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Channels with Peter Kafka
Brian Stelter on the 60 Minutes Mess; Nilay Patel on Apple’s AI Problem
01:06:01
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- [00:01]
Peter Kafka
Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start.
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Brian Stelter
Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte, paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is.
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Peter Kafka
With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see
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Brian Stelter
price estimates and read reviews all on the app.
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Peter Kafka
Download Today.
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Brian Stelter
Support for this show comes from Odoo.
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Nilay Patel
Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you try Odoo for free at odoo.com that's O-O-O.com. What did you steal? Secrets Disclosure day is Steven Spielberg's best film in 20 years.
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Sponsor/Advertiser Voice
Are they people?
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Peter Kafka
No.
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Nilay Patel
Are they human?
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Peter Kafka
My God, Spielberg does this better than anybody in history.
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Nilay Patel
I can see them.
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Peter Kafka
They're coming. Disclosure day. Rated PG13.
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Nilay Patel
Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. In theaters Friday. Get tickets now.
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Peter Kafka
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 Bari Weiss at CBS News in 60 minutes after a tumultuous couple weeks there. Tumultuous even by the standards of Bari Weiss and CBS News in 60 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 going to own his company in the coming months and combine it in some way with CBS News, probably run by Bari Weiss. Okay. And then I talked to the Verge's Nilai Patel, who I've known Forever, but somehow have never had on this show. So here we are. Nilay went to Cupertino to see Apple's new push into AI via its annual Developers conference. 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. Let's get to it. Here's me talking to Brian Stelter. I'm here with Brian Stelter. Brian, what is your title? Because you do everything at cnn.
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Brian Stelter
Chief Media Analyst. Because you know, that's what I do. I analyze the media just like you.
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Peter Kafka
You go on TV and do it. You send out your newsletter and then occasionally take time to talk to me. So thank you for joining.
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Brian Stelter
Good to be here. This is the fun part.
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Peter Kafka
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 60 Minutes and here we are again talking about that conversation. Tons of coverage about this. And I want to go big, big, big picture. First of all, is this story that everyone in media has been talking about about Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton and Scott Pelley 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 cable outfit. Is this story something that normal people care about?
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Brian Stelter
It is why it is. It is the rare media story that has broken containment. I see it in the most read list on CNN.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 almost never hear from. Why is it broken containment? I think because 60 Minutes is bigger than a single hour on television. It's an American institution. And what we've been covering in Trump 2.0 are American institutions under pressure in the Trump era. It's also broken through because it's a boss versus employee or an employee versus boss story. A lot of people have fantasies about speaking up and speaking truth to power to the boss. And on one level, that's what Peli did. So people have lots of opinions about that and what's the right way and what's the wrong way. But I do think 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.
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Peter Kafka
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 clock in. I mean, to be clear, CBS is a 60 Minutes is a huge show by 2026 standards. That's 9 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 60 Minutes. They certainly tell you the executive producer or who runs CBS News. And now normal people are talking about Scott Pelley and Barry Weiss. And who is this Nick Bilton character? It's kind of wild.
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Nilay Patel
You are.
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Peter Kafka
You literally have just been typing about this before coming on. For the people who are not covering the blow by blow, I think most people know that Scott Pelley was fired, slash fired himself last week. If you're following it pretty closely, you might have heard the remaining three correspondents at 60 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?
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Brian Stelter
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 because 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 in Trump, how the CBS newsroom has still been providing aggressive coverage of Trump despite the corporate parents relationships. Paramount, of course, trying to buy CNN and the rest of Warner Brothers discovery. Paramount urgently trying to get that deal approved. 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 Bari Weiss doing at CBS? She essentially blew up 60 Minutes by firing people, firing correspondents, firing producers, bringing in Bilton. You know, all of that happened in a way that has created distrust, has created concern and anxiety among CBS 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 guess I'm proposing more questions than answers, but I think that's where we stand now today, nearly two after the first firings of 60 Minutes. Does that sound right to you? You're the one on the outside covering it.
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Peter Kafka
60 Minutes is not on the air. We won't see it again until the fall. Our understanding is there are three remaining correspondents at 60 Minutes. Presumably they will hire some more. I think you and others have raised the question, like, how are they even going to produce a show next fall? I assume that it will air in the fall. But what's interesting to me is that Barry Weiss and then Nick Bilton said 60 minutes and all of CBS News has to change. We have to blow it up. Essentially, they blew up half of it over the last couple weeks. They also said, oh, the remaining old fixtures of 60 minutes, we need to keep those. Those are very important. Do we imagine they're going to have an entirely reimagined 60 Minutes in time for the fall, or does it kind of look like 60 minutes was this year?
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Brian Stelter
I think it will look mostly like 60 Minutes this year, and here's why. Bilton said to me when he was first hired the core of 60 minutes will remain 60. He said the Sunday show will not change. Of course, it will have to some degree, because he needs to hire correspondence. And Bari Weiss is excited about that part. She wants to bring in new talent, new outside voices and energy. 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 60 minutes or does not. But for the most part, it's still gonna be three mini documentaries every Sunday. What built in 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 60 Minutes and CBS who say, hey, we were doing well online, we were making TikTok videos, we were publishing on social versus another side, the Bari Weiss side, who says you all need to push much more aggressively in that direction. You all think you were online. You need to do so much more online. And Bilden says he has lots of ideas for doing that. So there's definitely a tug of war about what is 60 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 real concern, I think, among viewers, certainly among media critics, is about whether the show's 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 green lighting 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.
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Peter Kafka
The other thing that happened last week is that Scott Pelley, 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 is, you may have more than one take. What is your take? What are your takeaways from that interview?
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Brian Stelter
There are moments where he sounds self indulgent. There are moments where he sounds theatrical and performative in the way that 60 Minutes correspondence always have been. They've both been beloved and criticized for that dating back to the days of Mike Wallace and Don.
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Peter Kafka
It's a good point to remember, like 60 Minutes is not just a news show, right? It's an entertainment. And the part of the entertainment is watching these anchors perform 100%.
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Brian Stelter
And it's okay to talk about that and not avoid it in television. 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. 60 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 Peli and you can see that in his emotions. On. You can see that from Peli in his emotions. In the New York Times interview, there were moments that I found hard to believe. You know, Pelly says that he had never heard of Bari Weiss until she was hired. That's hard to believe given how prominent she was.
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Peter Kafka
It's impossible to believe because even if, even if, even if, even if Scott Pelley was not paying a lot of attention to media news, which would be a little weird, the fact that Barry Weiss was going to 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, at the company and the new boss is coming in, you Absolutely pay attention. And if you're 100% checked out, maybe you shouldn't be doing the news. I find that that was a real tough one.
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Brian Stelter
Thank you for saying that. It also didn't make sense to me that he claimed he didn't think he was gonna be fired after speaking up to the boss. Everyone was on firing watch expecting him to be fired at any moment. There were some parts I thought that were strange. But overall, 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, Bari Weiss is a love who has 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 are glad Pelly said it. That's how they feel as well. So he was articulating something real. Although I understand the critics who say, gosh, he really sounds sanctimonious in the interview. He's overly emotional, et cetera.
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Peter Kafka
I was also a little confused where he said, well, Sherry Redstone, she was very bad. She made US cough up $16 million to Trump. I agree with that sentiment. But then, well, David Ellison, he's a good guy. To me that there's a direct connection between those two things. And maybe that's just how you have to have to talk about the new boss and the guy who owns the company.
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Brian Stelter
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 he's really, really emphasized this idea that there's been political influence he claims CBS denies. But he says the bigger issue is incompetence, 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 Ellison is, is Barry Weiss too much of a distraction? Is this getting in the way of him getting the Paramount WBD deal approved? Is it too much of a distraction?
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Peter Kafka
Before we get to the Ellison part, just one more thing on the Peli thing, because lots of folks keyed in on the idea that Peli had said, look, I have direct evidence of Bari Weiss interfering with our content in a way that is politically motivated. That's the second time someone from 60 Minutes has said that out loud. And in both cases, I think a fair minded observer can go, that sounds bad, but Also, I'm not 100% 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 federal agents murdering Renee Good. And. And his interpretation is that Barry Weiss wanted that piece balanced in a way that somehow benefited the Trump administration. But I can imagine nuance. And you say, just look, are we covering all the angles? Are we dotting all the I's? And also what we say in an email is not what we put out as a report. And I can see a little bit of nuance there. And I'm not someone who is very sympathetic to the way Bari Weiss has treated the Trump administration generally.
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Brian Stelter
I think 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. So I'm with you on that analysis of looking at 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.
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Peter Kafka
Now Ellison, there's been this idea that the 60 minute stuff 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. He's a young man. He is going to presumably own Paramount and 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 spring of 2026. Do you think there's any reason that he says actually the Bari Weiss experiment is a failure or needs to be changed in some meaningful way?
- [16:26]
Brian Stelter
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 Bari 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. He describes as the 70% or so of Americans who are reality based, who are sort of in the center, who want to know what is going on in the world. 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?
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Peter Kafka
Yeah, I mean, I. I have a real problem with that 70% argument. Like, because what it says, 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.
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Brian Stelter
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 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 Bari Weiss exists, for example, in the D.C. 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
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Peter Kafka
Weiss on the business side? It's something Pelly talks about in his interview. Look, 60 Minutes doing CBS News has not done well compared to its peers. But 60 Minutes is a strong show. Nine million viewers at its peak. Yes, a lot of that is football. But even when football's not on, 60 minutes still gets millions of viewers. It is a working television show. You know, when, when Paramount canceled Colbert, their argument was it loses money. There's a debate about that, but they said it was not financial. Their argument is it was a financial decision. This argument that 60 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. Let's stipulate that, yes, the future is coming and we should all embrace the future. On the other hand, a successful broadcast television show that attracts millions of viewers is not nothing. Where do you come down on the 60 minutes needs to be blown up. Reinvented, slash. Actually, we could just sort of ease our way into something else.
- [19:18]
Brian Stelter
So I find it to be a very persuasive compelling argument that 60 Minutes, 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. 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 in 60 minutes but have been basically told to to stay out. And 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 mark at 60 minutes and not allow the historic insularity of 60 minutes to continue. Now it comes down to a question. 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 Reagan's to erode. You know, the line that Bilton 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 ways?
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Peter Kafka
I say all the time, the New York Times in 2010, reasonable people said, this thing looks like it may not be around, it may go bankrupt. And it is not.
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Brian Stelter
It was scary to work there back then.
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Peter Kafka
You were there. And it is now by far, I think, the strongest news outlet in the country, if not the world, financially.
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Brian Stelter
That is 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. I think there are a lot of folks internally who say you could have done this in a very different way. That would have been much more comfortable, much more constructive. Maybe you wouldn't have led Scott Pelley to erupt in a meeting and get
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Peter Kafka
fired and, or maybe, and, or maybe some of the old guard is upset because they do get moved out. But there's a way to do it.
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Brian Stelter
But 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 this have been handled differently? Yes. Sharon Alfonse's contract was going to be allowed to expire. It was clear that Weiss and Alfonsi were not going to see eye to eye. That relationship was going to end. But did Tan Simon and her direct reports have to be fired the way they were? One of them was out of the country when it happened. Pelia said that Simon did not see this coming, even though 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 Tonya Simon? Maybe he could have been put on top in some sort of layered role. In other words, Peter, there were lots of ways to do this that could have been less disruptive.
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Peter Kafka
Yeah. There's a Lesley Stahl interview from the weekend where she says, my producer, I was flying out of the country to do reporting and my producer was fired while I was flying out.
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Brian Stelter
Right. 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 60 Minutes folks. 60 Minutes folks did not trust her. This was bad from the beginning, but it became so bad two weeks ago that. That you now have people wondering if it's too much of a distraction for David Ellison.
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Peter Kafka
One, one last attempt 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 60 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 I don't know how you remove tree stumps. I need the tree stump removed. I don't care how it gets done. You go do it.
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Brian Stelter
The implication to your question involves President Trump and Trump's anger about 60 Minutes and his past lawsuit and the settlement and the desire to appease him.
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Peter Kafka
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 and it will be messy. And I'm gonna hire you to do. And by the way, you report to me, you don't report up to the news organization.
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Brian Stelter
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 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 NBC, 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 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.
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Peter Kafka
Yeah. And if the premise is, as some folks think, is that, well, what we're really going to 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. I don't know that you're going to get those viewers to CBS this way, but we'll see.
- [25:06]
Brian Stelter
You can't out Fox. Fox 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.
- [25:31]
Peter Kafka
Let's go back to where you started. You're covering this at cnn.
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Brian Stelter
Oh, where did I start? Oh, cnn.
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Peter Kafka
What? Give me the vibe at CNN as you guys are both reporting this and watching this, saying these people are going to probably own us. This person may or may not be our boss. What's the vibe in the room?
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Brian Stelter
Yeah, yeah. Full disclosure, right? I'm covering the Paramount saga from inside the company that Paramount is trying to acquire. I am, 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. My live shots are usually unscripted. So it's really just me as well as my editor Andrew Carell. And we're just the only ones that are reporting on this story and figuring out how to do it and what to say and how to frame it. So I'm really blessed to have that autonomy. 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' that Paramount does win all the necessary approvals. And then CNN and CBS are owned by the same company. There are a lot of great opportunities. I see a lot of potential. It makes a lot of sense 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 going to work. 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 bit. 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 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 reelection, 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.
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Peter Kafka
Yes, we will write about it. And there's always extra angles like the head of 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. Brian, when you're done reading my coverage in Business Insider, you should go then read Brian's newsletter because I was telling Brian before we on the air he, he writes my favorite media newsletter and I pay for many. So thank you for joining us. Appreciate you.
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Brian Stelter
Thank you for that endorsement. I will try to live up to to it.
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Peter Kafka
Thanks again to Brian Stelter. In a minute we're going to hear from the Bridges Nilai Patel. But first a word from a sponsor.
- [28:09]
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Peter Kafka
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Nilay Patel
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Nilay Patel
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Peter Kafka
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Nilay Patel
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- [29:39]
Brian Stelter
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- [30:13]
Peter Kafka
I'm with Nilay Patel, Editor in chief of the Verge. It is early June. You are in a hotel in Sunnyvale. That can mean only one thing.
- [30:21]
Brian Stelter
Thing.
- [30:22]
Peter Kafka
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?
- [30:28]
Nilay Patel
There was. They were very insistent that we try the AI demos ourselves to prove that they were real this time.
- [30:36]
Peter Kafka
All right, I've stepped on my intro, but what I was going to say is you've seen Apple's developers conference, you've heard from them and 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, our 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 going to do some AI stuff. Sounded kind of cool. I remember talking to Ben Thompson about it. It kind of seemed like a smart way for them to play AI, which was to let OpenAI and the other LLMs kill themselves and sort of rent space from Apple on your phone. And they were going to do this cool thing where they would use a limited amount 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?
- [31:31]
Nilay Patel
Something like that. It's here. It is real. I think the sum total of what they've announced is a replacement for the free tier of ChatGPT. You know this term Sherlocking? Apple developers love this term. It's one of the.
- [31:44]
Peter Kafka
Yes, but explain it to the rest
- [31:45]
Nilay Patel
the of there was this app called Watson a long time ago. It's like a search tool and Apple built a thing called Sherlock and just destroyed it. And so every year Apple does this in their operating systems. They look around the ecosystem of cool third party apps and they just build the feature into the operating system.
- [31:59]
Peter Kafka
That's a cool feature. Why don't we just make it our own thing and you'll never have a reason to buy this app again.
- [32:04]
Nilay Patel
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 ChatGPT GPT. It's slightly better in some ways and the way it's architected is more private. In Apple's version of events, we can talk about their capex and the fact that they're running on Nvidia chips in Google Cloud. We can come to that. But fundamentally the announcements add up to why on earth would you use free chatgpt when Siri is right here behind a button on your phone and it can do all the same stuff?
- [32:34]
Peter Kafka
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 is slow and not useful. And most people just forget, 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. 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 LLMs, we're just going to let them do the thing that we ought to do. And that kind seemed reasonable to me. Did that make sense to you at the time?
- [33:20]
Nilay Patel
It didn't. It didn't. Two years ago we were in an entirely different AI paradigm and 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 another great consumer AI product, at least as far as I can tell. There are the chatbots and you can go ask the chatbots do a bunch of, of stuff, but there's not some great AI pendant that is a threat to the iPhone. Right. That thing has not yet emerged.
- [33:55]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, stop there. Because you know, the, the chat GPT and, and the, and its derivatives and its competitors, sometimes people are dismissive of them, sometimes people say, well, it's just kind of 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?
- [34:16]
Nilay Patel
It does. I think all that stuff happens on your iPhone or your Mac. Openclaw is a thing that sells Mac Minis. Apple's point of view here is like great, you made software that sells our hardware. We're very happy for you.
- [34:27]
Peter Kafka
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 want to do with AI will involve our phone. You can either pay us to be on it or we're going to participate in this some way. It just won't involve us spending gazillions of dollars on servers and 24 year old AI experts and you can just use our phone, which it remains the best phone.
- [34:52]
Nilay Patel
Right. The problem in the long run is all of those chatbots will start doing things for you in the cloud 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 it's if you can talk to Gemini and Gemini can run around 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.
- [35:21]
Peter Kafka
Doesn't it? But it's still you're using your phone to access that.
- [35:25]
Nilay Patel
It is, right.
- [35:25]
Peter Kafka
And I know everyone wants to develop glasses and pendants, but right now it's the phone. The phone remains undefeated.
- [35:31]
Nilay Patel
So and I think this is why Sherlocking, the free version of ChatGPT protects the phone right now. 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. Because once you can do software development, you can maybe do anything digital, right? You can write, you know, 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 9.95amonth 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 whatever the next app model is, we will make sure we participate.
- [36:13]
Peter Kafka
I don't normally do this, 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 because I bought a thousand dollar phone from them last year and I'll buy another 1x 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 going to 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,
- [36:53]
Nilay Patel
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 that's what John Ternus is the CEO. In order to figure out they very much picked a product guy. This is the narrative around John Ternus. 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 10 or 15 years. And so I think next year 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 Jony I is attempting to build at OpenAI.
- [37:39]
Peter Kafka
Right.
- [37:40]
Nilay Patel
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 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. Okay, buy a point and shoot camera in our little pendant and you'll be set and you won't have social media to distract your kids.
- [38:09]
Peter Kafka
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 app Apple Intelligence? What can it do if you're on
- [38:27]
Nilay Patel
the paid versions of these tools, I don't think Siri is going to be all that compelling for you outside of the fact that it has better access to your messages, your imessages on your phone 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. 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 at us.
- [38:51]
Peter Kafka
Can't even search email.
- [38:52]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, that stuff is. They are claiming that they have fixed that and that's why Apple Intelligence want better personal context. So I think what you're going to 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 going to want to use Siri for that. Everything else where you have these like long running agentic tasks or, or go do deep research for me because I'm on the paid tier of ChatGPT or the paid tier of Gemini. Apple's nowhere close to that and even their demos aren't even trying to pretend that they're close to that. Right? This is why I keep making reference to the free version of ChatGPT. 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 in context window size that Google is very proud of, for example.
- [39:46]
Peter Kafka
And what is their thinking? That they're going to now belatedly spend billions of dollars and catch up and build their own LLMs and eventually they'll reach parity or close enough to the big guys.
- [39:57]
Nilay Patel
One of the most interesting parts of all of WWDC is that after the keynote which is their pre taped infomercial, they brought all the journalists and influencers and creators, a very small group of people into another theater. Theater. And Craig Federigh who runs software engineering and Mike Rockwell who runs Siri and two of their product managers were on stage with them. Tim Cook was in the front row which had to have been nerve wracking just watching them and they gave a presentation.
- [40:21]
Peter Kafka
I'm done presenting. That was my last presentation. I'm done.
- [40:25]
Nilay Patel
And on the one hand it was just cute. They're out of practice. They haven't done live events in so long that 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 rough rougher and they took some questions. They were obviously pre screened and we had to submit them 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 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 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 channels chips.
- [41:33]
Peter Kafka
They're trying to spend, aren't they paying, what are they paying Google every year
- [41:36]
Nilay Patel
It's a billion a year to license.
- [41:38]
Peter Kafka
Billion. Oh, so nothing.
- [41:39]
Nilay Patel
Okay, yeah.
- [41:40]
Peter Kafka
All right. And then me and then it's great because then Google is paying Elon 14 billion for.
- [41:44]
Nilay Patel
For. Yeah.
- [41:45]
Peter Kafka
And you know, great daisy chain.
- [41:46]
Nilay Patel
And 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.
- [42:13]
Peter Kafka
They went from we're not chasing AI to we're, we're in it.
- [42:16]
Nilay Patel
We're just doing it in a way
- [42:17]
Peter Kafka
that is sort of de risked and, and is. I've always been confused watching what we now call the frontier labs. The AI guys spend spend gazillions of dollars every year to move make their models incrementally better than to get matched by their competitors. And then for whatever innovation they've created to become commoditized 6 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?
- [42:51]
Nilay Patel
It depends on where. So if you look at Xcode, which is the platform that Apple developers use to write iOS apps, all of the frontier models plug into that. So if you are an OpenAI codecs 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 there. 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 give you the choice. You could pick your model in the dropdown but they have to portray 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'll 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.
- [43:51]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, put a pin on, on the, the product idea. I want to come back to it. But speaking of consumers, after they prematurely announced Apple Intelligence In 2024, they made an ad campaign with the actors. Was it from Last of us?
- [44:07]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And they got sued.
- [44:09]
Peter Kafka
They 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 intelligence in it? 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 sales?
- [44:40]
Nilay Patel
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 see these announcements. At the end of the day, nothing Apple or Google announced at these events convinces anyone to buy an Android phone over an iPhone phone or convinces anyone to buy an iPhone over an Android phone. These install bases are huge. Moving the needle is you gotta hire 100 million new iPhone customers or fire 100 million customers. Like, you can't do it. I think it's almost too hard to move the needle. They're 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 spending money. When there's great new hardware, new colors, they sell more phones. But there's not a killer feature every year.
- [45:23]
Peter Kafka
Well, remember when they introduced the talking poop emoji? That was a big deal.
- [45:27]
Nilay Patel
That was really good. Big form factor changes. The iPhone 6 sold a lot because the screens are big. I think we're all expecting a folding phone this Year, maybe that'll do it. But it's not. Those are upgraders. Those are people who have held onto phones for a long time and so sales are pulled forward or pulled. And this is Apple operators who are lagging.
- [45:46]
Peter Kafka
Curse of success. They make such good products, everyone has them. In fact, they hold onto them longer because they're so good there's no need to upgrade them every year.
- [45:54]
Nilay Patel
I think what you're going to see though is 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 and maybe is
- [46:11]
Peter Kafka
different than saying we've added a sixth sensor to our phone which you didn't even know existed anyway.
- [46:18]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, you know, we'll probably see some of the photography stuff get marketed, the reframe a photo, expand the background, get rid of the junk. 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 ChatGPT existing.
- [46:33]
Peter Kafka
What does it mean that OpenAI was their chosen partner and now seems to be so unhappy that someone is leaking to BusinessWeek that they're considering suing Apple because they're so unhappy with the deal. Does that tell us anything about Apple or OpenAI AI?
- [46:50]
Nilay Patel
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
- [47:12]
Peter Kafka
look at your email and text. No one else will.
- [47:14]
Nilay Patel
The servers can, but no one else can. And there's no data being stored. And there's all these ways to protect your privacy and your anonymity 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 deal 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 is an easy even default search engine placement in Safari. It's being our Model provider or refiner, I guess they would call it. Like I 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 antitrust pressure goes away. Google is good at having big corporate clients. 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 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 just had a messy breakup with Microsoft. They want to be the big consumer company of the next generation. They are building their own products. 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 going to be CEO forever? Is the next set of executives going to get fired tomorrow?
- [48:42]
Peter Kafka
So do you think this is more about Apple saying we'd like more control over AI or Apple saying we'd like to work less with OpenAI?
- [48:51]
Nilay Patel
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 technology that we base our products on. In this case, they don't own Gemini, the frontier model, and maybe they're not going to 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.
- [49:27]
Peter Kafka
Instead of making a new Android, they're going to make a new something that Jony I've is going to make, right?
- [49:32]
Nilay Patel
And they're just very competitive and OpenAI 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 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 OpenAI is a big enough or old enough or sophisticated enough 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 it off.
- [50:19]
Peter Kafka
We'll be right back with Nilai Patel, but first, a word from a sponsor.
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Nilay Patel
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- [52:30]
Peter Kafka
And we're back. We mentioned it. John Ternus is going to be the new CEO that Tim Cook is leaving. Long run sitting in the audience. Like you said, I don't know John Ternus at all. I've only read, I think, Mark Gurman's profile of him. How do you think he is going to navigate Apple through this phase in a way? And how would it might, how might it be different than Tim Cook?
- [52:53]
Nilay Patel
So, you know, I've reviewed a lot of Apple products over the years. I've been in a lot of briefings with John Ternus. He's a product guy. Like, you know, they would put him in front of product reviewers and I would ask him questions about how much DRAM the iPad had and would sit there and talk about it. But 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 because you, you can just talk to your new HomePod and it has all the data from over here and maybe you reach this ambient computing future where you are just Talking to your AirPods or your glasses or whatever. So I think the narrative around Ternus is that 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
- [53:56]
Peter Kafka
personality and not product guy. He was specifically not 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. Along with China.
- [54:04]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And Donald Trump.
- [54:05]
Peter Kafka
Yep.
- [54:06]
Nilay Patel
And so I don't know, you know, you have a show, you've interviewed lots of people over the years. I've never even requested the Tim Cook interview. It just, I've watched a lot of them and it always struck me as I'm not going to get a lot out of this.
- [54:20]
Peter Kafka
He is never going to say a word. He doesn't want to say he's never,
- [54:24]
Nilay Patel
we're never even going to have that glimmer of emotion from him because it is not in his interest in 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 going to be his new role at the company. And Ternus 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 face. He's just going to be a different kind of character and avatar for Apple because Tim Cook still exists to do the other job. And the interesting part of this is when does Kim took fully 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 because that might be many, many years in the future. But that is the role that Cook has played at the top of the Apple and now you're going to see that pull apart a little bit more.
- [55:26]
Peter Kafka
You've said this multiple times. We're 22 minutes into this interview that there are not really signs of consumers wanting a lot of AI. They might be using AI in various ways. A lot of people are actively angry about it, but a lot of people are just sort of non plussed by it. You had a great rant you published in April. Great headline. It's called the People Do Not Yearn for Automation Nation. Great title. Tell me what you mean and then I've got a follow up.
- [55:56]
Nilay Patel
Sure. I think people who make software for a living think the whole world looks like software.
- [56:03]
Peter Kafka
Yep.
- [56:04]
Nilay Patel
And I love people who make software for a living. I'm a tech reporter for a reason. I want to spend my time understanding this world and bringing it to a big audience and pushing on all the hard questions. It's the thing that I enjoy most doing in my work day. 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 just put more data in the database you can run more loops on the database to do the next thing and you can see it.
- [56:31]
Peter Kafka
They're right.
- [56:32]
Nilay Patel
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 goes and searches the Web and it looks at all the databases of all the shoes, and it brings you a product, 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, 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. Are not trying to maximize productivity. 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.
- [57:26]
Peter Kafka
Right.
- [57:27]
Nilay Patel
That's why we watch Instagram.
- [57:29]
Peter Kafka
Yeah.
- [57:29]
Nilay Patel
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 are not trying to actually optimize everything. There is a class of people that find joy in optimization. I'm wearing a whoop band right now, right? Like, I get it, but I.
- [57:45]
Peter Kafka
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, no.
- [57:54]
Nilay Patel
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. And it's 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. That 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.
- [58:38]
Peter Kafka
And if you're telling me the process is going to develop a wonder drug, like I don't have a wonder drug, so let me where is it? Shows up.
- [58:44]
Nilay Patel
And now all the AIC 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. They've run into the political reality of their rhetoric and they're walking it all back. But I honestly think, and this is very reductive, 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 like that's where Netflix is, people wouldn't be so mad. Right. 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 where YouTube comes from.
- [59:21]
Peter Kafka
That's where the App Store is.
- [59:22]
Nilay Patel
Right. That's where the AI is going, is like, what am I getting out of that? You're just going to take my job away? My kids don't have a future now.
- [59:29]
Peter Kafka
And even the. 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, he makes business software. It's you are 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.
- [59:53]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [59:54]
Peter Kafka
And even that is hard for me to get my head around because who is really thinking about tweaking their software mix?
- [60:00]
Nilay Patel
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 Airtable is the most powerful person at your company. Right. Because no one else is going to sit down and figure out how to use fucking Airtable, but that person is like literally in charge of prioritizing the list.
- [60:21]
Peter Kafka
And if you don't use Airtable, it is a productivity software.
- [60:24]
Nilay Patel
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 of sort 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. 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 your 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 going to fire everybody. And you can kind of see this happening already, right? Matthew Prince, the CEO of cloudflare, his justification for firing thousands of people is there's all these people and jobs that are to measure, measure things. At my company, I fired all the measurers. I just want individual contributors. This will backfire. Like anybody with an ounce of sense is going to say, actually, we need some people to hold everyone else accountable. No one's going to listen to a computer in this way. 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 either change course or double down or whatever it is we need to do next. We're on the cusp of some of the weirdest org charts and ideas in history. Jack Dorsey wants all 6,000 people blocked to report directly to him. Metis putting together teams of 50 engineers and one manager. Who knows how this, any of this
- [62:03]
Peter Kafka
pendulum will pendulum and they'll say, oh, it turns out actually some managers are
- [62:07]
Nilay Patel
good in some way. We're going to 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 airtable.
- [62:24]
Peter Kafka
Does it make sense to tie this back into what Apple is and isn't doing with that with AI that they're not telling you that this is productivity software, that they're not telling you that this is going to automate some part of your life that they're saying, yeah, you can make better emails and improve your photo and it's just Going to do sort of day to day things, or am I overthinking that?
- [62:43]
Nilay Patel
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 about a project launch and, like, vendors. And they asked Apple Intelligence to turn that into a memo to send to the boss. 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 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 worknotes in it. And they kind of didn't have a good answer. Right. This is software brain. 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 think that, you know, in many people's lives, a lot of things look like work. Like, I have two kids managing the calendars. The two children is just 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 going to 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.
- [64:01]
Peter Kafka
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 the podcast part of the business. And the part of the business you work at, the Verge and many other fine sites, is going to be its own thing. What do you think about that?
- [64:24]
Nilay Patel
I think it's good. I do. I really do. Just to clarify, I host two podcasts of the Verge. I co host the Vergecast, I host the Decoder podcast. Those are on the Verge's P and L, so those aren't going. And there's a lot of confusion about this. The Vox Media podcast network is, at least in my experience, is an ad sales network. And they're very good at it. They sell a lot of our ads. They sell your ads.
- [64:44]
Peter Kafka
Right.
- [64:44]
Nilay Patel
But they don't have, like, editorial control of us. So just to clarify that, because I think there's a Lot of confusion about that. None of that changes version of the podcast. None of that changes.
- [64:54]
Peter Kafka
You'll be at a 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 castoff company. You know, if Comcast really wanted you, you wouldn't be a standal loan company and hit an old argument about how they were going to have new resources and they were going to be able to invest. Is there a version of this that you are excited about?
- [65:17]
Nilay Patel
There is, I would say. You talk to a lot of media company CEOs? I've talked to a lot of media company CEOs lately. Jimagoff is one of the good ones. 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 isn't pure disaster. So that's the first thing. The second part is, to the extent that I've had disagreements with anything, 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. Maybe some of that is just therapy. How do you exist in a big, unwieldy matrix company? Maybe you can figure out what I'm working through on any given week with whatever I'm asking, whatever. CEO. CEO. I think a little focus, a little, you know, there's going to be a transaction, some, some amount of dollars are going to flow into a company that's going to be good. So a little focus, a little investment I think will be very healthy for the Verge. 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 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.
- [66:35]
Peter Kafka
Bending. Bending spoons is trying to go public at $20 billion. I went through the S1 and there's some scary there. If your company, well, you know, if your company gets bought by bending spoons, things have gone badly and then they're not going to go better for you personally. But I wish you the best. You're very good at speaking. You should do a podcast.
- [66:55]
Nilay Patel
Maybe one of these says I'll figure it out.
- [66:56]
Peter Kafka
Thank you. D Stay touch.
- [66:58]
Nilay Patel
Thanks, man.
- [66:59]
Peter Kafka
Thanks again to Nili thanks again to Brian. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver who produces and edits these shows for you. She kicks ass. She did both these interviews and turned them around in one day. She is awesome. Thanks to our advertisers. Also awesome thanks to our listeners. That's you. Everyone is awesome. See you next week.
- [67:22]
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