Uncanny Valley | WIRED
Apple’s Next Chapter; SpaceX and Cursor Strike A Deal; Palantir’s Controversial Manifesto
23 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Brian. Zoe, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new hosts these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people. And for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at uncannyvalleyatwired.com. Thank you for listening. On to the show.
Zoe, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I missed you so much.
And I missed you the exact same amount. Wow.
It's not a contest. I feel so loved. I'm going to go away more often. Absence makes the heart go ponder, as we all know. And I'm thrilled to be here. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry.
I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor.
And I'm Leah Feigert, Director of Politics and Science. This week on the show, we're saying goodbye to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who announced that he is stepping down from the top gig at the company. And more than just talking about his legacy at Apple, we'll be looking into what this long-awaited shift actually means for the future of one of the world's biggest companies.
We'll also get into why SpaceX and Cursor's potential $60 billion deal announced this week is pretty staggering. And we'll get into Palantir's controversial 22-point manifesto. I feel like manifesto is inherently controversial. Otherwise, they'd be memos that they posted on X this week.
And slowly but surely, we have been seeing certain MAGA leaders and supporters move away from Trump. We're going to break down whether these instances are actually building to something meaningful or just some wishful thinking on the behalf of our Blue Sky followers.
So let's kick it off this week with the news that grabbed all of our attention on Monday. It had Brian Barrett calling me, I don't know, 15 times in the span of two minutes. Tim Cook officially stepping down from Apple.
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Chapter 2: What does Tim Cook's resignation mean for Apple's future?
It's the overwhelming majority of my adult life. And so it's tough to envision life without Apple.
I'm also going to do this job at Wired.com until the voice in my head tells me to stop. Wow.
Okay, well, we're going to table that for another time. I think what's really interesting about this moment is Apple obviously is doing phenomenally as a company. Again, trillion dollars, et cetera, et cetera. However, it does feel like it has missed the boat in the AI era. And I think John Ternes' job will be in part to figure out what is Apple's place in the AI race.
Well, I think the fact that it's Ternus in general already sort of speaks to that a little bit. Ternus is a longtime hardware engineer, right? That's continuing Apple's history of sort of product people versus AI people, software people. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think on the one hand, yes, Apple is behind in this AI race.
On the other hand, Apple hasn't set fire to hundreds of billions of dollars in pursuit of a race that maybe doesn't even need to win, right?
Yeah, it doesn't think it needs to. Its answer to this, I mean, Stephen Levy interviewed Ternus somewhat recently and asked, again, what are you going to do in the AI era? And his response was very much, we have the iPhone.
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Chapter 3: Why is SpaceX interested in acquiring Cursor for $60 billion?
We think AI apps will exist in the App Store on iPhones, and that's going to be, in many ways, our answer. Not to say they're not going to try and embed AI in different ways, but I still think they think the primary computing platform is going to be Macs and iPhones, the devices that they create.
I kind of love this because in an era where we're seeing, you know, sneaker companies, shout out Allbirds, like pivot to AI. I like that there is this massive, very successful tech company that's saying like, yes, we're going to like live with this. We're going to make sure that our subscriptions, our products are adaptable to this clearly very important and instrumental technology.
But we don't need to blow up, like Brian said, our entire business plan to make this like a core structure here.
I like that for Allbirds because those shoes are absolutely hideous.
Chapter 4: What are the controversial points in Palantir's manifesto?
A parallel might be... So Apple never made a search engine, right? Like, search is one of the biggest businesses in the world. Apple never made a search engine, right? But Google pays Apple's billions of dollars to be the primary search engine on the iPhone. I think Apple's bet is that... By building relationships with OpenAI, with Google again, with Anthropic at some point, who knows?
It can have that similar, we're just the vessel, right? We're just the thing. And I like their odds because all of the AI hardware that we've seen so far, I know that Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are cooking something up.
Chapter 5: How are MAGA supporters shifting away from Trump?
I know that everybody's got some sort of pendant or speaker or whatever that they're trying to make happen. At the end of the day, I don't think that AI computing is going to replace your phone. I think fundamentally, you're always going to need something with a display and apps and the broader internet versus just something you can talk to and get answers back from.
I sincerely hope you're wrong. I'm really wanting an AI hardware device that could be like headphones that you could just speak to and you wouldn't have to look at a screen. But I think you're right that like there will always be certain things we need screens for and that humans are better at just doing ourselves.
And then I would like to think there will be a whole slew of tasks that we can eventually offload to AI agents and that would make more sense for like a voice computing paradigm. I do think to the partnership point that you made, Apple has already partnered with Google and it's going to embed Google Gemini into its devices.
I think some people saw that as a stopgap, like, OK, it doesn't have frontier models up and running. It's going to use Google in the interim. I saw that as like Apple admitting we're not even going to try and get into this race in a full throated way. Like Google's right there. We can use Gemini and that's what we're going to do.
Now, there's another part of Tim Cook's legacy that I want to ask Leah about because, you know, Tim Cook, of all the Silicon Valley titans who have been friendly and made nice with Donald Trump, Tim Cook kind of stands out in a couple of ways. One, that I think he's the only one who presented Trump with like a custom trophy. designed by his company's engineers.
Embarrassing. I was waiting for you to bring this up. But Brian, just so you know, in my world, we don't call him Tim Cook. We call him Tim Apple.
That's true. Rightly so.
Just like my president, he is Tim Apple to me now and forevermore.
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Chapter 6: What role does conspiracy theory play in current political dynamics?
No, this is such an interesting point. And actually, I'm going to throw this back to you guys. What's Ternus's relationship with Trump admin people? We have been seeing their colleagues in the tech industry, fawn over the administration in the last year and a half. Apple has simultaneously, while, you know, placating, has also managed to like stay out of the fray in some ways, too.
I'm very curious to see how that changes.
I think that Cook is a diplomat, first and foremost, and he used that diplomacy to position Apple to get deals that were favorable to the company. I think there was a surprise factor with Trump because he reads as more liberal. there was a feeling that behind closed doors, he wasn't as complimentary of Trump as he was in public. But nonetheless, he was at the inauguration.
He was appearing in photo apps. I did actually hear something funny. I mean, this caveat like is a rumor, but from people who are in these types of circles and said that he wasn't aware that he was going to be placed directly behind Trump in the inauguration. And when that placement was put forward, there was a moment of slight panic because they all realized like,
what the photo is going to look like. But nonetheless, that's the photo.
I think two things about the Ternus question specifically. One, I think we just don't know other than I will say like he is going to be the CEO of a major company that has lots of shareholders and he has a fiduciary responsibility to make this number go up, right? And the way that you do that is you're friendly with Donald Trump. That's just kind of the way it is.
I'm not saying that's the way it should be, but I think the idea that he would take a feels far-fetched regardless of what his personal feelings are. The other thing I would say is like Tim Cook's not disappearing. He's going to be the executive chairman.
And as part of the announcement, Apple said he is going to be, I don't have the exact phrasing, but something like he's going to be working with leaders across the world. Like he's going to continue that diplomacy role. Basically, I think he's stepping out of his CEO role and into more of a
shaking more hands, making nice with world leaders, trying to keep up that sort of diplomatic cadence that he'd already established over the last several years.
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Chapter 7: How did a scammer create an AI-generated woman to grift MAGA men?
What is he doing? Like, there is the sense that Enterprise Code is the thing that is working and that if you're going to be a serious AI company, you need to go all in. So, like... I don't know. Crazier things have happened. However, I think a cursor is in a difficult moment because it has to compete with the major labs.
A company agreeing to go into a deal like this with Elon Musk, who famously tried to buy Twitter and then back out despite the very expensive kill fee on that deal as well. Like, I would be hesitant. I don't know what they're kind of thinking right now.
Two things.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of AI in today's digital landscape?
One, the weirdness to me is deeper. Just the fact that SpaceX owns XAI, which owns X, is all just like we're just putting it all under this weird umbrella. I mean, yes. It's a weird Elon circus.
I have to say seeing SpaceX AI like actually written out whenever this was this week was, it was jarring.
It was a little bit jarring. This is the thing about getting too rich is you don't have people around you that will tell you your ideas don't make sense and that they're bad. And I think that that becomes a problem.
This is why I never want to have money. But Cursor's announcement I thought was interesting because Cursor didn't announce the acquisition part of this at all. They put out like a pretty terse, I thought, statement, short either because it was rushed or short because they were, I don't know.
But all it said... We don't know.
We don't know.
Allegedly.
Allegedly rushed. All we know is that they just said, you know what, we're excited about getting access to XAI's compute. That was basically it. Like nothing about the deal, nothing about the money.
Yeah. Yeah. You know what it made me think of is when Elon Musk told the world that Walter Isaacson was going to be writing his biography. And Walter Isaacson said, what? And then agreed to write said biography. And that man can make things happen by just telling his many millions of followers that things are happening.
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