Why I love the TV show that fired me

Dear Friends,

Scott Pelley and I have at least one thing in common: We have now both been fired from 60 Minutes. My tenure lasted less than an hour; his lasted twenty years. I got one good LinkedIn post out of the experience. He got 51 Emmys. 

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Given the chaos this week, I went back and watched some of my favorite episodes from the show, which I’ve always considered the gold standard in TV journalism. Here are a few that are well worth your time.

Start with this absolutely incredible interview by Mike Wallace, a legend from my hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, with Ayatollah Khomeini, just two weeks after the attack on the American Embassy in Iran in 1979. If you can, watch the whole thing. If you just have two minutes, scroll to about 5:45, where Wallace, sitting cross-legged on the floor, asks an astonishingly smart, well-phrased, and brutal question. “Imam, President Sadat of Egypt, a devoutly religious man, a Muslim, says that what you are doing now is quote ‘a disgrace to Islam’ and he calls you, Imam—forgive me; his words not mine—‘a lunatic.’”

After that, watch this brilliant Wallace interview with former White House counsel John Ehrlichman in 1973. Wallace grills the Nixon aide about Watergate, with sharp, profoundly well-researched, yet calm questions. Ehrlichman sweats, lies, and finds himself cornered again and again. Listen for the pacing of Wallace’s full questions; his short interjections; the way he uses silence. It’s one of the truly great interviewers of all time at the top of his game. 

Back to Scott Pelley, here he is exposing hucksters hawking stem-cell treatments. He sits across from one of them and declares, “You know, Mr. Stowe, the trouble is that you’re a con man.” Speaking of hucksters, it’s worth noting that Pelley was the one who broke open the story of Lance Armstrong’s doping. And there are things you can do in television that are hard to do any other way. The first few minutes of this Pelley report, “War Crime,” on a nerve gas attack by Bashar al-Assad in Syria, will make you viscerally understand the atrocity of that kind of warfare. It’s not something you can unsee. Or, three minutes in, watch Pelley interview this 15-year-old girl as she and her younger brother talk about being homeless in Florida and living out of their father’s truck. “It’s really not that much of an embarrassment. It’s only life. You do what you need to do, right?”

For some fun, watch this short Eminem bit about how to rhyme with the word “orange.” Learn about the life of Jackie Gleason, in a profile that both explains his talent and also the pain that motivated him. Listen to Steve Jobs explain what he learned from the Beatles. Learn the story of a small town gutted after the attacks on 9/11. This piece showing a young Jeff Bezos—nerdy, idealistic, and goofy—is wild to see now. Or watch the mesmerizing, if disquieting, bit from a segment this past Sunday on a German military company that is learning how to control the antenna of Madagascar hissing cockroaches to turn them into battlefield spies. (Skip to about 9:45 here.) 

Last, here’s a great Steve Kroft segment, “The Mother of All Heists,” on how roughly $500 million went missing in Iraq in 2004 after America toppled the government. It was supposed to help the Iraqi military, but it just disappeared. In classic 60 Minutes style, there’s an interview with a man named Ziad Cattan who was in charge of procurement for the military. He comically defends his purchases by pulling out photos of military equipment. Kroft responds by pulling out a tape recorder and playing audio of Cattan seemingly directing a bribe. “Is that voice yours?” Kroft asks.

Kroft is a remarkable reporter. Watch this short episode on how he door-stops Congresspeople. And then his segment on the unethical ways that members of Congress trade stocks on the inside information they get from inside the halls of the Capitol. And this intense, and confrontational segment, on the way patients are treated at the ends of their lives—and the companies that profit off of it.

I mention Kroft in particular because he was the correspondent I was hired to go work for as an associate producer back in 1997. I never met him then because I didn’t have time to. I walked in on my first day and was ushered into a screening of a piece on Clint Eastwood—a remarkable one, in fact, in which Eastwood stared down Kroft after being asked about the seven children he had fathered with five women. Right after I left the studio that sunny November day, Phil Schefler, then the executive producer, asked who I was and what I was doing there. I told him I’d been recently hired and printed out my resume. He deemed it insufficient and fired me on the spot.

Fifteen years later, I did have the chance to meet Kroft in person. I was at the Livingston Awards for young journalists and a piece that I had assigned and edited for The New Yorker—a stunning work called “A Massacre in Jamaica”—had just won the top award. Kroft was there as the winner, Matt Schwartz, praised me effusively on stage after winning. 

Afterwards, I was in the elevator heading out. Kroft said hello and I introduced myself. He said that he had noted Matt’s generous comments about me. I responded, “Yes, and you know, the funny thing is that I worked for you for an hour back in 1997.” I then told him the story, thinking that he would never have known a thing about it. He paused and his eyes got wide. “You’re that kid? I couldn’t believe that son-of-a-bitch fired you. And I’m so sorry we didn’t back you up.” 

It was an amazing moment. And it made me like this great show even more. 

If you have favorite segments from the show’s history, send me an email. Or, if you’re reading this on LinkedIn, put them in the comments.

The Most Interesting Things in Tech

On Wednesday, Cloudflare reported that web traffic from bots officially exceeded that of humans. This is in part due to the rise of AI agents, which have grown 8,000 percent in the last year. It’s a remarkable shift—and raises all sorts of questions around blocking and product strategies, hosting costs, and the future of online commerce. Many aspects of how the internet works are about to change.

This essay from Benedict Evans is one of the smartest pieces I’ve read about why it’s so hard to predict which jobs AI is going to disrupt. This is partly due to how difficult it is to define what a job is in the first place. But it’s also because we have little idea what markets a new technology will upend—and it might take years before we truly know. To wit, there’s a new paper from researchers at the London School of Economics that argues almost all of the declines we’ve seen in entry-level hiring recently are a result of work-from-home policies—not AI.

It is, however, becoming a little easier to see how AI will change organizations. The technology is going to accelerate all sorts of tasks, and in the process create new bottlenecks companies have to contend with. I talked about this dynamic with Glean’s Emrecan Dogan, who explained that one of the most important jobs for a business leader is figuring out where AI can improve workflows and mitigating the obstacles those gains will bring.

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The most striking fact about AI in 2026 is the contrast between how powerful it is and how little it has changed the economy. The tools are incredible. The amount that agents can do is remarkable. The number of businesses that have seen true productivity gains is minimal. A rough equivalent would be if, on the Staten Island Ferry one morning, everyone was given a Bugatti as the boat inched through New York Harbor. The cars are truly fast and the new owners would be excited. But it wouldn’t make the boat arrive any quicker.

To Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford who I spoke to on The Most Interesting Thing in AI, it’s true that most companies have gotten nothing like the full benefit of AI yet. But to him, the proper metaphor is that we’re now on the downward slope of a J-curve. It takes a while for companies to learn how to use these tools. It takes a while for industries to be rewired for this new era. The same thing happened with the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. You can’t just bolt AI onto existing processes and expect them to go much faster. In fact, as you try to do that, you’ll initially make things worse. But the nature of a J-curve is that once you hit the bottom, everything starts to skyrocket. According to Brynjolfsson, we’re soon going to see the benefits. We will, to continue the imperfect metaphor, quickly reach St. George Terminal, where we can all blast off in our new wheels.

Of course, one can’t be sure we’re on such a J-curve. We could just be on a downward sloping line. Brynjolfsson told me he doubts that. For one, he noted, productivity in the US climbed a good bit last year. Second, and most persuasively, companies that have rolled out AI to some employees and not others have seen real gains among the former group. And, third, Brynjolfsson, who wrote one of the most debated papers in AI economics this year, argues that we are already starting to see changes in the labor market because of AI. All of those factors suggest that the curve is about to turn upward. (You can watch our entire conversation here or read the transcript here.)

This question of the overhang was also something that I spoke about with Sam Altman. He pointed out that companies have been slow to reap the benefits of AI in part simply because change is hard. Altman told me that he had just met with a company who had access to one of OpenAI’s new models. The company’s own engineers said the tool was great. They were planning a security review in Q4, hoping for an implementation plan in Q1 and Q2, and then planning to launch in the second half of 2027. Altman has software to sell and an IPO to plan, but I’m quite confident the story is true.

Intuitively, I think Brynjolfsson’s right. Yes, there are many ways to use the tools the wrong way. You can create workslop; you can free up time for yourself only to waste more of it managing your fantasy football team. But there are many, many more ways to use it right. I suspect that we’re going to start to see real change in the economy soon. As I discussed with several other guests—including Yoshua Bengio, Raffi Krikorian, Carissa Véliz, and Nick Bostrom—not all these changes are going to be good. But I do think we’ll soon all be racing in our Bugattis across the Verrazano to whatever comes next.

Cheers * N

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