Rapid Recap: Iran, Anthropic vs. Pentagon, Paramount’s win, and more

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1:55Alex Morris:Stories, trends, key indicators from the business world recently. Hit me with what you got.

2:05Alex Morris: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.

2:22Bob Safian: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 started listing all the things that are moving around us these days, you know, all the uncertainties and the ambiguities.

3:02Bob Safian: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 that a lot of us are asking ourselves and trying to get to get comfortable with.

3:20Alex Morris: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?

3:30Bob Safian:Well, I guess when you when you think back to, you know, several months ago where President Trump made it sound like there wasn't going to be any U.S. involvement in overseas, you know, activities. And now we we see action in Venezuela and we see action in in Iran. And, you know, that's why I sort of say rules, expectations on all kinds of fronts are are hard to are hard to to anchor on. So I caution folks about making, 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.

4:22Alex Morris: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.

4:31Bob Safian: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 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 2.0. And so we have to learn to live inside it, right, to be open to more fluid 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?

5:21Bob Safian: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.

5:45Alex Morris:I want to move on to the news that we saw come through on Friday. Talks fell through over Anthropik'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?

6:23Bob Safian:In a lot of ways, we were talking about the idea of Generation Flux. I mean, in a lot of ways, is 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.

6:39Alex Morris: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.

6:53Bob Safian:Yeah, so, 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.

7:40Bob Safian: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 principal decision and here are my principles and here's how I act on it. Does it concern you about open AI, the fact that they were so quick to be like,

8:07Alex Morris:whatever Anthropik has a problem with, we're cool with? Or is that too simplistic?

8:15Bob Safian: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 as almost personality-driven was what the breakdown was with Anthropic.

9:04Bob Safian:But, you know, clearly, Sam is more willing to play ball. And that was more palatable to the Department of Defense, Department of War.

9:17Alex Morris: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?

9:39Bob Safian: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 help 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 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's so many things that go into feeding that.

10:17Bob Safian:And this is just This is just one data point that we're obsessing about now and with good reason. But it may not be the definitive one.

10:27Alex Morris:I want to stay in the world of AI. Last week, fintech firm Block, run by Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter, let go of 4 ,000 staff members out of their 10 ,000-person workforce. Jack Dorsey, in a statement, cited the reason being because of gains from AI. And is this a sign of things to come, do you think?

10:52Bob Safian: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 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 that block, but that doesn't mean that everyone's going to have, you know, a huge layoff 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.

11:44Bob Safian:I mean, some of them rationalize that like 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.

12:32Bob Safian: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. So and we've seen the impact of social media fueled polarization and societal anger and frustration, fear about changes that 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 the billions being invested in AI systems and data centers. How much is being committed to re-skilling? You know, do tech leaders really feel a responsibility to help the overall population win in an AI race?

13:11Bob Safian:Or are they just battling each other to win? And my suspicion is it's more the latter.

13:19Alex Morris:I want to move into the media business. Last week, we saw a 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?

13:35Bob Safian:I was. 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. um paramount skydance like they needed the deal more this is something we had a discussion a while back with a janice minn at the ankler who was explaining like that that skydance needs the deal they need the scale to be competitive um now that 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?

14:35Bob Safian: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, you know, this combination of assets that they brought together really is an effective, you know, accumulation and not just, you know, a house of brands and a lot of those brands being troubled in different ways.

15:16Alex Morris: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

15:53Bob Safian: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 for the purposes of keeping one political party happy or not.

16:45Bob Safian:I just don't think that will work on a business front. I think 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. 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 areas. 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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20:04Alex Morris:Start creating at ltx.io slash model. 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. And what does this indicate to you about the media business?

20:34Bob Safian:Well, I'll say that I've been, you know, disappointed by the Jeff Bezos era at the Washington Post. I sort of thought that having, you know, one of the richest people in the world by 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.

21:21You know, he hasn't.

21:23Bob Safian:He hasn't. It's kind of interesting because when Bezos bought the post, I sort of thought like this was his, you know, a way to marry his his tech influence with influence through media, which is something that, you know, 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 Ellicens 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 dystopic quality to it.