engine placement in Safari. It's being our model uh provider or refiner, I guess they would call it.
Um, like you said, the future isn't even being the default search engine in Safari for 10 Blue Links. It's being our model partner on the future, which is AI. And Google can just switch those revenue lines, the anti pressure goes away. Google is good at having big corporate clients.
Right. This is a big stable company that can just assign engineers and resources to you. They can say, fine, we'll re-architect Google Cloud for you. Go ahead. Here it's done. I think OpenAI is just a vastly more chaotic company with its own interests. They also had just had a messy breakup with Microsoft. They want to be the big consumer company of the next generation. They are building their own product.
They are trying to do everything all at once without any particular focus. If you are a big enterprise customer of OpenAI, I think you're looking around and wondering, is this company even going to survive to its IPO? Is Sam Altman gonna be the CEO forever? Is Is the next set of executives gonna get fired tomorrow or something?
This is more about Apple saying we'd like more control over AI, or Apple saying we'd like to work less with open AI.
I think this is Apple's DNA. And the part of Apple's DNA that I think is most important here is called the Cook Doctrine, where he said to shareholders many years ago, we want to own and control the primary technologies that we base our products on.
In in this case, they don't own Gemini, you know, the frontier model, and maybe they're not gonna make that investment, but they own private cloud compute. They own the code that's running on those servers in Google Cloud. They own the NVIDIA GPUs and how they're being used for this stuff. And I think OpenAI ultimately wants to be a competitor to Apple in a way that the frenemy relationship with Google has settled itself down. And now these are corporate entities that rely on each other.
Instead of making a new Android, they're gonna make a new something that Johnny Ive is gonna
Right. And they're just very competitive and open AI is just very competitive. I think this led to the the Microsoft breakup. I just had Mustafa Suleiman, who's the CEO of Microsoft AI and on my podcast decoder, and he was like, It's a great partnership, but eventually they wanted to do more and we wanted to do more and goodbye. And I don't think open AI is
A big enough or old enough or sophisticated enough c company to have that frenemy relationship yet. All the other big tech players have these frenemy relationships. Apple and Meta hate each other. These are companies that are not fond of each other. Their executives are always taking shots at each other. There's no Instagram without the iPhone, and there's no iPhone without Instagram. And they know it. And so they keep a distance that is very important.
And I I think some of these other companies want to be very big, but they just haven't developed the skill set or experience or thick enough skin to pull.
We'll be right back with Neli Patel, but first a word from a sponsor.
🎵 Music
And we're back. We mentioned it. Uh John Turnus is going to be the new CEO. The Tim Cook is leaving. Long run. He was sitting in the audience, like you said. Um I don't know John Turnus at all. I've only read I think Mark German's profile of him. What w how do you think he is gonna navigate Apple through this phase in a way and how would it might how might it be different than Timco?
So I you know, I've reviewed a lot of Apple products over the years. I've been in a lot of briefings with John Turnus. Um Uh, he's a product guy. Like, you know, they they would put him in front of product reviewers and I would ask him questions about how much D RAM the iPad had and we would sit there and talk about it. There's a part of this narrative where his job is to invent the next generation of products and maybe to
Speed up hardware development. If you look at Apple, one of the most unique things about it is it doesn't have very many categories of products, it makes lots of products. There are lots of SKUs of AirPods and iPhones and iPads, but it's not in lots of categories. And one of the things that AI gets you is, oh, you can be in more categories.
This might be a layer that connects all these devices together in really seamless ways,'cause you can just talk to your new home pod and it has all the data from over here. And maybe you reach this ambient computing future where you are just talking to your your AirPods or your glasses or whatever. So I I think the narrative around Turnus is it it's his job to usher in the next class of devices. The thing that will be different is Tim Cook as statesman was his whole personality.
And and not product guy. He was specifically not a product guy. You guys make the awesome products. I'll tell you how we can build them and I'll make sure we get along with China.
Yeah, and Donald Trump. Yep. And so I don't know, you know, y you you have a show, you've interviewed lots of people over the years. I kn I've never even requested the Tim Cook interview. It it just I've watched a lot of them and it it always struck me as I'm not gonna get a lot out of this.
He is never gonna say a word he doesn't want to say.
He's never. It's it's we're never even gonna have that glimmer of emotion from him because it is not in his interest to have those glimmers of emotion. And I think the interesting thing about the Turnus era will be that Tim Cook is still there. He's still there to handle Donald Trump. He is still there to handle China. He's not going away. That's gonna be his new role at the company. And Turnus.
gets to be more of an emotive character. And you can already see it. You know, the night before WWC, Apple had a welcome reception for journalists and creators. Turnus was there. He's taking selfies with all the creators. He's cracking jokes. Big smile on the face. He's just gonna be a different kind of character and avatar for Apple because Tim Cook still exists to do the other job.
And I the the interesting part of this is when Discom took fully a step away and who will do that job in the future. There probably won't be a Donald Trump in the mix at that point, right? There probably won't be a Xi Jinping in the mix at that point.
Shrugging.
You know,'cause that might be many, many years in the future. Uh but that is the role that Cook has played at the top of Apple, and now you're gonna see that pull apart a little bit more.
Um you've said this multiple times. We're we're twenty two minutes into this interview that that there are not really signs of consumers wanting a lot of AI. They might be using AI in various ways. Um, a lot of people are actively angry about it, but a lot of people were just sort of non-plussed by it. You had a great rant you published in uh April. Great headline. It's called The People Do Not Yearn for Automation. Great title. Um, tell me what you mean and then I've got a follow up.
Sure, I think people who make software for a living think the whole world looks like software. Yep. And I love people who make software for a living. They I I'm a I'm a tech reporter for a reason. I wanna spend my time understanding this world and bringing it to a big audience and Pushing in on all the hard questions. It's the thing that I enjoy most doing in my
But if you spend enough time with software people, you're like, Oh, they have this thing that I call software brain, where everything looks like a database and a front end to the database. And if you could just put more data in the database, you can run more loops on the database to do the next thing and you can.
They're right.
In some cases they're right, but you can see it in the demos. Every Google AI demo ends in a transaction. Every time you're like, I'm watching this thing, sell me some shoes for hiking. And it like goes and searches the web and it looks at all the databases of all the shoes and it like brings you a product recommendation. And you're like, is this right? It only reflects the data that Google can get in its database.
Which might be vast. Every Apple demo, if you look at it, ended with trip planning. Yep. Because Apple doesn't care if you buy anything on the web. Google really cares if you buy something on the web. Apple doesn't care. And they're like, okay, we've assembled all the data from the databases and here's an itinerary for you to go on a trip. And you're like, this isn't actually how people think.
Like people in their personal lives as consumers are not trying to maximize productivity. Uh Ben Thompson had a good line in his newsletter. Organizations and businesses are trying to maximize time. They're trying to maximize productivity. Consumers are trying to waste it.
That's why...
Watch Instagram. Yeah, and I don't think Silicon Valley has contended with this, that in your personal life You're trying to find joy, you're trying to find entertainment. You were not trying to actually optimize everything. There's a class of people that find joy in optimization. I'm wearing a whoop band right now, right? Like I I get it, but I
These are the same people that tell me that I should be vibe coding and I go, Okay, what would I vibe code? And they go, You could rename your file folders and like I
No. Yeah, this is what I mean. And you're like every every great piece of software automates some little task, like fundamentally, right? The idea that you can look at your life and see like, oh, I do this in a repetitive way. I should build a tool that does it for me. is one kind of personality. It is not every kind of personality and it is not universally applicable. And so you see the AI companies have all landed on, oh my God, we can make software with a prompt. We can do vibe coding.
That's everything. We can solve every problem now. Every business will bend to our will. And I think consumers, regular people are like, Well, you're threatening to take all our jobs away. Yeah.
Yeah.
But our feeds are full of AI slop. We see it, we hate it. And our energy prices are going up. And I don't care to vibe code. I don't care to automate my day-to-day life. Tell me the product is good. And now, you know, all the AICS are starting to walk back their job claims. They're saying they won't take all the jobs. In fact, software engineering jobs are up. Like they've reali they've run into the political reality of their rhetoric and they're walking it all back. But I
I honestly think, and this is very reductive. I people yell at me every time I say this, but just for the sake of the argument, if you just pointed at a data center and like that's where Netflix is, people wouldn't be so mad. Yeah. Right. They would they would understand the value exchange. And they might still be mad about the power bills, they might still be mad about the noise being generated, but they would at least understand, oh, that's that's where YouTube comes from.
for the app store.
That's where the AI is going, is like, what am I getting out of that? You're just gonna take my job away. My kids don't have a future now.
Even the you know, I had Paul Ford on the show and he is a human being who codes and speaks English and he was trying to give me the human version of this and in his mind And he makes business software. It's you are uh at your desk job doing Excel or some version of Excel and you want a feature that Excel doesn't have and you tell someone who either works at your company or that your company partners with and they build you that thing.
Yep. And even that is hard for me to get my head around because who is really thinking about tweaking their software?
It depends. I think there's a lot of people whose job is essentially to use a piece of software. And lots of people have a job that kind of revolves around a piece of software. One of my jokes is that the person at your company who runs the air table is the most powerful person at your company. Right. Cause no one else is gonna sit down and figure out how to use fucking air table. But that person is like literally in charge of prioritizing the list of
And if you don't use your table, it is a productivity.
Yeah, or Trello or whatever it is that your company uses. But the person who runs that thing is the most powerful person because they get to reorganize the priorities every day. They figured out the software. That person probably has a million ideas about how to improve Airtable or Trello or whatever piece of software that they are tasked with using every day. The cost to implement those ideas used to be high, right? Someone had to be taken off some other priority. You had to pay a vendor.
Working with a vendor sucks because they don't speak our same language, their interests aren't the same as yours. Okay, now you can just tell Airtable, hey, I want you to work this way, and the code will be generated for you, or the AI will use Airtable in the way that you want it to. Maybe that person got vastly more productive. The flip side of that is maybe the boss says, I don't need you at all because I can just talk to Airtable myself.
There's no more point in learning how to use Airtable. Airtable is an interface, it's deprecated. Airtable is a database of information for my agent to go talk to is actually the future. We're gonna fire everybody. And you can kind of see this happening already.
Right. Uh Matthew Prince is CEO of Cloudflare. His justification for firing thousands of people is there's all these people in jobs that are to measure things in my company. I fired all the measurers. I just want individual contributors. This will backfire. Like anybody with an ounce of sense. is gonna say, actually we need some people to hold everyone else accountable.
They like no one's gonna listen to a computer in this way. Like at some point you actually want someone to say, I measured this. I got it right. I'm accountable for the measurement. And we need to do the the we need to either change course or double down or whatever it is we need to now.
We're on the cusp of some of the weirdest org charts and ideas in history. Jack Dorsey wants all six thousand people a block to report directly to him. Meta's putting together teams of fifty engineers and uh one manager. Who knows how this any of this
Pendulum will pendulum and they'll say, Oh, it turns out actually some managers are
It s in some way, we're gonna see something happen, but this notion that just letting people write their own software should re-architect how every organization runs kind of misunderstands the role of the person who uses the ear table.
Is does it make sense to tie this back into what Apple is and isn't doing with that a with AI, that they're not telling you that this is productivity software, that they're not telling you that this is gonna uh automate some part of your life that they're saying, Yeah, you can make better emails um and improve your photo uh and it's just gonna do sort of day to day things, or am I overthinking that?
They've actually mixed it up quite a bit. One of the demos I saw all on the same sort of run was They asked for a dinner recommendation from text messages.
And then they opened notes and they're like and then I took some messy notes at a meeting where at a project launch and like the vendors and they asked Apple Intelligence to turn that into a memo to send to the bus and then it was a hard right turn into like asking about the lyrics of a song and I was like this Most people have like a work laptop.
Like all of this stuff is not happening in the same place. Like, why are you talking about all in the same way as though my company wants my Apple account to have my work notes in it? And they kind of didn't have a good answer, right? It's this is software brain. It's to show you the demos, we have to construct these scenarios in which everything you're doing kind of looks like work until we land right on the doorstep of actual work.
And I I think that, you know, in many people's lives a lot of things look like work. I have two kids. Managing the calendars of the two children is just a an administrative burden. Great. Apple intelligence, like you take it over. Like here's the horrible PDF of the dance class schedule. Like please figure this out and put in a calendar. Happy for that to happen.
But the part where it bleeds into actual work, I think everyone's employers are gonna have a lot to say about whether it's Apple system or the Gemini system they're paying for that protects the data or some other system.
Speaking of employers, You work for Vox Media. I make this podcast with Vox Media. Vox Media is being split into two. James Murdoch and his wife are buying uh the podcast part of the business. And the part of the business you work at, the Verge and many other fine sites, is gonna be its own thing.
Uh I think it's good. I do. I really do. Um just to clarify, I host two podcasts at The Verge. I co host the VergeCast. I host the decoder podcast. Those are on the verges PL, so those aren't going. There's a lot of confusion about this. Um the Vox Media Podcast Network is at least in my experience is an ad sales network. And they're very good at it. They saw a lot of our ads. They saw your ads, right? But we don't they don't have like editorial control of us.
There just to clarify that, because I think there's a lot of confusion with that.
So none of that changed. Different company. I had the versant CEO on a few weeks ago and I was politely, I thought, needling him about, hey, you're the cast off company. Um, you know, if Comcast really wanted you, you wouldn't be a standalone company and hit an old argument about how they were gonna have new resources and they were gonna be able to invest. Is is there a version of this that you are excited about?
There is. I would say you talk to a lot of media company CEOs. Um I've talked to a lot of media company CEOs lately. Jamakov is is one of the good ones. Yeah, he he are the company still existed until this day. Many of the other companies did not come to a similar end. They just crashed and burned.
So I give him a lot of credit for navigating a millennial digital media company to an outcome that does isn't pure disaster. So tha that's the first thing. The second part is I you know, to the extent that I've had disagreements with anything it's It's a big company. It does a lot of different things. It pulls in a lot of different directions. And I always joke that Decoder is a podcast about org charts. Like,
Maybe some of that is just therapy. Like how do you exist in a big unwieldy matrix company? Uh, maybe you can figure out what I'm working through on any given week with whatever I'm asking, whatever CEO. I think a little focus. A little, you know, there there's gonna be a transaction. Some some amount of dollars are gonna flow into a company that's gonna be good. So a little t focus, a little investment, I think will be very healthy for the Verge. Um and I'm excited that
We get to try. Do you know what I mean? Like most digital media companies do not get the second shot. They they just collapse in a ruin or they get turned into SEO farms to milk the last dregs of SEO. We're not gonna we're not gonna have to do that.
Uh uh bending bending spoons is trying to go public at twenty billion dollars. I went through the S one and there's some scary shit there. If your company well, if you you know if your company gets bought by bending spoons.
🎵 Music
But um I wish you the best. Um you're very good at speaking.
Maybe. One of these days I'll figure it out.
Thank you, Dila.
Thanks again to Neil.
Thanks again to Charlotte Silver who produces and edits these shows for you. She did both these interviews and turned them around and went.
🎵 Music
Thanks to our advertisers, also awesome. Thanks to our listeners, that's you.
Everyone is off.
🎵 Music