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I'm Alex Morris, a lead producer here at Rapid Response, and I'm joined today by your host of Rapid Response, the voice of the show, Bob Safian.
Bob, how are you doing?
I'm good, Alex.
It's fun to be doing this a little differently this time.
Absolutely.
We are going to be doing something that we're calling the Rapid Recap.
This is where we go through the buzziest stories trends, key indicators from the business world recently.
Hit me with what you got.
Well, unfortunately, we do have to start with the news over the weekend.
We saw the US and Israel launch joint attacks on Iran, sparking a wider conflict throughout the Middle East.
Are there any indications about what impact this could have on the business world?
Yeah.
So, as I'm sure everybody listening realizes, it's hard to know what the implications from this are going to be in the long run at this point.
What I'd say is the one clear lesson for all of us is that disruption isn't slowing down anywhere.
Right.
I mean, we saw this with tariffs recently.
Right.
With the Supreme Court denial, not to mention, you know, advances in AI.
For listeners, we recently had Corey DeBrow on the show, the Burson CEO, former comms chief at Google and Starbucks and Salesforce.
And he, he started listing all the things that are moving around us these days.
You know all the uncertainties and the ambiguities.
And it can make your head spin, right?
And the question sort of becomes, right, like, how do we act in a world seemingly without rules?
And I think that's the question that a lot of us are asking ourselves and trying to get comfortable with.
How much of that do you think though, is acting in a world without rules, versus the rules are just going to be changed, that there will be new rules?
Well, I guess when you think back to you know several months ago where President Trump made it sound like there wasn't going to be any US involvement in overseas you know activities.
And now we see action in Venezuela and we see action in Iran.
And, you know...
That's why I sort of say rules expectations, you know, on all kinds of fronts are hard to anchor on.
So I caution folks about making decisions, you know, making quick judgments about what the impact of this is going to be on politics, on the economy.
You know, this is one of these times where we have to learn to be flexible about it and be on our toes.
When you were back at Fast Company, you wrote about this idea of generation flux.
Is this kind of what you're referring to here as well?
Yeah.
So this is going back more than a decade.
I started writing about this idea of generation flux, about sort of a group of people and businesses that were defined not by sort of their their chronological age this generation but more by their ability to deal in a time of chaotic change.
I didn't realize how quite prescient that was being, you know, but today we're all in sort of generation flux 20.
And so we have to learn to live inside it, right?
To be open to more fluid change situations and structures and systems and open to learning new skills with AI and new, different kinds of career paths.
And I think about this as sort of we all need to be entrepreneurial, whether we're entrepreneurs or not, right?
We have to have that kind of agility.
And as I've talked about this idea of generation flux over the years, one of the questions I get is like you talk about chaos, so much like what do you like about chaos?
And my response is, it's not that I like chaos.
It's just that it's a reality of the environment, right?
And we have to learn to live in that reality.
I want to move on to the news that we saw come through on Friday.
Talks fell through over Anthropic's contract with the government to use their tech.
They were concerned about their technology being used for mass surveillance, for autonomous drones.
Once they pulled out very quick from Sam Altman and OpenAI to pull in and say well, we can do that.
I'm curious what you think about this story.
What does it indicate about Anthropix brand?
Is it good for their brand, but bad for their business?
What's going on here?
In a lot of ways, we were talking about the idea of generation flux.
I mean.
In a lot of ways this is a sort of quintessential example of flux and what I call flux leadership.
Because in an environment of chaos and change, what anchors us is our principles.
It makes me think of when Ken Frazier was on our show.
He said, and I still... honestly think about this every week.
He said, a value isn't a value until you're willing to lose something for it.
Otherwise, it's just a preference.
Yeah.
So eloquent, right?
And I think that's the perspective.
That's the step that Anthropic took with the Pentagon, right?
It was in service of their business, the choice they made, and it had a cost. right?
And I think it helps define their brand even more strongly than before.
OpenAI made a different choice, reflecting different kinds of principles that will have different implications for their brand and their business over time.
They may have more of a business with the federal government going forward.
Again, none of these things are secure.
The upshot to me is that leaders will face more of these kinds of moments in this environment of chaos and in the future right.
And so, as a leader, the lesson to me is be clear about what your own principles are for yourself and for your business, so that when events like this come up, you are more comfortable recognizing this is a principle decision, and here are my principles and here's how I act on it.
Does it concern you about OpenAI, the fact that they were so quick to be like?
Whatever Anthropic has a problem with, we're cool with.
Or is that too simplistic?
I mean, I think you know Sam Altman is more comfortable being more fluid around certain kinds of things and having certain kinds of business arrangements that he can move to his advantage, which is not always bad for business.
You know, his and open ai's contention is that they have the same philosophy about about autonomous, you know, killing machines and whatnot, as as anthropic does, and that they are protected on their agreement with uh, the pentagon it's.
It's hard to know what about.
This is just sort of two groups getting crossways, which is Some of the ways it's being described now is almost personality driven, was what the breakdown was with, with Anthropic.
But, you know, clearly Sam is more willing to play ball.
And and that was more palatable to to the Department of Defense, Department of War.
My fear is that, in a world right now where everything is being so politicized and polarized, do you think we'll reach a point where the left are fans of Claude, the right use OpenAI and insane people use Grok?
You know, where are we?
I don't think people are going to make their tech tools decisions based on politics.
I think they're going to make them based on which of the tools they've helped them get the job done that they need done best.
Again, it's more about branding who's going to come work for your organization, maybe what kind of sponsors you have if you have that kind of an ad business, as OpenAI has.
But I think it's more about talent and maybe about you know, once these companies become public sort of what kind of multiples they get for their brand.
But we're really early in all those days in figuring that out.
There are so many things that go into feeding that.
And this is just one data point that we're obsessing about now and with good reason.
But it may not be the definitive one.
I want to stay in the world of AI.
Last week, fintech firm Block, run by Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter, let go of 4000 staff members out of their 10000-person workforce.
Jack Dorsey, in a statement, cited the reason being because of gains from AI.
Is this a sign of things to come, do you think?
Well, you and I have talked before about whether layoffs attributed to AI are actually one-to-one right.
Because AI is doing those jobs, as opposed to the result of disruption, of which AI is a part, but this disruption sort of demands a new structure.
And I'm not saying that Jack is lying when he points to AI.
I'm just not sure that applying this approach situation to every other business, as some news reports worry about, is necessarily apples to apples.
It may be that these are one-to-one jobs at Block, but that doesn't mean that everyone's going to have, you know, a huge layoffs because of AI.
I would say that in my conversations I think there are a bunch of tech leaders that ultimately just don't care if jobs go away from AI.
I mean, some of them rationalize that this always happens with tech waves, but many of them are really driven by what's good for them, right?
There is a race for billions for building and owning the next railroads.
And if there's collateral damage in that, as they're growing, I don't know that they really ultimately make that a priority.
We've seen this kind of thing from Silicon Valley before, even recently sort of not taking responsibility for the societal impact of tech while enjoying the fruits of it.
I remember talking to Mark Zuckerberg in probably 2017 and I asked him about whether you know, as beneficiaries of tech, we have a responsibility to help those being left behind.
And he said yes, that there was, but he certainly didn't commit resources to that the way he did, to say, developing the metaverse right.
And we've seen the impact of social media-fueled polarization and societal anger and frustration, fear about changes that have driven us apart.
It's hard not to feel like we're on a similar track with AI, perhaps even on a larger scale, for all technologies.
The billions being invested in AI systems and data centers.
How much is being committed to reskilling?
You know, do tech leaders really feel a responsibility to help the overall population win in an AI race?
Or are they just battling each other to win?
And my suspicion is it's more the latter.
I want to move into the media business.
Last week, we saw Netflix bow out of the race for Warner Brothers.
If we go back a month, Netflix looked like a sure thing to land the deal.
Were you surprised by the outcome?
I was a bit.
I mean, it has been a fascinating game to watch.
I will say that, as it comes to Netflix, I sort of applaud them not getting drawn into bidding too much.
It's kind of a rare discipline in corporate acquisitions like this for a bidder to just say you know what?
Too rich for my blood.
Yeah.
Paramount Skydance, like they needed the deal more.
This is something we had a discussion a while back with Janice Min at the Ankler, who was explaining like that Skydance needs the deal.
They need the scale to be competitive.
Now that doesn't mean that you know, buying Warner Brothers Discovery will turn out to be worth what they're paying for it, you know.
And I could see that part of Netflix's calculation is that David Ellison won't be able to make it work and they'll be able to buy what they want later at a better price, right.
The wild card, of course, is that the Ellison family has so much money, courtesy of Larry Ellison's Oracle fortune.
And so anything might happen.
Has this made David Ellison the most powerful person in media?
It's made him a player.
I don't know that I would say he's the most powerful person in media.
I think that will depend on how they execute, on whether this combination of assets that they brought together really is an effective accumulation and not just a house of brands and a lot of those brands being troubled in different ways.
I'm seeing a lot of people... fearful of the fact that part of the deal comes with CNN.
You know, we've seen how they've ran CBS News and what's happened over at 60 Minutes.
The very small silver lining that I'm holding on to is, so I'm 28.
Very few people I know or younger than me watch TV news.
And so the power of CNN and the power of CBS News.
I'm trying to just hold on to the fact that maybe that's a relic of media at a different time.
And that's not where people my age get our news.
Oh, I mean, do I think a lot of people are watching TV news and that it's going to be a growing area?
No.
But I do think that professional journalism environments drive the news cycle in so many ways so that so many of the folks that you're seeing in the channels that you're looking at they're getting their starting point, their basis, from established news channels.
Is CNN at risk?
I mean, CNN has a devoted audience of a certain kind and it would be bad business for them to disrupt that unless they felt like there was a better audience that they could find in a different way.
I don't think they're going to disrupt that just enough for the purposes of keeping one political party happy or not.
I i just don't think that will work on a business front.
I think they you know that's what's going to end up driving ultimately, the decisions they make now.
It may be that they decide we don't want to be in the news business as much and pull back resources, and that would certainly be, you know, disappointing um, And I know it makes sense for journalists to worry and lament and push back over those things, because that's the only way to stay protected in this area.
But I tend to believe that at the end of the day, quality journalism will be valued, will be around.
And it may not be as big in the buckets as TV news once was, but I still think it will be among the more dominant places that people go to.
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We saw Jeff Bezos and The Post let go of hundreds of journalists, shuttering the sports section, the book section, shrinking local and foreign coverage.
What does this indicate to you about the media business?
Well, I'll say that I've been disappointed by the Jeff Bezos era at The Washington Post.
I sort of thought that having one of the richest people in the world buy The Washington Post— meant that there would be that much more investment and resources behind a great journalism organization.
I mean when I worked at Fast Company, I was fortunate enough to work for, you know, a successful business person, one owner, a guy named Joe Mansueto, who was incredibly supportive of our investments in journalism.
And You know, Jeff Bezos has way more money than Joe does.
And so I was really hoping that he was going to bring that along.
You know, he hasn't.
It's kind of interesting because when Bezos bought the post, I sort of thought like this was his a way to marry his tech influence with influence through media, which is something that Elon Musk did by buying Twitter, which seemed crazy at the time but actually probably has worked out more influential for him in some ways than the post has been for for Bezos.
And now in this discussion, I guess you sort of have to include the Ellison's who we talked about, right?
As a media influencer alongside tech.
I'm not sure who the James Bond villain is in all this, but there is some, you know, dystopic quality to it.
I hope for the best owners with the best intentions in safeguarding our news stories, and That was my experience at Fast Company.
It's not at all clear that that's what we're getting from these sort of these, these mega owners, in this way.
Before we move on from Jeff Bezos, you know Blue Origin.
Last year he sent up Katy Perry and a few other famous people into the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.
I was at a party a few weeks ago and I was speaking to somebody who works as a costume designer here in Hollywood.
And she said that she'd worked on the Blue Origin flight.
I was asking her, oh, wow.
So like, were you having to work with, I don't know, just like the science of spacesuits?
And she says to me, like, no, it was just like any other like film costume.
Yeah.
Which I think was kind of telling in a way.
Blue Origin is not winning in the battle with SpaceX right now, right?
They're just not.
And they need all of the buzz that they can generate.
But there's a lot of money that's floating around and will flow towards space-related initiatives.
And Blue Origin may be one of those players in the long run.
One thing that we've learned is that rich billionaires love space.
They love the idea of being the guy to go to space.
So one last story in media that I want us to hear is changeover at Disney.
Bob Iger finally picked his replacement Josh DeMauro, who was running the theme parks and consumer products division.
You know, we had seen so many rumors about who could fill this position.
Even friends of the show, Brian Chesky at Airbnb, Andrew Wilson at EA, Jimmy Pataro at ESPN.
Were you surprised by the decision?
You can't be surprised that, you know, a leader at that level inside would be the choice.
Granted the previous, you know time.
They tried to succeed Iger with someone from inside.
It didn't work out quite the way they wanted.
I assume their you know their due diligence this time around was more intense or had different parameters around it.
What I really think of with this changeover at Disney.
It makes me think about the changeover that we're seeing across CEOs more broadly, the number of CEOs being replaced in the last year going way up.
The strains that CEOs have had to manage through over the last five or six years have been so intense that it's not surprising that certain folks are saying
I'm out of here.
Or that other folks are saying like we need someone newer younger fresher, with more energy to take on the nonsense and the craziness that is in the future.
There is a new generation of leadership that is coming across corporate America that I'm going to be keeping my eye on that because I'm not sure who the Bob Iger of the future is going to be.
And You know, Bob Iyer is a tremendous leader.
Is his successor going to be that person or is it going to be someone from somewhere else?
That's the sort of the, you know, the parlor game that that I'm engaged in out of all of this.
So much of the mission of the show has been about trying to cut through the noise.
And, you know, it's so hard nowadays to know what's noise versus what is worth paying attention to.
Yeah. which is why I wanted to end on a really quick rapid fire game with you, if that's okay.
Ah, okay, great.
I'm calling it noise or legit.
I will throw out some fun buzzy stories of late, and I want you to tell me whether it's noise or whether it's legit meaning.
There's more of a indication about something that we should be paying attention to for the world ahead.
Okay.
All right, great.
Let's do it.
The first one, the viral Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise AI video.
So that was produced by this Chinese, enabled by this Chinese resource, Seed Dance.
I think it's probably noise for now.
You know, Hollywood is clamping down on that sort of stuff.
Guardrails will come in.
I mean what's legit is the long-term transformation that AI will enable in, you know, creating compelling content, costs down and broadening creator impact and all that.
But we're not there yet.
It's a scare at this point, but it's not legit yet.
All right.
Elon Musk merging XAI and SpaceX.
Noise or legit?
Oh, well, that is noise, but a lot of noise, I'd say.
Like, this is financial engineering.
It's going to have an impact on how other companies act.
It'll give Musk more leeway and flexibility, potentially help him hit some of his enormous personal compensation targets.
But, like, does it make Tesla a better car?
Does it make Starlink a better service, right?
Like those are the things that are going to matter in the long run.
And, you know, just merging the companies doesn't necessarily do that.
The next one, the vibe coding wave.
I think vibe coding is totally legit.
I mean, especially with the ongoing advances, even the last few months.
As you know, Alex, the company that runs Rapid Response and MasterScale, wait, what?
We recently did a three-day AI sprint, right?
And folks with no technical background were able to create prototypes in days and hours.
Now, what does it take to make those prototypes ready to deploy, especially on mission-critical work?
Like I'm not sure vibe coding is yet up to that task, you know, without bringing in a quality human engineer, human designer, to make it feel effective and distinctive.
But the tools are getting better much, much faster.
And so it's totally legit.
Social media on trial.
Yeah.
Well, alas, I think I have to say this is noise.
I know.
I mean, I'm not saying that the social media companies are going to win at trial.
They may lose, but they have enough money to pay off what's required.
And in the big picture, I kind of think the social media genie is out of the bottle.
You know, it would require more aggressive government-backed action to really turn things around.
I know there are analogies made to cigarette smoking and you know how the courts help businesses, make businesses more accountable.
But this is more nuanced territory.
And even cigarette companies, if you notice, they're still around.
People are still smoking.
I wish I didn't think it was noise, but I suspect that in the long run, it may end up being.
Next one, the introduction of the GLP-1 pill.
Oh, so here in New York City there are these subway ads that a row has up with Charles Barkley and Serena Williams.
They're everywhere.
They're great.
They're not about the pill, but GLP-1s are legit.
The pills will make them more legit.
We had New York Times writer Sarah Cliff on the show earlier this year and we talked about the new food pyramid and new vaccine rules and the Maha movement.
And there are all these things that seem like they're questionable, that some people raise about what it's doing to our health.
New Surgeon General.
But the GLP-1 pill's reinforced that science keeps moving forward and um and that that that's really gonna gonna be the impact and you can't you know look at charles barkley on uh on you know inside the nba and not say wow these things really really have an impact all right and finally malt book the social network for ai agents noise and legit Oh, gosh, I love this story because it's noise.
Right.
I mean, there was this great Nick Thompson post, the CEO of The Atlantic, who does you know his most important thing in tech?
And he did this great story video debunking, basically explaining why Malt Book wasn't the big event that everyone was afraid it was.
And so on that end, Malt Book is noise.
The legit part is really Nick's post, which is that AI is susceptible to hype.
You know, is there going to be a SaaSpocalypse?
Software as a service is not going away.
The businesses may change, but it's not going to go away.
So I feel like finding the hype, that is definitely legit.
You know, Motebook itself, yeah, it was noise.
Well, Bob, as always, thank you so much for going through all this with me.
Happy March.
And here's to another month of the show.
Well, thanks, Alex.
Always fun.
Always fun.
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Rapid Response is a Wait What original.
I'm Bob Safian.
Our executive producer is Eve Troh.
Our producer is Alex Morris.
Associate producer is Mashumaku Tonina.
Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli.
Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday.
Our head of podcasts is Lital Malad.
For more, visit rapidresponseshow.com.
