transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[01:54] Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of California's Laguna Seco Raceway, where new Apple CEO John Ternus apparently drives very fast, which is cool. Good for John Ternus.

Speaker 3:
[02:03] Big rules.

Speaker 2:
[02:05] I'm your friend David Pierce, Nilay Patel is here. Hi, Nilay.

Speaker 4:
[02:07] Hello, how's it going?

Speaker 2:
[02:08] John Gruber from Daring Fireball, also here.

Speaker 3:
[02:10] Hello.

Speaker 2:
[02:12] So we have to start the show with just the obvious news of the week. John, this is why you're here, because of course you're here to talk with us about the succession at Apple. Tim Cook is out, John Ternus is in. Nilay, you and I did a live podcast sort of immediately reacting to this on Tuesday. We've had a couple of days to settle in. We've seen some more reporting. Both executives have talked a little bit. We have some new stuff to talk about. And I also made a list of every product Apple has released under Tim Cook, and we are going to debate his legacy as a product person, which I'm very excited about. But John, I just want to start with you and go back to Monday for me when all of this started to happen. You've been covering the rumors and speculation of the will-they-won't-they of this succession plan for a while. I'll ask you the same question I asked Nilay. Are you surprised this happened, and were you surprised it happened when it did?

Speaker 3:
[03:07] No, but it's a weird feeling where they prepared us, I think, clearly about as much as they possibly could, and yet when the news hit the wire at 4.30 Eastern Time, it was still like, holy crap, what's going on? Wow, what's going on? And I'm thinking in context to elections, and it's like here in the US, we have a system where when the new president gets elected in November, they don't get inaugurated until January. And there is, the election results might be a surprise to people, but then there's this period where, oh, you still have the old president and the new president's coming. And they're kind of doing that with this, where Tim Cook is still the CEO until the end of August. But we didn't know, the difference is we didn't know when election day was gonna be. And then the UK has a really cool system where they have these parliamentary elections, and if there's a new prime minister, they move into one Downing Street the next morning. And it's like, whoa, where did this happen? And so I'm not surprised, I guess, but we just didn't know when election day was going to be. And then it turned out it was Monday this week. And so it was a little surprising, like, oh, they're announcing it now. But what they announced, not surprising at all.

Speaker 2:
[04:25] Yeah, I think that's right. Nilay, do you feel any differently now with a few days of hindsight? We were both definitely caught off guard. Just a little bit of inside baseball. My favorite thing that happened here was, Nilay was off recording, I think you were doing something for Decoder, right?

Speaker 4:
[04:40] I was doing Software Brain.

Speaker 2:
[04:42] That episode just came out, it's very good. When you do that, it's the only time you're very hard to get in touch with, because you have to turn things off to go record audio for a long time. I had to call you and you picked up and you were like, I think you think when I call you it's like some horrible emergency is happening.

Speaker 4:
[04:59] Always, every single time.

Speaker 2:
[05:01] I called and you picked up and you're like, hey, what's going on? I was like, are you recording Decoder? You're like, yeah, and I was like, you should stop because Tim Cook is leaving. He just goes, okay, bye, and hangs up the phone.

Speaker 4:
[05:11] Then immediately started just being useless and slack.

Speaker 2:
[05:14] Now here we are. Yeah. How do you feel a couple of days later?

Speaker 4:
[05:17] The one thing that has truly surprised me in the post-announcement period is Tim Cook had, I think they had an event in Apple and he addressed everybody. I think he realized he had to say out loud, I'm healthy and I will be the chairman of the board for a long time. Because it's Apple, because it's Steve Jobs. That question was on people's minds, given the seeming suddenness of the timing, if not the John Ternus of it. So he did have to say, I'm very healthy, I'm excited to be the executive chairman of the board for a long time. I think at least until the end of the Trump administration, he has no choice but to be the chairman of the board and just handle that problem. But that's the one thing that it felt like they were not expecting him to have to clarify it. So he had to say that out loud.

Speaker 3:
[06:06] Yeah, and I think that comes back to a little bit of a whisper campaign about his health that people, and I think Mark Gurman and, you know, Gurman's name will probably come up a couple of times in this podcast, but I think Gurman had mentioned it, you know, that people have noticed that at least one of his hands shakes a little bit. And people say, I've looked at the video and I don't really see it, that you could see his hand shaking in the rather infamous Oval Office event last summer, where he gifted the President of the United States a gold apple trophy, that his hand was shaking. People have said that they've noticed it in private. And so, you know, and I think honestly, some of his competitors have sort of added fuel to that Whisper campaign, that, hey, he's getting old.

Speaker 4:
[06:59] Can I just say, old in American public life is not 65?

Speaker 3:
[07:03] Not anymore.

Speaker 4:
[07:04] Not anymore. Like, there's a pretty yawning gap between 65 and old in American public life. Like, Donald Trump is very old. Like, Apple, I think they have a rule that their board members have to retire at 65.

Speaker 3:
[07:19] No, I forget how old, because Levenson is like 75 and he's still there. He was the chairman until now. I forget what the age was. It's older than 65, I think. But Gore ran up against it, might be 70, I don't know. And it doesn't say you have to leave, it just means you have to get an exception. Yep. And so I think overall, this was a, from Apple's perspective, an enormous comms success. I think whether their plan was exactly the way it should be, I think it went off exactly as they wanted it to come off. And I think one of the things, you know, there's always with a big announcement like this, some kind of, huh, we didn't think we had to dot that I crossed that T. And I think the, hey, is everything okay with Tim? Health wise was the one that they just didn't think they even needed to address.

Speaker 2:
[08:05] Do you think that's a Steve Jobs thing? Like, Nilay, you mentioned that, right? Then, like, obviously, the last time a CEO succession at Apple happened was because of Steve Jobs' health. Do you think that's what's on his mind? Or are people just trying to figure out why is this happening now? Because, again, like, you and I have talked about this, Nilay, that the there was a sense when Trump was elected again that all of the big tech CEOs were now essentially tied to their job through the end of the Trump administration because you just, you couldn't, it was the devil you know, right? So I think there was a little bit of surprise that this happened this way. And I think the way that Apple is managing it, which is to leave Tim Cook as the person who has to, in Trump's words, kiss Trump's ass.

Speaker 3:
[08:52] Yes, I know. Isn't it great? I mean, there is something great about the fact that Trump put those words out there and we can just say, those are his words, not ours.

Speaker 4:
[09:02] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[09:02] Right? That is fantastic.

Speaker 2:
[09:04] That is journalistically honest now. I can say kiss his ass because that's what's happening.

Speaker 4:
[09:09] We all know it. Everyone knows it. I mean, again, I think that is just a huge part of the world. Like, I do not envy Tim Cook's responsibility to manage a thing that is the global economy. Like, it just fractally looks like the global economy. You have software in the United States, you've got chips in Taiwan, you've got hardware in China that is moving to... Like, it's the economy. It's just one of the biggest companies that does anything ever. And if the iPhone doesn't ship on time, maybe the global economy suffers. Like, you can see it. And so he has to go be a politician. And even that Trump true social post, which is bananas if you look at it... I'm saying American public life is very old. You look at that, you're like, wow. He just voice memo that thing to hell and back and didn't give a shit. Trump can't meet a new guy. Like, it has to still be Tim Cook who calls him. It cannot be John Ternus being like, I need a tariff exception on this narrow class of goods that is necessary for the next MacBook. Like, that's just not going to happen. So I think that role is very important. I was actually, when he said to Apple employees, I'm going to be here for a long time, and the question in my mind is, does that end when there's another president, or does he mean a long time?

Speaker 3:
[10:23] I'm pretty sure Arthur Levenson is 75.

Speaker 4:
[10:26] I looked it up, sorry, I was wrong. The rule is 75. It's not 65. The rule is 75, and they extended it for a handful of their directors.

Speaker 3:
[10:32] Right, and I think Levenson is 75.

Speaker 4:
[10:35] Yep, and they extended it for him.

Speaker 3:
[10:37] Yeah, and so even without getting an extension, I think Tim Cook could stay on the board, at least, for another 10 years. And I kind of think that's probably the plan. I mean, and I guess we'll see how this plays out, right? I think they kind of knew when Steve Jobs, in 2011, when he stepped down as CEO and said, you know, that day has come. I always said that I would step aside if I couldn't do the job, well, that day has come. And it was like 43 days later, he was dead. I mean, so it was probably pretty clear that him staying as chairman of the board wasn't gonna be a long time. When even when they announced that, but let's just say something had happened and he had somehow in 2011 managed to stay ahead of the cancer for another year or two. He would have been a pretty influential chairman of the board at Apple, right? For however long he was around. How much of a role like what exactly? I mean, we know this geopolitical, not just Trump, but you know, China, I guess, everything else that Cook is still going to have his plate. But we don't know what kind of a role he's going to play in any other non-obvious decisions that percolate up to the top of the heap. I mean, there's a saying, I forget who said it about the White House, but I know I was watching Bill Maher last week and Rahm Emanuel was on, and he was the chief of staff for the Obama and had been in the White House before. And his description of it was basically, the only thing that comes to the Oval Office are problems. Because if it's not a problem, somebody deals with it before it gets to the president. That's it. It's just four years or eight years of just dealing with problems. That's it. And I think a CEO's office is kind of like that too, right? If it's not a problem or a debate, why in the world is the CEO dealing with it? And are some of these things still going to go to Tim Cook too? I don't think so. I think if anything, because I think Tim Cook knows what it's like to have a level of responsibility with somebody over his shoulder because he was doing it with Steve Jobs. So I don't think he would do this. I think if he wanted to still be making the decisions and wasn't giving the true authority of the CEO office to Ternus, he wouldn't be doing this right now.

Speaker 2:
[12:59] The thing I've been thinking about a lot is the Disney succession at the beginning of the pandemic when Bob Iger quote unquote left and turned over the company to Bob Chapek. And then by all accounts spent all of his time systematically undermining and sabotaging everything Bob Chapek was trying to do. I would say there's nothing about Tim Cook that suggests he would do that. And there's nothing about the way this process has been run that suggests this was anything but Tim Cook's idea that like, and I think to a lot, to a large extent, like you mentioned this being a huge PR win. I think the way that this has sort of hit the world as smoothly as it has, unbelievable win from Apple's perspective. Like the stock market didn't freak out. There was this sense of like, okay, we're gonna give Tim Cook his flowers, but also isn't it cool that a product guy is gonna be in charge again? Like everybody managed to immediately be excited about the new guy without there being any kind of referendum on the Tim Cook legacy. Like it's just in the sort of public eye.

Speaker 4:
[13:58] I disagree with that a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[13:59] You don't think so? Okay.

Speaker 4:
[14:00] I disagree with that a little bit. And not to hype my other show, but I spend a lot of time asking CEOs what kind of decisions they make and how they make them. Sure. And all of them want to pretend that the only thing they do is solve problems. And all of them want to pretend that they've empowered their teams and I shouldn't even be making decisions. Like if you just like take the gestalt of a Decoder interview with a CEO, they're all like, I don't do anything around here. You know, like I'm just slapping babies.

Speaker 2:
[14:27] Who knows?

Speaker 4:
[14:28] But like the reality is...

Speaker 2:
[14:29] That's the phrase by the way, just slapping babies.

Speaker 4:
[14:32] It's slapping faces?

Speaker 2:
[14:34] No, it's slapping babies. That's good. Just out here slapping babies.

Speaker 4:
[14:38] You can tell I pay a lot of attention during the CEO interviews on Decoder. But the reality is they're making hard decisions about priorities and trade-offs. Like that is actually the job. And that is actually the problem at any company, even a company as laden with resources as Apple. And a joke I've been telling for years now is I've never even asked to interview Tim Cook on Decoder. Because you can just imagine how he will answer all of the questions. You can imagine, you're like, what's a big problem you have? And he's like, the problem, the products are too great. Like I don't need to do it. And I think this is the moment where there is enough pressure on whether Tim Cook can invent the next generation of products that, oh, it's going to be very exciting that the product guy is in charge, while the person who manages Xi Jinping and Donald Trump is still there. And if there's a blip in the supply chain, he can swoop back in. But actually what we need to do is look at the threat from the next generation of conversational interfaces dead in the eye and figure out what to do with it. It's a big problem. And the person making the trade-offs should be as deep in that problem as they can be. And I think if there's a referendum on Cook, it's that he was never so deep in the products that he could make those trade-offs. I'm looking at your list of products and they're all pretty good. But like, they never figure out what to do with a car. They just spent however many billions of dollars letting Johnny Ive feel like, I will reinvent the car. And anybody who's deep in cars, like the best selling cars in America are midsize crossover SUVs. Do you want Johnny Ive to design the Toyota RAV4? Like, that's your market.

Speaker 2:
[16:17] The new Ferrari looks sick.

Speaker 4:
[16:19] He designed a Toyota RAV4. That thing looks more like a RAV4 than it should, right? Because that's the market for that kind of car. That, I think, is the referendum on Tim Cook, is that the products all got incrementally better. To some extent, they are all just extensions of the iPhone. But there's not the step change that reflects a vision of the future. John, I know you kind of disagree with this, but that would be my look back. Oh, this company got way bigger in a way that almost no one else could have done. But there was never a step change.

Speaker 2:
[16:49] I want to get into the specific products, but John, I do want to know your thoughts on that, because I also suspect you disagree.

Speaker 3:
[16:53] Yeah, but I disagree in a way that we're never going to settle it. It's a wonderful podcast discussion point because you can't really disprove it. You'd have to go back in time and reroll the universe with different decisions. But I think one of them is that the iPhone is especially particularly, not just because Apple made it, but it's the whole business Apple has been in since 1977. As we all know, 50 years ago, making personal computers. And even Apple didn't know it, that that was the end point. The end point was a personal computer, something akin to the size of a wallet or a deck of cards that you could put in your pocket in your purse and that would have a wireless networking connection to a network that connects you to anybody around the world, right? And I know that sounds a little like, yeah, duh, that's what a phone is. But like in like the early 80s, that sounds super sci-fi. And that's really what it took. And Ben Thompson and I say this over and over again on our podcast, Dithering, that it's really kind of a waste of the term that we started calling computers, personal computers, back in the late 70s and early 80s, when the real personal computer was the smartphone. That's really when it became personal for everybody in the world. And calling the Macintosh the computer for the rest of us. It was the computer for more of us, but the iPhone was the computer for the rest of us. And it's just so, and then ever since then, everything that's come out since, it's like, well, but it's not the smartphone, it's not the iPhone, it's not the smartphone. Well, there's no, it's gonna be a while, maybe a very long time, maybe after all of our careers before something really supplants the smartphone. Just because it's the endpoint of a certain progress, and you can see the progression from 1976, 77 to the iPhone, and then you can see why it kind of stopped there, and that you end up with things like in Tim Cook's portfolio, the Apple Watch and the AirPods, which connect to, guess what they connect to? Your iPhone, which is in your pocket. Like, what else is going to come up like that? There is nowhere else to go. You can't make it smaller. People, it turns out people, you know, even when they tried to make it a little smaller, or at least back to the way it used to be with the iPhone 12 and 13 Minis, people didn't want to buy them. Like, they've kind of figured out, they tried it. They actually tried the experiment, like, what if we went back a little smaller, and people didn't buy them? And it's like, okay, we know what size phones people want. Here they are, and we know what they want. They want better cameras and nicer screens, and they want longer battery life, and that's it.

Speaker 4:
[19:46] No, so I agree with that fully. I think my hottest take is there's not another thing after the smartphone. I don't think we're all gonna run around wearing glasses in that way.

Speaker 3:
[19:54] But I think to Cook's credit, and this is where it's so different than Scully, I think Scully was a good CEO of Apple, and as the three of us talked about with the original Macintosh episode of Virgin History, he was a good CEO overall, but I think he never got it out of his mind that the Mac was Steve Jobs' thing, and Steve Jobs is gone, and everybody thought he was gone forever from Apple, and Scully needed his thing, and his thing was gonna be the Newton, and the fact that the Newton didn't really have much of a connection to the Macintosh at all, I mean, I know there was a Newton connection kit, and you could kind of sync some things, for the most part, you would go out, you could go to a conference, and enter all these contacts in your Newton, and then come back, and then it was like, are they on your Mac? No. And it's like, what? But it's like, he wanted the thing that would be, this was John Scully's thing, and Tim Cook never had that ego of like, I wanna make my iPhone.

Speaker 2:
[20:50] He seemed to, if anything, let Johnny Ive entertain his own version of that too much. I think that a bunch of the product strangeness inside of Apple, including the car, which I think is the closest thing to sort of a failed lark of an experiment, seems by and large to have been Tim Cook giving Johnny Ive too much rope to chase his own vision and ideas.

Speaker 4:
[21:15] I agree with that. This is, it's also, like John is saying, like everything is just fine gradations and agreement here. It's great for a podcast. But when they set out to do the car, there was a lot of reporting that they kinda did the Google exercise of what market is big enough to move the needle for Apple. And the two were healthcare and cars. And they've gotten, they've done healthcare. I think Tim Cook is happy to say that his biggest legacy at Apple is health. I don't know if they've done healthcare in a way that moves the needle. They've sold a lot of Apple watches, but they've entered that market, they are a fixture in that market, they're doing what they do there. The car, again, I think it was, in that sort of like Google exercise of we're gonna launch a thing, and if it's not as big as Google search, we're gonna kill it. I think what Apple historically has been best at is they launch a thing, they see what's there and then John, this is your famous story, they just roll. They just continually iterate until the thing is great because it's the thing they wanted from the beginning. And you just don't see a lot of that in new categories with Apple. I think the last time we did a podcast together, John, you were talking about the Vision Pro. A big question I have is whether John Ternus wants to iterate the Vision Pro because a VR headset might just have a limit. That might just be all anyone can ever do with VR headsets and all of that time might be better spent elsewhere. And maybe you can't iterate it into a great product or it has to become AR glasses, which is actually a totally different product. And I think there's a lot of those questions inside of Apple's product lineup right now where it's like this is about as good as it can get. Where are the new ideas that are green shoots that need to come up? And you just didn't see a lot of those in the Cook era outside of maybe, I think it might just be the Vision Pro.

Speaker 2:
[22:59] On the other hand, it's not like he missed anything. Like this to me is one of the things that I think goes back to John, what you were saying about the smartphone is while everyone else flailed around uncontrollably trying to find the thing after the smartphone, like credit to Apple for just continuing to look around and be like, oh, we're the smartphone company? That's sick, and just not do anything except continue to entrench around the smartphone. And is there something that someone is doing that they... I don't know, but right now there is no evidence that Tim Cook missed anything. And I think that to me is like the thing about his product legacy that is probably the most positive.

Speaker 4:
[23:38] Including AI, we should put that on the list, including AI.

Speaker 2:
[23:41] Yeah, I mean, there is, like, this is an interesting time for this to be happening, because I would say if there is going to be some brand new hardware, AI is the best shot we've had to find it in a while. But that said, the single best AI device anyone owns right now is their smartphone. And I think that's gonna be the case for some time.

Speaker 4:
[23:59] Or a Mac Mini, like, those are your two choices.

Speaker 2:
[24:01] Or a Mac Mini, which you can't even find anymore.

Speaker 3:
[24:05] I'll disagree with you there, though. I will disagree with you there, where I do think, as I sit here and think, okay, I wrote a rather lottatory first take on the Cook era. And I've been thinking, and I'm not trying to find the, you know, well, you gotta have a list of pros and a list of cons. What are the cons? The car is a good one because it was a lot of money, but it's, I still think it's maybe overall, even if it's $10 billion spent, it was like a kind of feather in his cap that he was like, you know what? I don't care if we spent 10 billion. This isn't worth shipping.

Speaker 2:
[24:37] At least he didn't rename the company after it and then screw that up horribly.

Speaker 3:
[24:41] The one that I think sticks out is AI. And I think you have to go back to before the whole LLM moment and just look at Siri and that there was a time where like, it was like Steve Jobs' last obsession. He was the one who spearheaded, there was the famous story that just came out recently.

Speaker 2:
[24:58] Kitlaus.

Speaker 3:
[24:59] Yeah. Said that he met Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs was pretty interested in Siri and he wanted to buy it. And he said, nah, I don't think I want to sell. And then Steve Jobs called him 50 days in a row. And for 50 days in a row, he's like, oh, Christ, it's Steve again. Well, but it's Steve Jobs. I'm going to answer the phone. And for 50 days, Steve Jobs called him up and said, I want to buy the company. What do I, you know, and then eventually he's like, all right, fine. And he sold the company. And there was a time when you could say Apple was the leading AI company in the world. And I know as crazy as that sounds today, because everybody just universally says, well, of all the big tech companies, their own homegrown AI technology is by far the furthest behind, which is true. But there was a time, 2011, when they were clearly ahead of everybody else. And for a couple of years after that, they were pressing that lead. And I think Steve Jobs was clear, and maybe Forstall, I don't know, you know, in the way that Forstall was aligned with Steve Jobs in terms of the way they saw these platforms evolving. But they, you know, Cook, to adjudicate a clash of personalities that he could not keep aligned the way that Steve Jobs could, he had to make choices as to who was gonna go and who was gonna stay, and they couldn't all stay. And Forstall was the guy to go.

Speaker 4:
[26:17] He just dunked on Forstall again, by the way. Again, at the employee event, he was like, what's my biggest mistake? It was Apple Maps, but we fixed it. And it's like, oh, my firing Scott Forstall. Like, you pinned it on Scott Forstall, and now he goes.

Speaker 3:
[26:28] I don't think so. I'm gonna say that that's one, my understanding of that whole thing was that Forstall and Maps was unrelated to Forstall's departure. People have hung on to it because of the timing, because Maps came out the same year. And I think there was some dispute over who should apologize for what. But I think Apple Maps could have debuted 10 times better, and Forstall was still gone at the same time. It was because, I think, fundamental. My understanding, I don't know if there were others, but Johnny Ive wouldn't take meetings with Forstall anymore. He would not sit in a room with them. And I don't know that Johnny Ive said it's either him or me, but I think it more or less came down to that. And I don't think the other people at that level, the level of having their picture on the Apple senior leadership webpage, I don't know that there was anybody else who got along with Forstall other than Steve Jobs.

Speaker 4:
[27:21] I'm definitely enjoying, in the course of Apple 50, then Cook leaving, all these executives are posting pictures of them being young with the original iMac. And you're like, wow, a lot of things happened between then and now, with just the four people in this picture. A lot of things have happened.

Speaker 3:
[27:37] And I don't think it had anything to do with it, but I think when Forstall was pushed out of the company, the company was left with senior leadership, none of, nobody was left who thought Siri is the future of the company, or the future of technology, this sort of interface. And it just sort of fell by the wayside, and actually got worse. It really did. People forget how much more useful Siri was around 2013 or so than it eventually got. It actually got worse. And you look back at some of the comments from, or it wasn't all on the record. It was mostly people secondhand, but what Steve Jobs spent most of 2011 focused on his last year was Siri. And he was like, this is the next thing. Like he was, you know, he'd shipped the iPhone, and then he came back from a medical leave and focused 2009 on creating the iPad, which came out in 2010. And by 2011, he was like, okay, that's done. He could, you know, not that they were done iterating on it, but the new thing for Apple was going to be, you know, talking to your computer and doing things in an agent-like way. And we talk about agent, agent, agent now, but part of the stuff that Siri could do around like 2013 was like get you movie tickets and stuff. It was a partnership with Fandango, and it had like a really cool pre-IOS 7, you know, skeuomorphic interface, but you could like say to Siri that you want to go see the new Avengers movie, and it would be like, here, here's a showtime near you. Do you want two tickets? And you'd say yes, and then you'd have them. I mean, that was 13 years ago, and they just completely lost that under Cook. So I think that needs to be taught. I think that's worth breaking in to say, I don't know, I think that was a big swing and a miss.

Speaker 2:
[29:27] That is fair. I think, yeah, the whole question of, there was that first era where everybody had a bunch of correct ideas about what voice was gonna be. I mean, because you can tell a very similar story about the Alexa team at the beginning, and the Google Assistant team at the beginning, everybody kind of intuitively saw the future, and then for some combination of business reasons and technology reasons and focus reasons, all bailed on it until they lost to ChatGPT and then panicked and came back.

Speaker 4:
[29:56] But they're all back now. I will point out that when you say business reasons, the way they have solved their business problems now is they're like, screw you, we're not paying, we're just gonna horsepower away into clicking around your website without permission. And that like, I don't know if any of those companies would have done that at that time, but that is what they're all doing now.

Speaker 2:
[30:14] Yeah. All right, we should move on from this, but I made a roughly chronological list of all of the major products launched under Tim Cook. And I just want to read it to both of you, and I want you to react, because I thought it was really interesting, actually, just seeing all of this in one place. He was appointed CEO in 2011, but I'm only giving him credit for products starting in 2012. And all caveats apply, everything's a team, whatever, he's the CEO for giving Steve Jobs credit for all the stuff they did before, giving Tim Cook credit for all the stuff they did after. So here's the list. It was the iPhone 5 and everything after, the iPad 3 and everything after, the iPad Mini and the iPad Pro, Apple Maps, buying Beats, which I think like half counts, but it was a meaningful thing that Apple did. There was the iMac redesign, the slim unibody iMac and every iMac after. There was the Apple Watch, the Apple Pencil, Apple Pay, Apple TV, the streaming service and most of the boxes, but not all of the boxes. The 12-inch MacBook, the whole AirPods line, AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, HomePod and HomePod Mini, the Apple Card, the trashcan Mac Pro, bunch of keyboards and accessories, AirTags, the polishing cloth, the most important thing Apple has ever launched in history. So there's Tim Cook's legacy. The Mac Studio, the Pro Display and Studio Display, other various monitors, the Vision Pro, honorable mentions to MagSafe and the M-Series chips, both of which are not like individual products, but matter to a lot of stuff Apple does, and the MacBook Neo, which almost was the last thing that was shipped under the Tim Cook administration. Instead, it is the terrible AirPods Max 2. But we're gonna, I'm gonna give it to him in an honorary way as the MacBook Neo. I look at that list and there's a couple of like slam dunk huge hits, right? The Apple Watch was a giant victory. The AirPods is a giant victory. There's a couple of like stinkers. And then there's a lot of stuff.

Speaker 4:
[32:15] I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[32:15] What does that list make of, what do either of you make of that list?

Speaker 4:
[32:20] I can break that into levels of Johnny Ive out of control-edness. Like that's one way you could sort this. Like how out of control was Johnny Ive? And you're like the Touch Bar existed for too many years. And that's just the answer to that question. There's a little bit of how much of the ghost of Steve Jobs are we fighting. I think the Trashcan Mac Pro is like the ultimate ghost of Steve Jobs. That's Phil Schiller saying, can't innovate my ass on stage. Like there's a little bit of that you could break it down into. And then without question, there's before the M-Series chips and after. And you can see the M-Series chips came out, and Apple Silicon was the thing. And then all of their product roadmaps just coalesced. They're like, oh, we can do anything we want. And that, I think, provided them just opportunity, but also focus in the same breath.

Speaker 3:
[33:09] I will just say, I like Nilay's summation there, but I will just say, since you brought to mind my, this is how Apple rolls, that's the problem with the Touch Bar. The problem with the Touch Bar was that they never, the last Touch Bar they made was exactly the same as the first one they made. Except maybe they, remember they added back a hardware escape key. Like, everybody was-

Speaker 4:
[33:31] Probably because of you.

Speaker 3:
[33:32] Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 4:
[33:33] That might have been like directly your fault.

Speaker 3:
[33:35] It might have been. But that was not the, you know, that was not the problem with the Touch Bar. I think the overall idea, I think is still resonates, which is, wait a minute, hey, a series of F1, F2, F3, up to F12 keys at the top of the keyboard, isn't that like right out of like, Unix in 1975? Why do we have these F keys? Why, you know, we have, you know, and it comes back to Steve Jobs' great explanation of why the iPhone didn't have hardware keys. We know how to solve this. It's software, right? Why don't we have software? People love their Steam decks, right? Where you have like a little thing with dynamic screens for the buttons. There is something there of having something dynamic above the letters and numbers keys. The first Touch Bar wasn't it, and they never iterated on it. I don't know. I kind of feel like that's one of those things where if it was a good enough idea to ship, it was a good enough idea for somebody to come back and say, okay, we swung and missed on the first one. Let's come out with a second one, right?

Speaker 2:
[34:41] John, I love that you and I both think the Touch Bar could have been great. I really do believe that.

Speaker 3:
[34:46] I really do. I also think that having a bunch of fiddly little buttons and that the solution to let's make it useful to people is we'll just print a bunch of hardwired things, screen brightness, expose. I'm looking at mine, a microphone on, off. All of those icons on top of the actual F key buttons on all Apple keyboards ever since they scrapped the Touch Bar and before the Touch Bar is exactly what Steve Jobs was talking about, why the iPhone doesn't have a bunch of frigging hardware buttons because once you put the icon on the button, it's set in stone.

Speaker 4:
[35:20] You're both so wrong about this. I don't know what you're talking. As a person who has a stream deck and thinks it rules, putting the buttons back on the keyboard was the best decision. Because you have a big screen.

Speaker 3:
[35:30] It was better than the Touch Bar as we knew it, but the potential for something good there, maybe something that would have needed a different name than Touch Bar because the first one was such a dud, but something dynamic, something could be done there and still might be done there. I don't know.

Speaker 4:
[35:46] I think we should sell tickets to a straight up Touch Bar debate. One hour, no holds barred, people would come.

Speaker 2:
[35:51] I'm so down.

Speaker 4:
[35:52] I could do this for the rest of the show.

Speaker 3:
[35:53] I think it's rather cookie and note, the worst solution is that they shipped one that very few people liked as it was, kept it for too long and never iterated it.

Speaker 4:
[36:04] And it was the same with the Butterfly keyboard. There's a lot of this in this list, right? Where it's like they fired off one idea that they thought was the future, they kind of didn't know where to go and they just held onto it. And that's kind of what I mean about the Johnny Ive, uncontrolledness. You can see it. He's like, I got it right. What do you mean I have to change it? Like, of course the phone should be too thin.

Speaker 2:
[36:23] They were like, what if we gave you a Butterfly keyboard that was slightly better and everybody's like, still bad? And then they're like, this one? They're like, no, it's still bad. The Touch Bar, everybody was just like, what is this for? Why can't I press the escape key? And Apple just goes, never mind. We're done.

Speaker 4:
[36:38] I feel like John and I were in a briefing where the big update to the Butterfly keyboard was they had added a rubber membrane to it to keep one speck of dust from destroying the whole thing, which Casey Johnson had pointed out.

Speaker 3:
[36:49] That was the problem. And it was like, are you guys sure a rubber membrane is going to solve it? And they're like, we are pretty sure that that's going to solve it. And I remember that that was the off-the-record Apple. It was like, we are pretty sure. They weren't like, take it to the bank. And it was like, you know, it's like the Ron Howard narrator. You know, they were not sure.

Speaker 2:
[37:12] So I think we've successfully established that however you feel about the Touch Bar is how you feel about Tim Cook's legacy as a whole.

Speaker 3:
[37:18] No, but I do think there is, that is, it exemplifies a difference in the Cook versus Jobs mentalities where Jobs, Tim Cook seemingly never had his pants on fire about something, right? It's like he was always calm, cool and collected. And he did get everything more, much more organized and much more scheduled. Everything is annual. Both the hardware and software now are annual, almost across the board. And Apple's schedule was effectively erratic under Steve Jobs because his attention, there was the very famous, early in the iPhone where they were like, hey, we knew we told you we were going to come out with a new version of Mac OS 10 in June. Well, it's going to come out at the end of the year because we've taken all the engineers off it to ship a new update to iOS software. And it's that important that we do it. And that was that. And it's like, okay. You know, but Apple doesn't do stuff like that anymore. But sometimes that was actually called for. It was like, I think Steve Jobs would have looked at this. Look at this and just printed out a bunch of things like, here, here's Joanna Stern making fun of our keyboard. You know, like, this is hilarious. Well, guess what? We're the butt of the joke. How are we shipping this? Fix it right now, tomorrow. You know, and I don't think that happened with the butterfly keyboards. I mean, they did fix it eventually, but I feel like it went through too many revisions. And it was too much trust in the... Basically, my understanding is sort of the obvious, that the people who, the engineers who came up with the butterfly keyboard in the first place, got like three swings at it. You know, like, okay, we got it this time. Okay, we didn't get it that time. Give us a third try. All right, we got a third try. And each of those tries was like a year plus of MacBook devices that had those keyboards. So you've got like three or four years of these keyboards in practice. And I don't think that that was a three strikes in your out situation. That was more like a one strike in your out situation. Like, the keyboard needs to work on a frigging laptop. I mean, that is not a controversial statement.

Speaker 2:
[39:26] Yeah, and everybody knew from the very beginning.

Speaker 4:
[39:28] Yes, yeah. So I think this is like another interesting sort of moment in the Cook era, because this is also the point where they believed that the iPad would take over everything. So the idea that the Mac had a weird bad keyboard is not the biggest problem in the world, because of course the iPad is going to eat everything. This is also the period where they kept trying to kill the MacBook Air and they couldn't because people kept buying it, like over and over and over again. And eventually they could not just horsepower people into believing that the iPad was the future of all computing, which is not on your list here, but it is like a thesis of Apple in the Cook era that just came to an end with the resurgence of the Mac. Like, I think I said it on the show last week, the hottest gadget in the world right now is the MacBook Neo, which is an iPhone ship that just runs a real operating system. That's all it is. And it is easily, we can't write enough about the MacBook Neo on The Verge. Every single story is explosively popular. And it's like, yeah, you just, I think, John, you called iOS a baby OS the other day. Like, they just put a real OS on an iPhone ship and everyone's like, I love it. The best thing that's ever happened.

Speaker 3:
[40:40] All right, let me throw this out there. I've been thinking about it this week. And I love your segue, because I do think you're exactly right that the MacBook keyboards, literally stinking, just they were the worst keyboards anybody's ever shipped in a mainstream laptop for years, was seen as less of a crisis than it should have been, because it coincides with an era at Apple where they were like, yeah, but the iPad's gonna take over all this eventually anyway. I really do think that was the sentiment within the company, not universally, for sure. I think internally there was, it was one of the moments of highest debate and the most divisive factions within the company. But the ones that had the political clout were the ones that espoused that viewpoint. And I'll come back to the misbegotten thinking there. But, how did that get rectified? It does kind of correlate to Apple Silicon on a Mac. But if you actually look at it, it really kind of correlates to the rise of John Ternus within the company. And I really do think that Ternus was on, for lack of a better word, our side of that debate. And I think Cook recognizes that. And I think that's why Cook is so fond of him and thinks that he's the one to fix this. That Ternus internally was the one who is like, this is madness. We cannot, the Macintosh is not being replaced by these tablets. You know, look at the stuff that the Mac does and why we need it. We need to make the Mac better than ever, not let it drift off. I mean, I think that's been a huge part of John Ternus' rise within the company. And I think that the, hey, everything kind of got better over the last, you know, like from 2018 onward. That's the rise of John Ternus within the company.

Speaker 2:
[42:36] Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that is the people who look at this and say, this is a diet in the wool product person who is now going to be overseeing all of this thing again. I think that is the cleanest sign of hope, right? Is that every, every product we've seen John Ternus be part of has gotten better under his watch.

Speaker 4:
[42:55] Did you read that there's a journal sort of profile of Ternus in the transition and the lead was something along the lines of John Ternus had a problem and it was he needed to chip bump the Mac Mini, but he couldn't let Johnny Ive get involved because it would get bogged down in like redesigns. And he's like, no, it's just a new chip. Like, don't worry about it. And eventually the Mac Mini with a chip bump shift. And it's like, that's a lot of politics for a chip bump. And if that's where Apple was at that time and he was able to do that, then it kind of supports what John is saying. Like, he was able to keep the trains on the track, make the computers better without getting bogged down into what seemed, from the outside even, pretty intense politics. Walt Mossberg used to call them the fashion people. He's like, the fashion people are running Apple now. I've bought 500 MacBook Airs to keep myself away from the fashion people. And that is, all those decks are cleared. John, I'm kind of wondering, David and I have made it very clear how we feel about Alan Dye leaving Apple in the state of liquid glass and all this stuff. Those decks have been cleared too, right? Apple design is very different. Johnny Shruji is the Chief Hardware Officer now. How are you seeing the future of design under Ternus?

Speaker 3:
[44:01] We don't know. I'm optimistic. And I do think in addition to the reliability of the hardware being better than the software, I think it's less debatable that the design of the hardware is superior to the design of the software. And after Johnny Ive left, they were very explicit about the fact that Johnny Ive wasn't being replaced by a new Chief Design Officer and that the roles of software and hardware design were separate, you know, and that Alan Dye was brought in for software specifically. And there's no hint, no suggestion on off the record, any role in any keynote that suggests that Alan Dye ever had anything to do with any hardware ever whatsoever. And I think you see post-Johnny Ive, this very clear fork in the road where their hardware is, if anything, better designed than ever. And the software is clearly worse designed, right? It really is. I mean, and I remember when I was, I'm still not done with it, but when I was really on like an extended weeks long bender, writing about Tahoe, Mac OS Tahoe in particular, not liquid glass overall, which I actually am kind of a fan of on the phone, kind of ambivalent about on Apple TV and iPad, and absolutely despise Mac OS Tahoe. I don't think it's liquid glass. I think it is just a complete ignorance of what, all the nuances that the Mac needs to embrace. I can't help but think, though, that somebody who's overseen hardware that's only gotten better since Johnny Ive left, and in the same direction, is a very good person to oversee design going forward software-wise, and sort of bring that back in alignment. And the thing that, when I was going with that vendor, is I looked back at screenshots from Mac OS 10, or Mac OS, whatever the name was at the time, about 10 years ago, right before they hired Johnny Ive, around 2014, 2015, and not only is it gorgeous, it's not gorgeous, it doesn't look retro at all. It looks like they could just ship that OS right now, and it would look perfect for 2026. Wouldn't look 10 years old, wouldn't look dated, wouldn't look out of place with the way iPhones look right now. It would just look like, yeah, that's what Apple's desktop computer OS should look like, you know? It wasn't the skeuomorphic stuff. It was a look and feel that looked connected to the Mac's past, looked completely aware of all of the subtle nuances of human-computer interaction for desktop computer interfaces and looked very Apple-y. And it's all squandered over the last 10 years.

Speaker 4:
[46:51] Yeah, there was that period where they took all the color out of Aqua and made everything smoother and it was like perfect.

Speaker 3:
[46:57] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[46:57] Right, and it was very connected to liquid glass because it was still, it was liquid. Like Aqua, the interface was supposed to be lickable. And so they desaturated it. I could go on about this forever. I think their mistake was they believe that all the new customers are iPhone customers. And an iPhone customer who picks up a Mac has to be like, I know exactly how to use this. And that just doesn't need to be true. Like people are a little bit smarter than you give them credit for.

Speaker 3:
[47:21] Because it looks vaguely similar in terms of the style of the controls doesn't mean they know how to use it. You know what it's like.

Speaker 4:
[47:29] We'll see, the touchscreen MacBook that is rumored is going to be a real test of all this.

Speaker 2:
[47:34] And potentially, I mean, there's a fascinating run of hardware coming, right? Because it's the touch screen MacBook has been rumored to be coming soon. There is a 20th anniversary iPhone theoretically. I mean, it is coming next year. It will be the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. Apple loves an anniversary. What will they do there? There's just been a lot of questions like you said, Nilay, about what the Vision Pro is going to be. So there's a lot of moments here where it's like, okay, actually, Apple is going to sort of put a bunch of forks in the road all at once about what it thinks about hardware. And the first 18 months of Ternus' reign as CEO, which aren't even really his fault, are going to be fascinating. He's going to have to launch a lot of things that he either loves or hates, and we're going to see what happens. But all right, we should take a break. Nilay, you and I actually have some breaking news to talk about, but John, you can go, you've got other stuff to do. You have to go be mad about Tahoe.

Speaker 4:
[48:32] I look forward to it, and we will be selling tickets to the great Touch Bar debate.

Speaker 2:
[48:36] Also, John, it's so important that you don't stop being mad about Tahoe.

Speaker 3:
[48:40] No.

Speaker 2:
[48:41] None of us can stop being mad about Tahoe until Apple fixes it.

Speaker 3:
[48:44] Well, speaking of pants on fire, I feel like my pants have got to be on fire between now and WWDC just to get it all off my chest because who knows what's going to happen there. But I would love it if all of my things that are igniting my pants are addressed. But just in case they are, I need to get them off my chest before they are.

Speaker 4:
[49:05] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[49:06] Well, yeah. If you get a bunch of new things to let your pants on fire, you need time for new things to be mad about John.

Speaker 4:
[49:10] This is just like there's an Apple memo going out about this podcast, like to John Ternus, re John Pants Ignition. It's just a bullet list.

Speaker 2:
[49:20] All right. We should take a break. John, thank you for being here as always. Go read Daring Fireball. Go listen to the talk show. John, we'll see you soon. We'll take a break.

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Speaker 2:
[52:15] All right, we're back. So Nilay, while we've been recording a story that has been burbling all week, burbled in a bigger way. So we should talk about it. Yeah. We've talked a lot about the rebooting of the Xbox team. New leadership, Phil Spencer retired. Asha Sharma is now in charge of all of Microsoft's gaming stuff. We've been talking about Microsoft's attempt to get Xbox stuff onto phones for years and there have been lawsuits about it. There was a memo today from Asha Sharma, basically. I would call it like trying to reboot and reestablish what Microsoft is doing. And the sort of news here is that it is no longer being called Microsoft Gaming. It's just being called Xbox. Like we've been wondering whether there was a future for the Xbox brand going forward. Which is in a pretty meaningful way, the only consumer brand at Microsoft. Co-pilot ain't it. But now it appears they are doubling back down on Xbox as a thing and as a culture. You and I both just read this memo that Asha Sharma sent to the team. What do you think?

Speaker 4:
[53:26] So I appreciate that she is a new CEO. She has to make some change. She has to break with the past. Rebranding the whole thing as Xbox is a big deal. They are trying to get back to gamers. This memo starts with players are frustrated. We are doing a bunch of stuff wrong. She is trying to break with the Spencer era. I think the plan outlined in this memo is the exact same plan. Maybe that's just because it's a quick read. But the heart of this plan is Xbox will be where the world plays and creates. We will build a global platform that connects players and creators everywhere. Console is a foundation. You can play where you want in your games, progress, friends, and identity. With you across Console, PC, Mobile, and Cloud. Aside from Console is the foundation, that is the same plan as Xbox Everywhere, which was Phil Spencer's plan. Yes. It is just the same plan. The thing that frustrated that plan was not execution. I think there was a lot of execution that frustrated that plan. The thing that most of all frustrated that plan was they could not get Xbox on your phone. Epic and Apple are suing each other and there's lawsuits. Microsoft just filed an amicus brief in the Google case, trying to get an Xbox Store onto Android phones in ways that don't involve paying taxes to Google. It's the same plan. Do you see a meaningful difference here?

Speaker 2:
[54:50] Not really. I think one of the things that is clearly happening under this new regime is they're trying to make the thing make more sense to people. And I think you look at what Microsoft's gaming things have become and you can play some games in some places and some games in all places, but not all games in all places. And then there's Xbox Game Pass and there's cloud gaming. And there's just too many things. And so I think to me that there is something actually significant about this idea of like we are Xbox, we are returning to being Xbox. My assumption would be we're going to start to see fewer things with fewer names. And that actually what they're going to do is try to turn that whole thing you just described where essentially you can play anything anywhere, and it all moves and feels seamless, which I think is like transparently the correct idea, right? Like just in a vacuum, can you pull it off is one question. But like, is that what gamers want? They want to be able to play their games in all of the places, all of the yes, of course, that is the correct outcome of how Microsoft's gaming ambitions should go. And so I think this sense of like we need to simplify what we offer and to whom and in what way is right. Again, that is not a vastly different idea than what Phil Spencer has been talking about for a long time. It just has fewer names. And that's something. Like genuinely you deserve credit inside of a big organization for going for fewer names. It's like, that's a victory. But I think it's true that you look at all of this. And one of the things she has clearly identified is gamers don't understand what their Xbox is for and what is an Xbox, right? Like the whole everything is an Xbox, I think has backfired so spectacularly. It is like inside of everything that Asha Sharma is now doing.

Speaker 4:
[56:44] But what is different about everything is an Xbox and you can find Xbox everywhere you are. Xbox will be a global platform that connects players and creators everywhere. You can play where you want in your games, progress, friends and any share with you across comp. I get that is a much tighter definition. Maybe that's all you need to do. Again, the whole memo is a break with the past, which maybe that team desperately needs. I'm just saying that was Xbox everywhere. If you were to just walk up to any Xbox player and say, what do you think Xbox everywhere means? They'd be like, I could play Xbox on my phone. They would just say the thing that it's supposed to mean. It's true in the Spencer era, they got totally sideways. They're like, Candy Crush is an Xbox. I don't know what that is at all.

Speaker 2:
[57:26] Well, and they got so over their skis buying games that I think it reshaped everything that they were trying to do. And then it becomes an, okay, we have to start putting Xbox games on PlayStation because we have to figure out how to make money from these games. And so it's like, okay, if what you actually want to do is bet on Xbox, you stop doing things like that. And you start to say, okay, we are going to build an ecosystem. And I think they continue to believe that we can build that system not around a console, but around Game Pass. Like I think ultimately my Galaxy brain theory here would be that the center of Xbox is Game Pass. And that's why they continue to fight for, we want to be able to do this mobile store. It's why they continue to like, you know, get involved in these lawsuits. And they said something about, you know, in the memo it says we will re-evaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing and AI and share more as we learn and decide. Exclusivity, windowing and AI is like a wild trio of things to name.

Speaker 4:
[58:28] It's just stuff gamers hate. We will re-evaluate our approach to things gamers hate.

Speaker 2:
[58:33] Yeah, what is true is I think Xbox is beyond the idea that the Xbox is a console that you have in your living room. Like I think Microsoft has been past that for a while, maybe to its detriment, because fundamentally, for most people, your game system is the thing in your living room that you play games on. But they're making this big bet, and I think they're just trying to make it more clearly.

Speaker 4:
[58:57] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[58:57] Because also, like, just the fact that you can play some Xbox games on a PC, and you can play some PC games on a PC, but it is like more or less unknowable what you can actually play where. It's just like they've just lost the plot on this. And to me, it's like, OK, we need to center on our thing is Xbox, not fucking PlayStation. And that's what this says to me.

Speaker 4:
[59:21] There's a line in here, I'm going to quote, here it is. We have to be honest about where we are. We're a challenger, and meeting this moment will require pace, energy, and a level of self-critique that should feel uncomfortable. So I think that's just a culture change. You're just announcing a culture change. Yeah. Phil Spencer used to say it in a way that was used to justify the Activision blizzard. He'd be like, we're number three. I have to spend $10 billion. She's like, we're number three. We have to be better than number two and number one.

Speaker 2:
[59:48] We have to win.

Speaker 4:
[59:49] So that's one thing. I think the other piece, Phil spent a lot of time just integrating Activision as a huge acquisition, and the new boss doesn't have to keep any of those promises.

Speaker 2:
[60:02] Yep.

Speaker 4:
[60:03] So you can see, she's like, we're Xbox. You don't get to be Activision anymore. I run you. No promises will be kept. We'll just see how that goes. That will be messy. The thing I want to ask you about specifically, because you and I have talked a lot about how when YouTube decided that its key metric was watch time, YouTube changed and everything about YouTube backs up into all they care about is watch time. It's their main metric. Okay. Well, she announced a new main metric. Our new North Star will be daily active players. It's in the memo. This is the thing that she's saying. This is the new North Star. This is the metric she cares about the most. How do you feel about that?

Speaker 2:
[60:44] I mean, it's tricky because that's the kind of number you can mess with any way you want. Like is somebody playing Indiana Jones on the PlayStation 5, a daily active player for Microsoft? They might be able to argue that it is. But I think what that means is that you need to give people a sort of infinite availability of stuff to do, right? If daily active players is your goal, you sure as hell need a successful mobile strategy. You can't win this game without it.

Speaker 4:
[61:15] Do Candy Crush players count as daily active players for Microsoft?

Speaker 2:
[61:18] Maybe. I mean, in the amicus brief, you know what comes up a bunch is Zynga, the company. It's a real part of Microsoft strategy here. Obviously, Minecraft has been a huge hit on mobile platforms. So I think you might see Microsoft lean into getting its stuff on the devices in front of you more and more. It also means this company is going to have to learn new ways to engage gamers. And there's a bunch of that in here, right? There's a lot of focus on content and there's a lot of focus on marketing. And there is a sense of like we need to find new ways to reach people. And it's like, is Microsoft going to release a vertical video feed so that you'll go to the Xbox app more often? Probably. It's just sitting right there. And so I think to me, it's like that is it's not, they're not after game sales in the same way. If all you want is daily active players, you think about the business model differently, you think about the hardware, you sell people differently. It means something like a handheld makes more sense, because again, you just start to put it in front of people in more places. Like it means to me, it means less interest in sort of huge AAA culture-shaking games and probably frankly, more investment in Candy Crush. Like I think you're not wrong.

Speaker 4:
[62:39] Yeah. And you know, there's the wreckage of the live service games in the past year and a half. Daily active players is all about, we want you online. You have to measure it. The idea that you're going to play your Xbox offline is apparently gone, because then you're not in the metric.

Speaker 2:
[62:55] You don't count.

Speaker 4:
[62:56] You don't count. And so I'm just very curious to see how that goes.

Speaker 2:
[63:00] Yeah. I tend to agree. And I think, I don't know, we talked not that long ago about whether Microsoft was going to need to just walk away from this idea of being everywhere, that the mobile thing wasn't going to happen. VR is not the next thing that is going to obviate mobile gaming, that maybe this is just a losing battle. At the very least, it doesn't sound like Microsoft is done fighting this particular battle. Can it win the fight to sell Xbox games its own way on mobile phones? Who knows? But it's still betting on that in a way that I'm frankly slightly surprised by.

Speaker 4:
[63:36] I think that they have to for as long as it even seems remotely viable. In these cases are ongoing and judges are real mad at Apple and Google, so that must seem more viable than not.

Speaker 2:
[63:46] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[63:46] I still wonder if one day Microsoft will just be like, you know what, we're selling this. We're going to spin this off into a standalone consumer company, so it can be a consumer company, and we will just be an enterprise software provider. Something very big will have to happen at Microsoft for that to ever happen, but like you said, it's the last consumer brand they have. At some point, you're just like, you know what, we're going to be the Azure company.

Speaker 2:
[64:09] Right. The one other bit of Microsoft news that I want to know your thoughts on, they also dropped the price of Game Pass Ultimate this week from 30 bucks a month to 23 bucks a month. The one big caveat being Call of Duty games will no longer show up on Game Pass day and day when they launch. What do you make of that? Call of Duty is like the thing. That's what they bought Activision Blizzard for.

Speaker 4:
[64:32] Yeah. They spent a lot of time just announcing it loudly that Call of Duty would be on PlayStation. I think Call of Duty is its own business. They'll let it be its own business. Then if you take that out, then Game Pass has to be its own business. She says in the memo, we have to solidify these offerings. They have to be good. If you're just coasting on Call of Duty, you can't be good. To the extent that this will make them try to make Game Pass good on its own, I think it makes sense. Plus, you get to do different things with Call of Duty and price it in different ways. Maybe people pay for both, which is probably better for Xbox's financials right now.

Speaker 2:
[65:08] Yeah, that's very fair. There's also just a line in here that says, Maintain and grow in live games and long-term stewardship. Elevate creator-centric platforms like Minecraft, Elder Scrolls, and Sea of Thieves. Boy, is Microsoft not ever going to give up on building another Fortnite. Over and over, everybody keeps trying to build live services games to take down the few that make all of the money and have all of the users. Everybody fails and they just can't help themselves. Minecraft is huge and very successful and a place that people do lots of things inside of. So there's a lot to plumb there. But Microsoft is still trying to be everything all at the same time. But at least it's called Xbox now.

Speaker 4:
[65:54] This is what I mean about this memo. You read it and I get it. It is chest thumpy, they announce the name change, we're going to change the culture that is as clear as day. Then you're like, so it's the same? Well, it's all in the execution, so we'll see. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[66:09] There's also a line that just says, fix the fundamentals for players and partners. So that's good and specific, should all be fine. You could probably just say that. All right, we will keep covering this. I think we should probably have Tom on at some point in the next couple of weeks. He's been covering all of this. He'll help us figure out what's going on here. Let's take another break and then we're going to come back. We'll do a lightning round. We'll be right back.

Speaker 7:
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Speaker 8:
[67:02] So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere? Anywhere. What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris? Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad in Touloume?

Speaker 1:
[67:16] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 8:
[67:18] What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you going to do this for all 9,000 properties?

Speaker 10:
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Speaker 2:
[68:05] All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, unsponsored for flavor. That felt like five or six dots that time. I tried to experiment with the number of dots in the ellipsis. Nilay, are we doing this again?

Speaker 4:
[68:19] Oh, it's real bad this week. Oh no. It's real bad this week.

Speaker 2:
[68:22] It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, which is not a Webby category, but soon, and we will win. We will sweep the Webby's for Podcasts Within a Podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

Speaker 3:
[68:35] Brendan Carr is a dummy.

Speaker 2:
[68:43] Okay. I have two bits of very exciting news about this. One, that is now the permanent theme song of Brendan Carr is a dummy.

Speaker 4:
[68:50] No, we're going to keep playing the other ones.

Speaker 2:
[68:51] We'll keep playing other ones, but we own this one.

Speaker 4:
[68:54] That's true. That's the big news.

Speaker 2:
[68:56] We, this was made by Viola Dagumba. It is now our permanent theme. Guest theme, guest themes may pop up. Things happen. We get new music for new vibes, but the official music of Brendan Carr is a dummy, which I think you need to win the award for America's Best Podcasts Within Podcasts is a Krakorian chant.

Speaker 4:
[69:19] Yeah. So Travis reached out and we bought the theme song. It's ours now.

Speaker 2:
[69:23] Love it.

Speaker 4:
[69:24] So soon when we, when we federate the show, it appears on other podcasts. Kara Swisher is going to have to run the Gregorian chant. That's all I'm trying to get at.

Speaker 2:
[69:31] We'll just run the chant as an ad on other people's podcasts from now on.

Speaker 4:
[69:37] Keep them coming because I do want to run other ones. But that one, we've run it so many times. It did feel like we should pay some money for it. In this age of stealing everything, it felt like we should make the move. Brendan was particularly dumb and evil this week. So joy of licensing the Gregorian chant aside. This one's a little serious. So the FCC technically has oversight authority over the TV rating system because it shows up on broadcast. And so the TV rating system is basically a voluntary system. Like Netflix doesn't have to put ratings on things.

Speaker 2:
[70:10] Y7 is the only one I know. And TVMA, I feel like everything is one of those two things.

Speaker 4:
[70:14] Yeah, it's like the five stars in the app store. It's either everyone's naked or it's for babies. And those are your choices and everything is kind of messy in between. Anyway, so all the streamers, everybody participates in it. This is an opportunity for our boy Brendan to mess around with speech. So he has had the FCC launch an investigation over whether kid shows that even have transgender or non-binary people in them are immature and inappropriate for kids. He put out a tweet, there's an official FCC request for comment, and it says, this is the whole justification for it. Recently, parents have raised concerns with the industry's approach, including with ratings creep. Specifically, they argue that New York and Hollywood programmers are promoting controversial issues in kids programming without providing any transparency or disclosures to parents. This undermines the whole point of the law and the rating system parents rely on. And then, in the actual FCC document, those controversial issues are laid out. Controversial gender identity issues being included or promoted in children's programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents. Specifically, it calls out shows with transgender or gender non-binary programming is appropriate for children and young children. I think a lot of people listening to the show know that war on transgender people is just a war on anyone who doesn't conform with basic heterosexuality. I think it is an affront to human dignity in general. The goal here is to make gay people illegal. It's a hop from one thing to the other very quickly. You can see it across the Trump administration. There's a move to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that made gay marriage legal in this country. It's not quiet. It's just there. It is a loud undercurrent of the Trump administration's policies. You have Brendan saying, we should go look at the rules of programming for young kids. Even the presence of somebody who's transgender or gender nonconforming is inappropriate for children. We're going to make these people illegal. We're going to make it so kids can't see them.

Speaker 2:
[72:24] That sucks.

Speaker 4:
[72:25] It sucks. Again, because the rating system is not like the FCC's true mandate, they get to weigh in on whether it's effective in helping people. But it's a way for him to go regulate content on Internet platforms. This is the real thing. We talked a lot about how he has a lot of power over broadcast television and that's a whole mess. He uses that power indiscriminately. This is a way for him to get control over what's on Netflix, and YouTube, and all of the other streamers that the FCC has no authority over, because there's a little bit of creep. So I would just argue, first of all, it does not say which parents and which concerns specifically. It just recently parents have raised concerns. Who? Who are these parents?

Speaker 2:
[73:08] It's a real people are saying, which is like a hallmark of the Trump administration.

Speaker 4:
[73:12] Truly, so which parents? It's obviously not the parents of transgender children. I bet they have different concerns about the programming their kids are seeing. So to me, this is just A, it's nonsense. It is the continued Trump administration war on trans people, which is just naked. You can just see it everywhere. And then the creep to, actually maybe gay people should be illegal fully, because that is in the Trump administration ethos. And then all the way to, we should regulate the speech on internet platforms. So that's Brendan. I think this is all very dumb, especially because I don't know which parents have raised concerns and why those concerns are being weighed over the concerns of other parents. And too, as always, it's just the man keeps monkeying with the First Amendment. And then he's going to go. He's being invited to the White House Correspondents' Dinner this week to celebrate journalism in the First Amendment. Guess who he's an invitee of? Yep, he's sitting at the Paramount table, David. Oh, God. Our boy David Ellison.

Speaker 2:
[74:06] I was going to say Barry Weiss, and then I was like, I wouldn't have even asked if it was that obvious.

Speaker 4:
[74:10] Paramount. Anyhow, Brendan, if you're done partying with your corporate overlords, you're welcome to come on the show or really any podcast. And let me ask you some questions about which parents are important here and which children you think are important. If you can answer them, because I don't think you can. Or we can just, I can just yell at you. That's also a choice you can make. You can just sit there quietly and I'll just yell at you. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcaster in the podcast.

Speaker 2:
[74:37] What do you think this podcast would be rated? I feel like we've got real TV 14 energy.

Speaker 4:
[74:43] Yeah, it's pump up the volume. Whatever pump up the volume was rated. I think that's an R.

Speaker 2:
[74:49] Yeah, I don't know. But it's like, we're definitely not, I wouldn't let my three-year-old watch us because he would get very bored and leave. But we're cool and hip and young, as has been well established on this podcast. So TV 14 feels about right to me. All right, we should talk about Mythos. I'll make this my first one.

Speaker 4:
[75:10] How you doing it?

Speaker 2:
[75:11] What's that?

Speaker 4:
[75:12] You're doing it.

Speaker 2:
[75:13] I'm gonna do this. We're just gonna talk, let's talk about Mythos. So we haven't really talked about this on the show yet, but a little while ago, Anthropic released or sort of didn't release its new model Mythos, which it said is so good at writing code that it's actually dangerous, that it found vulnerabilities in every operating system and browser, all kinds of stuff. And it launched this whole thing called Project Glasswing basically as a cybersecurity measure. They were like, we've built AI that is too powerful, we need to work on mitigating it together. There's been this really fascinating backlash to it since then, where there are a lot of people all the way up to like Sam Altman at OpenAI who were like, this is essentially Scare Tactics marketing, they're just trying to frighten you, none of this is real. There are people who are going through and saying, well, actually they're extrapolating the data out from like a little bit of manual review of some things that they found old bugs that aren't even relevant in old software anymore. All the way to people being like, this is the end of the world. The spectrum has been wild. And this week, a couple of interesting things happened. One of which was that it came out that a group, we think associated with a vendor of Anthropics, got access to Mythos and has been playing around with it. As far as we know, without any terrifying goals behind it, but they've been in there mucking around.

Speaker 4:
[76:40] Yeah, they've been making like landing pages for web apps. That's what they've been doing, just to screw around with it.

Speaker 2:
[76:45] Mythos is also apparently potentially Anthropics way back into deals with the US government. We've talked about this a lot. It's big follow up with the Pentagon. It was classified a threat to the supply chain, like whole big mess. And evidently this thing is so important and so powerful that the Trump administration has decided maybe this is how we become friends again. All of this is to say, I still have absolutely no idea how to feel about Mythos, whether it's literally the end of the world or just a bit of really great fear-based marketing from Anthropic. What is your read on it at this moment in time?

Speaker 4:
[77:21] First of all, I think it's very funny that the people who got illegal access to Mythos got it by looking at Anthropic's own leaked source code and figuring out the URL for Mythos.

Speaker 2:
[77:33] Yeah, they didn't hack it. They typed in some URLs.

Speaker 4:
[77:36] Literally, when I first heard the news, I went to our daily editorial meeting. I was like, how do you leak a model? Did they steal a data center? What happened here? No, they just found out the URL. That's hilarious. So your mother of all cybersecurity problems is coming from a company that has its own deeply hilarious cybersecurity vulnerabilities is one very good. The Trump administration, the Department of War, has designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk, but they've got a problem in their own supply chain because their vendor leaked their... This is all perfect.

Speaker 2:
[78:11] Yes.

Speaker 4:
[78:12] This is all just truly perfect. This whole industry is moving too fast.

Speaker 2:
[78:14] And as a useful reminder, it's like, you know how we talk all the time, everybody gets these very intense cybersecurity trainings, and what it actually amounts to is like, people are stupid about clicking links in their email. Every time. Fundamentally, people are idiots is like the main security problem. This is sort of how I feel about Mythos. It's like, actually, we have so many bigger security risks that are just all of us living our lives every day that I don't even know if I have time to be worried about what this model can do to my web browser.

Speaker 4:
[78:40] This is a very small inside baseball story, but one of the funniest days I have ever had at this company, at Vox Media, was we got an email from IT to the whole company, and it basically just said, don't click this link. Everybody got this weird phishing email, don't click this link. And I won't say who, but someone replied to the whole company, and all it said, no period at the end, it all said was, I clicked the link. And you could just feel the panic. Like, holy shit, I clicked the link. Like, am I dead now? Like, and I must have spent the entire day with our producer, our video producer at the time, Trey Shalivarn, we spent the entire day just yelling, I clicked the link at each other. Like, cause that, that's it. Like, don't click the link. That's all, that's the only rule. Just don't click the link. And everybody always clicks the link. That's really good. So I, all that's funny. I do think Anthropic is gonna end up back in the good grace of the Trump administration. Trump has basically said it's gonna happen. They had a meeting with, I believe with Susie Wiles and Scott Besson. From all accounting, that meeting went very well. I think Pete Heckseth is kind of out of the outs cause he is kind of really bad at doing war, which is his only job. It doesn't seem to be going well. No, it sure doesn't. And I think they're gonna win that lawsuit. So I do think all of that is swirling around. Whether or not this is all just doomsday marketing, I think OpenAid, Sam Walman needs to be able to say that. At the same time, if you release a model that has these capabilities and you're like, here it is, everybody use it, without even a lick of safety planning, you're doing something wrong. So somewhere in the middle of these two things is the right move, where you're like, oh, this can be used for offensive cyber capabilities. We should probably make sure everyone's ready for it. So we're gonna release it. And at the same time, we're winning. So we're gonna call out how much we're winning by saying it's too dangerous for anyone to use.

Speaker 2:
[80:28] This model is so sick, you can't even use it. It's like an unbelievably great marketing line. I think that's right. Where I've landed talking to people is whatever you believe about Mythos in particular. And there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the thing Mythos is doing is also possible for Opus and a lot of other models to do, that if you point these existing models at cybersecurity problems, they will also find bugs that Mythos is maybe better at it, but it's not a step change better at it. But what is certainly true is that the AI models are getting better at cracking cybersecurity. Like that is just a true thing that is happening. And so even if you don't take Mythos as the end of the world, but just a step towards a thing becoming slightly more dangerous all the time, we're still right to sort of point at everybody and say, oh my god, we have to take a giant deep breath here and figure out what to do. And Rafi Krikorian, who's the CTO at Mozilla, wrote a great piece, I think for the New York Times, basically arguing that the real problem here is with open source software. All of the everything runs on open source software. People don't realize this, but every video you watch is based on some kind of open source system for showing video. And all of those things are generally maintained by a person or a few people or an organization without anywhere near the resources of a giant tech company. And Rafi's point was essentially that that is where we need to go focus our energy, that actually we have these infrastructural risks that are not just a thing that you have to patch in your own code, but are things that could break the internet. And knowing that these things are, if not all the way at the point of we've dissolved cybersecurity forever, but are sort of marching towards getting better at cracking these codes, that now is the time to start fixing it. So like, don't take this as the world has ended, but also don't take it as this is nothing, right? His point was like, we have to live somewhere in between that and start to make moves on this thing we are clearly making progress towards that might someday be dangerous in the future. And that's way less sexy than our model is too dangerous to release, but I think it's probably closer to what's actually going on.

Speaker 4:
[82:48] Yeah, I mean, there's a famous XKCD of like, all the software is held up by one person maintaining one line of code. Yeah, like I buy it. I think because there's so little safety culture in AI anymore, the idea that you would hold something back at all makes you seem like a doomer. And I just thought, right, like there are all kinds of products where you're like, hey, we should evaluate the risks before that we release them widely. It's pretty normal. It's what they should be doing. All of them should be doing. But I do think we're I will I'm just going to preview this. We have a story coming out next week called Attack of the Killer Script Kitties. I cannot wait for you to see this art. And it kind of lays out all the problems to come.

Speaker 2:
[83:28] Yeah, it's good stuff.

Speaker 4:
[83:29] All right.

Speaker 2:
[83:29] What's your next one?

Speaker 4:
[83:30] My next one is a little power cleanser. I just want to show you a picture and get your reaction to it. This week, BMW introduced the new 7 Series. It's in their new class design language, which is my like hottest take about cars right now is like everything is a cyber truck. Like everything is just like a low poly square now.

Speaker 2:
[83:51] That's a real bummer of a state of affairs.

Speaker 4:
[83:53] Like if you look at the new Kia Telluride, you're like, oh, they're like rectangles. They looked at, they were like, you're doing triangles. We're going to do rectangles. You look at this new BMW, like you're doing rectangles. That's not actually the thing I want to show you. It's a rectangle. It's fine. People are, rich people are going to drive around in the back of 7 Series. It's fine. I want to show you a picture of the interior, the front seat. I just want you to look at this. You tell me if this is good. This picture is, this BMW is on picture. What do we think is going on here, David?

Speaker 2:
[84:23] Wait, what? Okay, so I'm looking at the interior of a car. With a, it's a BMW. We have some like white seats with some weird texture on it. And we have a bunch of like rhombus shaped screens that don't look like they're in the car at all. This straight up looks like someone Photoshopped like a juju tablet into this with cutoff corners. And then there's a big, wide, long stripe of screen up at the top that I think is like pretending to be a heads up display, but seems to just show you the weather. What is happening?

Speaker 4:
[85:09] And then there's another screen. So there's the main infotainment screen.

Speaker 2:
[85:12] Oh yeah, and then there's a screen off to the right.

Speaker 4:
[85:14] And then there's a little screen off to the right. It's like when you have your laptop screen and you buy one of those like little USB-C displays, like that's next to it. And then you're right, there's like the strip of screen above it. And then I just want to call this out.

Speaker 2:
[85:26] It's showing what music is playing three times. You can see what music is playing three different places.

Speaker 4:
[85:32] I do want to call this out. The steering wheel is flat on the top and the bottom, and the spokes aren't horizontal. They're vertical. So it looks like...

Speaker 2:
[85:40] Oh, I didn't even notice that.

Speaker 4:
[85:41] It's like the steering wheel of a TIE fighter, like the steering wheel looks like a TIE fighter. Like I don't... I have no idea what's going on in this car.

Speaker 2:
[85:47] But then it looks like a paddle shifter, but it's like a translucent paddle. What is happening?

Speaker 4:
[85:52] There's a lot going on in this car. And I've been joking that especially luxury cars are designed for the teenage children of billionaires in the Middle East and China for a long time. They all just look like nightclub interiors. This one, I can't make that claim.

Speaker 2:
[86:10] No, this is like the car of the future according to like 1954.

Speaker 4:
[86:16] It's the second display that's smaller than the first display that just broke my brain.

Speaker 2:
[86:21] And it also just shows the music and the weather.

Speaker 4:
[86:24] And it looks like the Zune interface on top of all of that. It's like, and it's a Zune. But what if there was a 7-inch Zune in your car next year?

Speaker 2:
[86:31] I think car companies think that people in passenger seats can't reach the center screen.

Speaker 4:
[86:38] I had a car. Our old Jeep had a passenger display. We'd literally never turned it on to use it. I plugged an HDMI cable into my phone one time to watch Sunday Ticket on it to prove that I could. And then I was like, why am I doing this? I can just hold my phone, which is playing Sunday Ticket.

Speaker 2:
[86:54] This is wild.

Speaker 4:
[86:55] It was very dumb. Anyway, I just-

Speaker 2:
[86:57] It's also really ugly. It would be one thing if this was more technology than you needed, but it was all put together thoughtfully. This literally, it looks like someone took a prototype of an Android tablet from 2012 and just super glued it onto the dashboard of a BMW.

Speaker 4:
[87:17] It is one of the most confusing cars I've ever seen in my entire life. And I apologize for the audio listeners. We'll have the links. You can click on it. I assure you, you will have the exact same set of reactions that David and I just had when you look at this picture. I also want to point out that in the back seat, a giant TV folds down from the ceiling so you can watch TV, because this car is meant to be experienced in the back seat. You're not supposed to drive this car. Your driver is supposed to drive this car.

Speaker 2:
[87:42] Correct.

Speaker 4:
[87:43] And your driver will have just an array of confusing screens to deal with. Anyhow, I just wanted you to see this. I was like, I got a surprise, David, with this picture, because it was like a jump scare when I scrolled the Car and Driver article.

Speaker 2:
[87:58] It literally shows you the song that's playing three times. This is the best idea they had for what to put on these screens, because let's just show them the song that's playing every single CarPlay Ultra mock-up, too, has the exact same problem.

Speaker 4:
[88:11] It's the weather five times, three songs, two maps, you're golden.

Speaker 2:
[88:17] This is terrible. I don't care for this.

Speaker 4:
[88:19] Again, I apologize to the audio listener, but I assure you, when you pull over your car and you click the link in the show notes, you'll be like, oh!

Speaker 2:
[88:28] This is really validating my purchase of a 2018 Hyundai Ioniq that gets 50 miles to the gallon and does nothing interesting.

Speaker 4:
[88:38] Can I interest you in a secondary USB-C monitor for your main screen?

Speaker 2:
[88:41] You sure can't. Sure can't. That's what my phone is for. And then my wife yells at me for looking at my phone while we're in the car. All right, my next one is a short one and it is just, it's a real sign of the times gadget that I want to tell you about, which is a new thing called the Insta360 Mic Pro. It's the NAB is right now in Las Vegas, which is basically like a camera and audio show. It's like CES, but like much more niche and nerdy. NAB is a blast. But basically they took, Insta360 makes a lot of webcams and microphones and stuff like that. And like every other company that makes these things, they've been leading further and further into creator devices. And this one, the Insta360 Mic Pro, is designed very specifically to be prominently displayed. And the thing that it will let you do, it has a little screen on the side. It's a round microphone that you're supposed to clip to your lapel or your shirt or whatever. And it has a screen onto which you are meant to put your brand. And this is like, I cannot describe to you a more 2026 story about a gadget than a creator microphone that you are going to pin to your shirt that is going to show your brand as you make TikToks. It's perfect.

Speaker 4:
[90:02] It's like they're going to do a partnership with whatever. What's that platform that Clivicular is on, Kick?

Speaker 2:
[90:07] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4:
[90:08] Like this is just a product for the live stream era. It's very good. Do you have the fuzzy thing on top? I've noticed everyone loves the fuzzy thing on top.

Speaker 2:
[90:16] People do love the fuzzy thing. And I think I've been noticing a definite trend away from seeing these things. Maybe this is just my feed. And I'd be curious if others are seeing the same or different. But like we were on this run for a long time of everybody started holding the microphones. And then it was like, it's cool if you hold the microphone and also show the really long microphone cable. And then it was like, we all had the tiny lavalier microphones. And now we've gone back to them being a little less visible. And now you can tell people are starting to like do better audio and hide it. Like have a microphone out of frame is a thing people are starting to do. So it seems like microphone as prop for a lot of creator videos is going away. But again, maybe that's just my feed and maybe that's just what I'm seeing.

Speaker 4:
[91:01] My feed is all people putting the clip on their brim of their hat, which is a move I want to get to.

Speaker 2:
[91:05] There is a lot of that. I think you could do that.

Speaker 4:
[91:08] Every day I wake up and I think to myself, is this the day that I do hat mic? It's not that day.

Speaker 2:
[91:15] Someday soon, though. I believe in you. We can do this for you. But yeah, I think this to me is like just it's the perfect creator gadget. And I think it will sell like crazy. And you're going to start to see a lot of people with what look like buttons with their logo on it. But it's actually a microphone.

Speaker 4:
[91:29] Oh, I'm absolutely buying this thing.

Speaker 2:
[91:31] It's a great idea.

Speaker 4:
[91:31] 100% buying this thing.

Speaker 2:
[91:32] Yeah. Everyone should know Nilay walks around with at least one decoder button on, 24 hours a day.

Speaker 4:
[91:37] I'm watching you. That's my transition. That's my last one.

Speaker 2:
[91:40] You ready?

Speaker 4:
[91:42] In the never-ending quest for training data of real things instead of just weird shit on the internet, Meta is going to track everything their employees do on their computers to make sure their AI agents can click around, like open windows, click on apps. They're going to harvest that as training data.

Speaker 2:
[91:59] Okay. Can I tell you my response to this that's going to get me into a lot of trouble with a lot of people? Yeah. This is not a problem at all.

Speaker 4:
[92:07] Really?

Speaker 2:
[92:08] A, if you work at a large company and you don't think they're already tracking your keystrokes, you are all the way out of your mind. I mean, they just are. Do you remember in the peak of the pandemic when Microsoft started talking loudly and proudly about all the ways that it was able to monitor people who were working from home?

Speaker 4:
[92:27] Yeah, and people bought mouse jigglers.

Speaker 2:
[92:29] Yeah, my, I might get in trouble for saying this too, but my wife works at a company where on Teams, you go idle if you don't type in Teams or on your computer for like three minutes. So sometimes what she'll do is she'll open up a spreadsheet and put like some heavy thing, a rock on top of a slash key and just type a billion slashes into an Excel spreadsheet so that she stays active in Teams. This is what we've been reduced to. Like this is a disaster. Do I think this entire set of things is a horrific mess? Yes, of course. Do I think the idea that Meta is collecting this data to put into its training models for its AI agents is like a vastly worse intrusion on your privacy? No, I really don't. Like you can feel about this however you would like to, and I think there are a lot of people who are very upset about this, but I think in a lot of ways this is just saying the quiet part loud.

Speaker 4:
[93:30] I'm just going to say according to our friend Alex Heath and Sources, Meta has experienced, quote, intense internal backlash to this program, which is called the Model Capability Initiative.

Speaker 2:
[93:39] Horrible thing to call it.

Speaker 4:
[93:40] And Baws, Andrew Bawsworth said, there's no option to opt out of this on your work-provided laptop.

Speaker 2:
[93:45] I do think, I think I would be angrier about this if I thought that it was actually going to work. Because the reason to be mad about this is you are asking me to do my job while tacitly training a computer to do my job. That's now the trade. You are saying, do your job so well and so successfully that we can teach a computer how to do it and thus fire you. And this is happening right next to Meta preparing to lay off 10% of the company. The macro of this is really, really, really ugly. And I think people are right to be mad about this. My thing is just everyone should have already been mad about this, I think, is what I'm saying. Like, the AI of it all is bad, but so is the fact that your boss has been able to use the number of keystrokes you enter in a day in your performance review. It's a thing they can do.

Speaker 4:
[94:41] So to be clear, Meta, we did ask Meta about this. Their spokesperson said, there are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content. The data is not used for any other purpose, including performance evaluations. They just need to get data for how people actually use computers, things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating drop-down menus. Because like Meta, like every other company is like, oh, people won't do business deals with us. We're just going to open their websites and use them on behalf of the people. There's something really gross about that. It is also the limit of the training data. The LLMs, all they have is text files from the internet and every video on YouTube or whatever other stuff they've managed to scrape, and they don't actually know how to use computers. And you can see that hasn't been going great. And so they need to get more data. This is why Joanna did that video of the guy in the suit remotely controlling the robot. That is just an attempt to get training data for how the robot should move. It's just all is very silly. We've made a lot of promises about AI and what it can do. And to get there, we have to monitor every keystroke that every employee at Meta makes so that the computer can click a mouse button appropriately. It just seems silly to me.

Speaker 2:
[95:51] I agree, and I don't think it's going to work. Again, I think I would be more outraged if I thought this was actually going to work for Meta.

Speaker 4:
[95:59] Well, the vision they're building to, according to Bosworth or CTO, the vision we're building towards is where our agents primarily do their work, and our role is to direct review and help them improve. Talk about software brain.

Speaker 2:
[96:11] With 8,000 fewer employees as of next month. Those two things absolutely unequivocally go hand in hand. If you believe, and this is what everybody keeps saying, if you believe AI is going to be as good as everybody says, you're going to fire a lot of people on your team, and your stock price is going to go up as a result. And that is what has been happening, and it keeps happening. And I think everyone who works at these companies should be mad about it, I guess. I just think you should have already been mad.

Speaker 4:
[96:39] David and I had a long conversation today about how we won't use work computers. We've just been at this company long enough that we just don't do it.

Speaker 2:
[96:46] Yeah, not interested.

Speaker 4:
[96:48] Yeah, no thank you.

Speaker 2:
[96:49] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[96:51] We'll see. I think that won't work for these companies. I think they're going to miss the next turn.

Speaker 2:
[96:57] I think you're probably right. And I think a lot of people, we keep talking about, and we keep getting feedback about people's changing feelings about tech companies. And one of the last groups of people who by and large love tech companies is people who work at tech companies. And this is a super good way to lose those people. Like you want to take a bunch of people who believe in the mission of your company and just kind of systematically ruin the goodwill that you have with them. This is a really good way to do it.

Speaker 9:
[97:24] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[97:24] It really, really, really is.

Speaker 9:
[97:27] All right.

Speaker 2:
[97:27] Well, on that happy note, it's time for us to get out of here. We need to go source some Touch Bars for the Touch Bar at WWDC. This is really a thing we should do. We should figure out how to do this. This is a thing we should do.

Speaker 4:
[97:39] It's a Jubilee style event where John's just sitting there and you have to rush up to him and defend the Touch Bar.

Speaker 2:
[97:47] And then he gets to swat you with the Touch Bar if he doesn't like your opinions. We should say before we go, thank you to everybody who voted for us in the Webbies. We won the People's Voice Award for Best Technology Podcast, which, if I'm being honest, is the only one of the two awards I care about. Congrats to Future Around and Find Out who won the other award for being a good podcast with a very funny name. But we won the one that I care about and that is all thanks to you. So thank you to everybody who voted. Also, you have like a couple more days to send in questions for Version History. We're doing a bunch of smart home stuff. Nilay, I have a really fun surprise for you on the Harmony Remote episode next week. It's gonna be great. We're gonna have a blast. I'm very excited. Lots of that coming up. Nilay, you just put out the software brand Decoder that you've been noodling on for a while. That I think turned out really well. People should go watch that and listen to that. What else is coming on Decoder?

Speaker 4:
[98:38] On Monday, this is really fun. We have the CEO of Underwriters Laboratories, UL Solutions, so the company that puts the stamp on everything that makes it not explode. I don't know how else to describe that. She's great. She's very smart. We talked a lot about the flood of electronics with cheap batteries from China and whether or not those have labels, whether anybody cares anymore, and they're trying to safety label AI, which I had a lot of questions about whether anyone's going to participate. But it was a good one. We had a bunch of pretty rowdy ones, and then this was straightforwardly, oh, you have a very complicated problem and you're good at solving it.

Speaker 2:
[99:15] That's fun. UL is one of those companies that is way more important in the world than anybody realizes, and that's probably how it ought to be.

Speaker 4:
[99:22] My favorite Dakota episode is when you take this thing for granted, and it turns out to be this very complicated thing in the background. It's one of those.

Speaker 2:
[99:29] I'm excited about it. As always, you can subscribe to The Verge to support everything we're doing, and also to get all of our podcasts, these and those that we just talked about, ad free, verge.com/subscribe. It's a great page. It's just nice to look at. Just go look at it for a while. Also, the new homepage is out. Speaking of good pages to go look at, we fixed the scroll bar. Thank you to everybody who's very upset with us about the scroll bar. It seems to be going great. Feedback's solid so far. People like the homepage. I'm happy about it. I have some notes, but I'll give those to you off air. It'll be fine. If you have notes on the homepage or anything else, you can always call the hotline at 66-VERGE-11. You can email us at vergecastatheverge.com. We love hearing from you about anything and everything. It's the best part of the job. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk and Andrew Marino. We'll see you next time, Nilay. Rock and roll.