Muse AI is Useful and Horrible, Apple Home Event, OpenAI Crossed a Line

Welcome and show overview

0:00You can't just love something. You have to take care of it. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. We've got a follow-up on Muse. I've actually been trying it and have some thoughts. Google sent ideas out that can actually identify AI-generated images and video. Microsoft had their big event. It's rumored that Apple's Smart Home event should be coming soon. We're going to have some thoughts on AI self-regulation and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by Eleven Labs, Framer, CleanMyMac, and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, joined by my friend and famous co-host, Jason Aiton.

0:32How's it going, Jason? I don't know. You get mentioned on all the other podcasts. No, no, no. I have- I just get in control. I have here a video of you in your podcast setup talking to ABC Action News about none other than Muse. I didn't mean to Dr. Seuss that. You were on the news, Jason. Your coverage of Muse AI is all over. It's awesome. I am absolutely the subject matter expert on how not to install Muse.

1:02And I have not, to be clear, I have not installed Muse on my Mac because of your experience. But I have tried it on my iPhone and iPad, and I have some thoughts, Jason. I have some thoughts. All right. And there was also a big interview with Alexander Wang and Cleo Abram, and so we're going to get into that. But first, the quote, you can't just love something, you have to take care of it. Do you have any idea what movie that might be from? I have no idea what movie that's from. It is from the Fablemans movie. You just made that up.

1:32That's not real. That is a real movie. It was a good movie, the Fablemans. And here's the thing. You can't just love something, you have to take care of it. And here's what you can do for this show specifically.

Signal Award nominations and voting tips

1:42Finally, we are nominated for a Signal Award. And so you can both love us and take care of us. So here's what we need you to do. This is our one shot, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. I submitted our show for nomination months ago. I think it was in July. And I had not heard. I didn't know what was going to be happening with it. And I saw The Verge talk about how they were up for a Signal Award. And I was like, oh, voting for that is open. Did we make the nomination? And yes. Yes, we did.

2:13So we are nominated for the Best Co-Host Team. And we're the only tech show in that category, which is amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing. So we're up for Best Co-Host Team for the Signal Awards. And we are also up for Best Technology Show. We're up against some big names, including The Verge cast and even Wired. Now, listen. There's a gold, silver, and bronze award they give out for each category. And there is a Listener's Choice Award. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you all go, you can vote for us right now.

2:48Voting goes through October 16th, I believe. So next Friday. So I'll talk about it this episode and next episode. But run. Don't walk. Vote for primary technology. This way, now and forevermore, we can say we are an award-winning podcast. That's a lot of hope. But no, really, this would be a huge honor. You know, I've followed these awards because I was in the podcast movement space when I was at Riverside. And it would be really cool to win one. You have to create an account to vote, which kind of stinks. So I'm going to give you a pro tip, all right? Because, listen, we provide value in this show. Here's the pro tip.

3:19If you use Gmail, Fastmail, and many email providers, Outlook and iCloud don't do this, unfortunately. Do you know the plus trick, Jason? You ever use the plus trick? Yes. Here's the plus trick. Let's say your email is theotherguyatgmail.com, okay? You can do, and you don't have to set this up. This is just built into Gmail and Fastmail and a lot of other providers. You can do the other guy, the plus symbol, like you're adding something, and any word after that.

3:49And then do your atgmail.com. And it goes to your inbox, like normal. So you can do theotherguyplusjunk at gmail.com. And you can use that email wherever you want to sign up for anything. And then what you do is you create a filter in your email account that all email sent to that address goes to a folder, skips your inbox, goes directly to trash, whatever you want. So that's just a little tip for you. You can do the plus thing, but you don't have to do that. Just we would really appreciate it if you voted for us.

4:19Links are down in the show notes. We could be an award-winning show, Jason. Yeah. I feel really obligated at this point to tell our listeners. Yes. That is not my email address. I just checked. It is someone's email address. Please don't email that person. Oh, I'm sorry. I don't know who it is. Wait, how did you check? It is not me. I just tried to create it. Oh. I just tried to take that email address just in case. It's already taken. So please, please, listeners, don't email that person. Don't spam that person. You can email theotherguyatprimarytech.fm. That does come to me.

4:50Totally fine. I will absolutely not read them, but you can send email. No, he reads them. I know he reads them because I see him reply. You can also email theotherguyplusyoureawesome. No apostrophe because that doesn't work in email. Wait, does the suffix come through the email? Can you tell that someone has put that on there? Yeah. Yeah, you see the plus. You see the plus. Okay, cool. So anyway, don't email theotherguyatgmail.com. I don't know who it is, and I honestly don't want the blowback. But you can email the other guy plus however long of a sentence you want.

5:20You can send Jason an entire message in the email address at primarytech.fm. That I promise you I will not read the whole thing though. That's fair enough. Fair enough. We have some great five-star reviews. Wanted to give a shout out. Pacific Darktide from the USA says we're a fun show. Thanks for trying Muse so he never has to. You're welcome. That's our service. That is our service to you. Andrew Mika from Australia. Enjoyable and easy to listen to. G Apple Pro from the USA. The smartest hour in tech. Thank you for that. 67 Aluminum Plates said this podcast bullied me into turning my battery percentage off.

5:53I'm sorry. I feel bad. We didn't mean to bully it. But also get that percentage off. Turn it off. I did not bully anyone. Turn it off. Just kidding. You can leave it on if you want. iPhone Duo, you don't need it though. Jason said that. He said because it has the full circle. You're good. That is true. It is a more useful icon measurement. I'm fine with that. Sorry. I didn't mean to bully you. Don't bully. But also turn it off. Joshua on YouTube also said he's seen batteries not included, short circuit and gremlins. And also Apple I lovable has also seen batteries not included.

6:24Thank you. There's other people out there who have seen it. Have you seen it? You've not seen it yet. I believe I have seen it. I don't really remember it.

Listener reviews and video podcast scaling

6:30You should do it. You should watch it. And lastly, this was an interesting. This was a five-star review. So thanks for this, but Barty Burns from the USA, they were asking video podcasts as a channel for YouTube content. Would it be scalable for current YouTubers to pull back from the monopoly of like the platform to go to video podcasts again? This is a great utopia, Barty Burns, but I don't think so. What is the question specifically? Like could YouTube creators post their content as video podcasts now that Apple has video podcasts, Spotify, and would that help, you know, differentiate their audience from just

7:05being beholden to YouTube as a platform specifically? Definitely not. Definitely not. One is discovery. You know, the whole game. That's the only one, really. That's the big one. The big one is discovery. The second one is monetization. And Spotify is monetization, but nowhere near the level of YouTube, like as far as AdSense. So it's discovery is the problem, monetization, but I will say there are some YouTubers like Ryan Trahan, who's a massive YouTuber. So this works for him, but he posts his full YouTube videos on Spotify. Like you can just watch his YouTube videos on Spotify, which he then monetizes and Spotify

7:39gives him a cut, but there that's, yeah, not going to happen, but you can watch this show wherever you want. You can even watch us in Pocket Cast. Did you know that our videos in Pocket Cast? I did not know that. You can, Pocket Cast HLS video. You can watch it. I also feel like I've watched this video once when we record it, so I don't usually watch the video again later. That's fine. That's fair enough. I do sometimes go to YouTube and especially because I, somebody, several people sent me messages about my hat.

8:07People like the hat on YouTube. I do think so. So I had to go back and watch and be like, what did it look like? It was a good hat. It was a good hat. It was a Rivian hat, just to be clear. Oh, was it? That's what people wanted to know is what was your hat? I was like, listen, it was just a hat Rivian sent me one time. Oh, that's pretty nice. Well, I have a hat that says I am not a robot and I might break that out next time. All right. Last thing before we get to new Kindle's Apple Smart Home event, Chris Peck is on a cruise across the Pacific and he has brought our Medieval Night Riding the Polar Bear. This is our Medieval Night in Hawaii at the USS Arizona Memorial.

8:39You can see a little night guy down there at the bottom. So he's all over Hawaii. Here's us at the beach. Medieval Night. Not us. Well, you know, symbolic, the symbolic us. And also Las Vegas. Here's our Medieval Night in Las Vegas. Traveling the world. Traveling the world. Remember, if you're going to Antarctica, let us know. We want to send you a polar bear with a Medieval Night and we'll do that. I think if you're going to Antarctica, we'll send you the pin. But we're also going to send you like a flat, Stephen, to take with you. Oh, my mom used to do the flat.

9:10Yes. We had one of my brothers when he lived in Colorado until like at every Christmas or not every Christmas because he came home for that. But like we used to do family lunches and he was just standing in the corner. The flat. Nope. That's amazing. Yes. Well, I'll send you a flat, Stephen. I also, I'll just tease this. I made a shortcuts pillow. Hopefully Apple doesn't get onto me for it. But that's going to be for sale soon. If you want a shortcuts pillow for the holidays. All right. I just wanted one and so I figured I'll just do it.

Amazon's new Kindle lineup

9:37All right.

Amazon's new Kindle lineup

9:38Right after we were done recording last week, I believe this was Thursday it dropped, but Amazon released new Kindles. So if you're in the market for a new Kindle or obviously for the holiday season, there's a new base model Kindle, which is supposedly lighter and faster. Starts at $150. There's a new Kindle Paperwhite. Starts at $200. So if you like that model. And there's a new Kindle Colorsoft all the way up to like three, about $300. So new Kindles are out there. They come in nice colors. There's also now a Bluetooth remote where you can turn the pages by clicking a physical

10:09remote that's wireless. So if you want to, I guess, prop the Kindle up or if you have one of those elaborate bed mounts where it just like floats over your head while you're laying down and you can turn the pages with the remote, you can do that now with the Kindle. There you go. And they now like are essentially step laddering these because there's like the base Kindle and then there's an aluminum version. That's right. And then there's the Paperwhite and then there's an aluminum version, right? Aluminum is the premium version. Apparently. And so, yeah.

10:40Anyway. And then there's a kid's version, which I think is just a regular version of everything, but with kid-friendly colors designed by like artists and stuff. And you get something called the Amazon kids, which I don't know what that is, but I don't think I, I don't know how I feel about that. One, I just wanted to show this picture of the little remote. Here's a little remote with the two buttons and now we'll link it. This is the most Jeff Bezos thing of all time, which is people, the number one complaint about a Kindle is bring back the buttons.

11:12Right. We want the page turn buttons. We missed the good old days when that janky thing, you could push a button and it took 14 minutes to redraw the screen, but we just loved the buttons. And they're like, well, what if we didn't get the buttons on the thing? We just gave you a remote with buttons. Like, I'm sorry. This is not the easiest way to solve this problem. All right. We'll give you buttons, but it's on a separate remote. It's a separate thing. I will say my kids enjoy Kindles. We got Kindles for my youngest two last year and my, uh, my middle son, he reads anime on

11:44the Kindle, which is fun. We discovered, I bought him a Kindle color soft because I was like, oh, anime, this will be great. But all the manga, and I'm sorry, you don't read anime, you read manga, you watch anime, but all the manga that you buy in the Kindle store is all black and white. So there's no color. Like the covers are color and that's it. All the manga is in black and white. So don't get a Kindle color soft if reading manga is your priority. But he likes the Kindle and my daughter uses her Kindle too. But those are the kinds of devices where they will last for a decade and you really don't

12:15need to buy any. Yeah. I still have, I think, a second gen Kindle or something. Yeah. And it doesn't have a keyboard or button. So it's whatever the first generation of the base Kindle that didn't have a keyboard or buttons. Right. And I will say the Amazon Kids parental features are the most bizarre, difficult to understand and set up parental controls. They even beat screen time on Apple devices as I think the worst kids settings because it's like, do you sign in with your account? Do you create a kid's account and sign with it that?

12:48But then how do you, it's bizarre. So anyway, that's a mess. And I am three devices away from trying out the new screen time settings in iOS 27. I have finally got it down. It was at probably 20 devices I needed to update. And right now I'm going to look to see what the update is. Three devices. My mom's iPhone, which I'm going to update tonight when I go over to our house and eat dinner. My mom's iPhone, a Mac mini and an iPad that have been updated, but for some reason screen

13:18time doesn't register it yet. So one day, one day I'll try the new screen time settings and make a video about it. Yeah. I know we're going to talk about my screen time settings adventure later, but I cannot wait. Wait, your screen time settings? Well, it's just weird that something is in screen time settings. You got it on the rundown. We'll get to it. Oh, oh, that's right. That's right. Okay. Yes. We'll get to that.

Apple smart home rumors and smart locks

13:39All right. Then I was hoping that we would have news of an Apple event happening next week because there's so many rumors about the HomePad, Apple's new push back into the smart home. There are a bunch of leaks now from leaker PDFU recently on the scene, but he's leaking all the things now where he leaked a partnership supposedly. Well, Bloomberg said this. Mark Gurman over Bloomberg said that Apple is going to be partnering with LG to make smart

14:09home products for the Apple home line. They will be labeled and branded as LG products, not Apple products. And PDFU shared full on renderings and images of what these products might look like. There's a smart lock, might be LG. There's a number keypad. Obviously, we'll work with all of Apple's HomeKey stuff. There is an LG thermostat that will be, you know, sold in Apple stores, kind of blessed by Apple as a Apple HomeKit device and a temperature sensor. And so all these things, and these are, they're also FCC filings.

14:41Things for these devices. So it looks like these devices are real. Unfortunately, you know, this partnership, I'm sure, is years in the making. It's a little bit unfortunate that Apple, who prides itself on privacy and security, especially in Apple Home, partnered with the company that had the huge breach of trust in their LG TVs, where their smart TVs were just recording audio nonstop of people. That's unfortunate. Yeah. But anyway, I guess it'll be their devices. I'm really hoping the smart lock doesn't look like this, Jason. I don't prefer this look of a smart lock. Like, I don't, what do you think of this?

15:12The, yeah, I mean, I don't know personally. Like, we have the one that just looks like a deadbolt. That's the only thing I ever want. You have a level lock. Yeah. I don't want buttons. I don't want any of that stuff. I just, because it's the most inconspicuous thing. It just looks like a deadbolt. Yeah. And if you walk up to it with the little thing, you just tap it on it and it unlocks or I can do it. Like, I don't, locks don't need to look techie. I don't think most people want that. Sure. It's complicated because like the level lock while really has a key, you can just put

15:44a key in it. You could just put a key in it. Some people prefer not having a physical key backup because they don't want like the even chance of being picked, I guess. Have they, has that ever happened to them? I mean, we've had deadbolts for a really long time and yes, it doesn't, the number is not zero, but that's not an experience most of us experience. No, no, I get it. I do, I do have a level lock thing I want to go into for a minute, but please continue. I'm sorry. Well, I will just say on the lock thing, when it comes to design, I have the Schlage

16:16Sense Pro. They didn't send it to me. I bought it. And I do think it's one of the nicest smart home locks. It's like a, just a rounded wreck, pretty inconspicuous. There's actually no keyhole, but it works with the ultra wideband chip where you can just approach it compared to like the Aqara ones that are really big. But anyway, very curious to see, we might get an announcement today and I'd like to pontificate a little bit about, you know, if we will see. We have a podcast. That's what it's for. That is a podcast pontificate, that alliteration. The other rumor I just wanted to cover is that Apple will allow HomePods to be grouped

16:49in four for surround sound. So this is supposedly all these smart home announcements, which again, Apple has not made anything official, but this is all from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, from PDFU, the leaker, but that you'll be able to pair four HomePods, well pair, but you'll be able to group four HomePods for full surround sound with the new Apple TV 4K. These are all the rumors. Now, I was fully expecting, everybody was saying there's going to be an event. Mark Gurman said there's going to be an event October 13th. Now, typically when Apple does an event, they announce it a week ahead of time, which would

17:20have been yesterday or Tuesday, sorry, two days ago, Tuesday, as we record, that was a week. That's usually the timeline they announce an event. Sometimes, and I believe this was someone at 9 to 5 Max said, for the scary fast event, which there was like a physical event in New York and a couple other places, but it was mainly a live stream. They sent invites out for that six days before. That would have been yesterday. It's been totally silent. For that one, that was, I mean, I was at that event. You were at that event, yeah. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure I just got a phone call and was like, can you come to this thing?

17:52Oh, really? We'll send you details later, yeah. Ah, interesting. So maybe there is that, and we won't hear about anything. Here's my prediction. I'd be curious your thought. I think we're going to get something Friday, tomorrow, as we record. And Apple's going to be like, tune in Tuesday at this time for a special event. And there might be some in-person gatherings with hands-on in New York and London, Los Angeles or whatever, but it's going to be a live stream at a certain time, and that's where they're going to announce it. But they're going to announce it, drop it on Friday.

18:23That's my prediction. What do you say? I don't know. I also think it's equally as possible that there is no advance anything that we see publicly about it, but that there may be people there. But if they do this in New York, it's like, I don't know, 70 people, right? Like, they don't, well, they're not going to announce that they're doing an event because if that's what's happening, right? Did they even say anything about the Scary Fast event in advance? I can't remember. I believe they announced, they said, tune in for a video. Was it just like a Twitter post from Joswiak or something? I think so.

18:54Okay. So like, that's, that's a little bit different, but I just think we have to, okay, let's think about this. It's a brand new, essentially category for them. I mean, the Apple TV is not a home device. I know it is a home device. I have a story about that, but like, this is, they don't have a home device. It's a brand new category. Okay. But they also have no idea how this is going to go. And I think that that tells you a lot about the type of event they're going to have, because if they announced that they're having an event, they have set the expectations, right?

19:27Whereas if they just do this thing where they're like, tune into this thing at 7 PM Tuesday, there's some people who are there. They've already gotten briefings during the day. They're going to release their, their first impressions, like at the same time, essentially. So YouTube is just going to have Apple's event and a bunch of MKBHD. And I, Justine, like walking around the penthouse, like, you know, this townhouse doing it. They're not going to, that doesn't require them to announce it to the rest of the world. And that is a much more low key way of, of rolling out something that they didn't, they

19:57have no way of knowing how people will respond to this. Yes. The super like enthusiasts are like, please give us some stuff. But the average person already has 14 Alexas, three Google Home devices, a Roku, and maybe two HomePod Minis they forgot about in the bedroom. Like, do you know what I mean? Fair. Yeah, that is fair. The Scary Fast event, it was announced on October 24th. It was teased. Okay, so it was a week ahead of time. It was teased with media invitations and a web animation.

20:28And then the event was on October 30th, late, like Monday evening. It was like 8 p.m. Monday evening. So it was still like a, it was six days before. And sorry, to be clear, that actually wasn't an event. That was literally just a video that got released at that time. Everything that they had, the hands-on was all beforehand. But you actually had, you were invited to like sit and watch the video with other people, right? There were some people who were invited to stick around to watch the video.

20:59Right. But not everyone was. I did not stay to watch the video because I flew home. I watched it on a plane. I actually watched it on a plane. That's right. That's right. On my laptop. But it was not like a quote event because everything that had happened at a quote event had already happened during the day. Our briefings happened like at 10 o'clock or something. I was sitting there. I was in the briefing with Gruber like, and then, then there was like group, uh, hands-on like you went, they took you to like, okay, there's all the laptops.

21:30There's the Mac minis. Did they do iPad pros then? No, that was separate. No, that was separate. Okay. Well, we'll see. I mean, these are pretty strong rumors from multiple sources. And so I'm excited to next week. I've been waiting years for this thing. And so, yeah, we'll see. We will report back. I also have Muse checking the, scouring the internet hourly for any signs that this event is official. Well, that is what I found Muse to do. What Muse is actually doing is booking the townhouse in New York right now. Give me your Amex, please, Steven.

22:01Listen. And reaching out to all of the press. I mean, there's going to be an event now if Muse has anything to say about it. It will be. Just to me, it may not be anyone from Apple there. That's the thing. We're going to talk about Muse because I have many thoughts about it. So anyway, did you say what you were going to say about it? I want to say about the level lock real quickly. The level lock, yeah. Okay. I love our level lock. Sure. That's hard to say out loud a lot of times. But anyway, it's great. It's perfect because I can control it from my, like I have a, I have a widget for it on my, on the, my control center. Like it's great. If I walk up to it, it'll unlock, like I can make it unlock.

22:34All these things are fantastic, but it stopped working, Steven. Why do you think it stopped working three weeks ago? What would be the potential causes of something like now it still worked in the app, like the level lock app, but it did not work in the home app. What could I have possibly done that would have caused that to happen? Um, was it updating to like tvOS 27 on something? No, I swapped out an Apple TV, Apple TV in our bedroom stopped connecting to the internet and an Apple TV is like, just not useful if it's not going to get to the internet. So I took the one out of my office and I put it there and that Apple TV is the closest

23:07one to our front door. And I like had to like bug, you know, like try to reverse engineer what could have possibly happened. I'm like, you know, the only thing, cause I had also gotten a new iPhone in that same time span. I thought maybe that's the problem. I was like, you know what? I bet it's the Apple TV. And as soon as I rebooted the Apple TV, took the battery out of the level lock and put it back in everything. So I'm just telling you, don't swap out your Apple TVs unless you are prepared for that to have ramifications for any thread device on your, in your home. But how many Apple TVs do you have? Like before that level, we have two.

23:39The other one is significantly farther away from that front door. But usually, I mean, usually if you have multiple Apple TVs and you just unplug one, your Apple home should reassign a different Apple TV to be like the hub for the house. Sure. But, and supposedly you can manually choose that in the home app. Like you can actually say, use this Apple TV as my, as my home hub. But to your point, no one really knows what happens in that app. Yeah. It is such a black box that you just, there's like, there's like thread whispers going through

24:12the air. And if they find a thing, they find a thing. And I just assume that it's because it was the closest one that that's the one it was using all this time. And then once we disconnected it and plugged a new one in, it was like, I'm a lost lock. I don't know what to do. And that's, so I just went into my home settings and there's now an option for active home hub, which it will show you what Apple TV is chosen as like the main one. And it has chosen my studio Apple TV, which I don't want because I run the betas on that. So I'm going to turn off automatic selection and I'm going to choose my newest Apple TV,

24:46which is my family room Apple TV. And let's see if everything breaks because I also, as I was going into the settings, I saw in my Apple home, 101 issues, which usually means devices disconnected. So who knows? Maybe that's why my office was freaking out during the pre-show. So this is interesting because the home hub in my house is the living room home pod. Not is a living room home pod. It says home is the hub, but that Apple TV would have been the border router. Right. So without that, it doesn't matter which one is the hub. If it can't reach that, it would, that's, I think what was the problem.

25:19Right. And I just went back into my home settings because I wanted to see if I could choose a home pod as the hub, which you can. And the automatic selection toggle toggled itself back on. So that might just be a placebo. It might just make you feel good while you're changing the settings. This is like every time I remove Muse from the settings for full disk access and it just puts itself back there. It's like, I didn't have access. Well, anyway, so can't wait for the Apple home hub. It's going to solve all these issues. Very excited.

Microsoft's surface laptop and copilot event

25:45That was a little tongue in cheek. Microsoft had a big event. The Microsoft Surface laptop event. It wasn't necessarily like, you know, a Windows event. Anyway, they had a big event. The two big announcements that I walked away with, they announced a new Surface laptop ultra. It's funny using that ultra naming convention before Apple as far as, you know, laptops. This thing is expensive. It starts at like $2,600. And if you spec it up with a terabyte and more RAM, it can go close to $6,000.

26:19But it has the RTX Spark chip, 18 core RTX Spark, 5120 GPU cores, and 24 gigs of RAM. That's the base model. One of the coolest features, and Microsoft actually spent some time on this, is the magnetic USB-C port, which typically to have a nice magnetic connector like MagSafe, it's a proprietary connector. You know, Apple has the MagSafe, and that's just Apple stuff. And Microsoft actually made the USB-C charging port. It has this little like magnetic connector.

26:50And so it's just USB-C. So technically, you could just plug a regular USB-C cable in there as well. But if you use their little special charger, you can have the little magnet snap in there like it's MagSafe. And that was cool. Yeah. That was cool. It actually works from very far away too. I saw people just kind of like flicking it towards the charger, and it finds its place pretty quickly. So that's the breakaway USB-C port. And then the other big thing was Copilot. They're really pushing Copilot to try and be, you know, all the AI stuff. They announced something called hybrid intelligence, where Copilot can work with your apps and tools

27:25and the files on your local computer. Never think Codex or Claude Cowork, but for Windows and Copilot being that. So they're turning that up, trying to get you to use it. And also the Windows search experience. They added a bunch of quick actions, almost like trying to make a launcher. And it has cool animations. It has cool features. It also seems like, I don't know. I don't know. Do people enjoy Windows, Jason? I honestly don't know. I don't want to really open that can of worms.

27:56No, let's not open that can. If you enjoy Windows, that's great. I don't love Windows, mostly, to be fair, because I have done the experiment of using it for an extended period of time for the purposes of writing an article about it. Like, I wanted to know. I switched to a Google device and a Surface device as well. Microsoft makes great hardware. They really do. The Surface devices are fantastic. If I was going to be forced to switch to Windows, I would want a Surface laptop, for sure. That's right. That's without a doubt, because they're basically just MacBook Pro ripoffs.

28:26It's fine. I mean, it is. It's like positioned as an alternative to the MacBook Pro. They even have the magnetic connector for the power, right? It's like, which people talked about how amazing that was. And I'm like, that's not great, because that means you have to give up one of your USB-C ports for power. The beautiful thing about MagSafe is you still get the other ports. That is true. Right? That is true. I think that's, yeah, anyway. But I don't know, like, I know people use Windows computers for two reasons.

28:58One, that's just familiar. Sure. That's what they've always used their whole life, or their job requires it. I don't think there are any. There's no one who's doing it for school, because you either have a MacBook or a Chromebook. Like, that's just the way it is. And there are very few people, I think, who just wake up one day, evaluate all of the options, and are like, I think I'm going to go with the Asus. Like, which the one huge area, and it's in my own house, the call is coming from inside the house, is gaming. Gaming PCs. Okay, fair. And that's the thing where, we got my son a gaming PC last Christmas, and he uses it

29:31every day. Like, he loves that thing. And my son, my older son, we got him a MacBook Pro for his birthday earlier this year. And at one point, he realized that he could download games on a MacBook Pro. Like, I never told him that. And I was like, yeah, I mean, you can. And so he was like, wait a minute, I could download, like, Epic Games on the MacBook Pro? I was like, I think so. And it turns out, he cannot run, he cannot play Rocket League on a MacBook Pro, because the Epic Games store blocks that, I guess, doesn't allow Rocket League.

30:05Interesting. Specifically, he could play Fortnite, but he can't play Rocket League. I don't know why. But my son's gaming PC obviously can, and that's one of the main games that they play. And so that use case, I totally understand. And his use case is basically like turning on the PC, opening the Epic Games or Steam app, and launching a game. You know, that's the whole experience. But yeah, let us know. I mean, aside from the gaming aspect, I'm sure we have Windows users that listen.

30:36You know, are these features interesting? Because this is the hybrid intelligence feature that's part of Copilot, where it can access your files, take actions for you, and even use local models. And I'm curious how powerful this is, as opposed to things like Claude and Chachapiti. Like, is this comparable? I'm not going to install this on my son's gaming PC to test. So if you're out there and you listen, leave us a five-star rating review or shoot us an email and let us know. Like, yeah, hybrid intelligence, super excited. Windows, let us know. Yeah.

31:06And no one's buying this, though, to play games specifically. Like, every PC that I've ever been, like, review unit they've given me, I'll download, like, Xbox Store and Steam. And the only thing I want to do is run Microsoft Flight Simulator. And they have yet to send me a computer that will actually do that. Because it is so graphics intensive. That it's like, you need at least 64 gigs of memory. You don't actually need that. But, like, in order for it to be a good experience, like, none of these things that I've ever been

31:37given is... I'm... My son actually has the Microsoft Flight Simulator on Xbox Series S. And it's pretty cool. I might buy an Xbox for that, though. It's really fun. He even has, like, the physical controls. Like, he asked for that for his birthday. I'm like, my aunt got it. Like, those are pretty cool. So anyway, I say... You know, people say in our reviews that we're a great Apple-centric podcast. And I try to say, like, we're not so... We're not really Apple-centric. But I think I just gave up the hand right here. Because... Well, we are Apple...

32:08People who use Apple products almost exclusively. Not entirely, but almost exclusively. But, like, yeah, we still cover the other stuff. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And we're going to talk... We're about to talk about Muse for a second. That's definitely not Apple. I mean, it's running on Apple devices, but... All right. Well, we've got to get to that. Because I've been trying it in-depth. So we're going to try Muse, Chachi Patia, some things out there. And Google Synth ID, so you can actually detect at least some AI-generated content. We're going to get into all of that.

Sponsors: Eleven Labs, Framer, CleanMyMac

32:34But before we do, we want to thank our sponsors and our friends. This is a new sponsor. I actually use them a lot. And so I'm excited to actually sponsor the show. 11 Labs. So thank you to 11 Labs. Here's what I do. I've been using 11 Labs for a long time. And there's lots of use cases for this. If you are a member of this show, you support this show, and you listen to Primary Tech Daily, you probably hear that a lot of those episodes are generated by 11 Labs. During tech season, honestly, this entire year, it's been getting really busy. And so I need to be able to quickly put together the news, and I curate that manually.

33:08But then to be able to generate a quick five-minute daily update podcast in my voice, I use 11 Labs for that. And it is awesome. Because one, I actually trained 11 Labs on my own voice. And I know we've talked about like deep fakes before, but this was like my own deep fakes. I wanted to do it. Deep fakes myself. That's exactly right. And so I gave it just a ton of my voice. And the voice sounds really good. I will actually maybe insert a short... Actually, you have to support the show. Become a member. Listen to Primary Tech Daily, and you can hear what it sounds like.

33:39But 11 Labs V4 just came out, and it is even more natural sounding, expressive, and it is just an incredible tool. And so this could also be for, you know, hold music or automated like phone. So if you have a business, and you have an automated phone system that you can upload recordings to, and you want to update it quickly, or the person that usually records it just can't get to it, generate that with 11 Labs. There's a lot of built-in voices for it. But of course, you can also train it on a voice. And 11 Labs helps you create better experience even for customers, whether it's a call center, for teams.

34:11And when it's made by 11 Labs, it supports over 70 languages. And that's another use case I've done. You can overdub using 11 Labs. And so with my trained professional voice that sounds like me, I can overdub into other languages. And I have uploaded those to my YouTube videos so someone can watch it. And it's me and my voice, but speaking French, German, Japanese. And 11 Labs can do all of that overdubbing, get you that file, and then you can use it however you want. So overdubbing for audio generation, text-to-speech, it is incredible. And it's built for enterprise scale, too.

34:4211 Agents handles more than 10 million conversations per week with SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI certifications, regional data residency, and even forward-deployed engineers who can work alongside your team to get agents into production. It is an incredible tool. I use it all the time. I've been paying for it personally for several years now. So if you run a business or handle customer operations across support, sales, or marketing, you can start with a demo at 11labs.io slash primary. That's 11labs.io slash primary.

35:12See how 11 Agents can fit into your workflows and help build experiences that your customers will actually love. 11labs.io slash primary. That link is also in the show notes. E-L-E-V-E-N-L-A-B-S dot I-O slash primary. Thanks to 11 Labs for sponsoring this episode and our friends at Framer. We've talked about Framer before. It's an incredible tool for building websites. I also love this landing page, Framer and Primary Technology. Look at that. If you love something, you'll care about it too. That's what it is. And they care about this show.

35:44But we actually had a friend of the show, Parker Ortolani, he talked about how he rebuilt his website using Framer Agents. And it was just incredible. Did it super fast. And it looks really good. I've been seeing more and more Framer websites. And they just look awesome. Plus, you can do things like A-B test. So if you have a landing page or a website and you want to full-on A-B test your homepage, what homepage converts more, what actually do people click through, Framer can help you do all of that. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right.

36:18Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. And agents and humans work in tandem. So your whole team can be collaborating in Framer along with the Framer agents, helping you build the pages, custom code, whatever you need. And you can work alongside of it. Build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO, audit for issues, and ship everything all in one place. And Framer is an enterprise-level solution powered by agents that provides premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs.

36:50So learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash primary. And you get 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash primary for 30% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. That link is in the show notes. So thanks to Framer for sponsoring this episode. And finally, to keep your Mac clean, CleanMyMac, also sponsoring this week's episode. I use CleanMyMac. Listen, if you ever need to delete an app and you want to make sure all the little files across application support and library and all those little files go away, CleanMyMac can help you with that.

37:25If you need to free up space on your Mac, CleanMyMac can help you find either those big attachments that might be hiding in your messages. It can even do cloud cleanup. So you can find iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox. If there's some files taking up lots of space on your local machine, CleanMyMac can help with that. It can run just cleanup and clutter scans to see what are some random files you don't need anymore, what are ways to free up space, even make your Mac faster. It also has anti-malware engine. And there's an assistant and a menu app. So it can live right in the menu bar on your Mac. You can click it, run the scans, look for big files.

37:57But there's an assistant now that can actually help and offers quick practical fixes to bring things back into balance. And the menu app gives you those quick insights and instant actions right from the top bar exactly when you need them. And you can even track progress without turning maintenance into another complicated to-do. And again, I stress the messages feature because that is where sometimes a lot of storage is being taken up. If you have iCloud messages turned on, you have like forever saved messages, and you're sending big videos and photo attachments, then CleanMyMac is the way to do, is the way to go.

38:29So here's what you do. Get tidy today. You can try seven days for free and use our promo code PRIMARYTECH, all one word, for 20% off at clnmy.com slash PRIMARYTECH in all caps. That link is also in the show notes. Just click it there. Use promo code PRIMARYTECH for 20% off, clnmy.com slash PRIMARYTECH. They also got a Mac App Store shortlist for the best 26 apps for 2026. So kudos to them. And our thanks to CleanMyMac for sponsoring this episode.

Testing Muse AI agents

38:59So I've been using Muse, Jason. I've been using Muse in preparation for this week's show. Okay. And you've been using it too, you said? You've been right? I've been using it more than apparently anyone on the internet. No, I'm just kidding. Or it's been using me. That is, been using your data more than anybody. So here's, okay. So I've been trying it. I downloaded the app on my iPhone and my iPad. Muse for iPad just came out this week. So you can have the dedicated app there. And I started talking to it. I'm going to plug this thing before we get into the details.

39:30I'm going to plug Jason's bit on the news. It's about 28 minutes in on the ABC Action News. And I also want to link to this interview with Cleo Abram and Alexander Wang. He is, works for Meta. He was in the Meta Connect event recently talking about Muse. This is a great interview with Cleo and Alexander Wang. You can kind of hear their vision for it. If you listen to this, like, they are very optimistic. And Alexander is very optimistic on the future of what these agents can do.

40:01She asked him, like, what is your, not five-year plan, but what is, like, the future with all these AI agents? And Alexander Wang was basically like, listen, people can pursue their hopes and dreams. And we believe the world is just going to be awesome. Like, I think those were his words verbatim. And he, they're very optimistic that, you know, this is going to save people time and money. He said that multiple times. This will save people time and money and will allow them to pursue their dreams and live their best life thanks to Muse.ai. He literally said all that.

40:33So, anyway. I'll link to the interview. So, did Muse.ai help me live my best life? Well, I think there's, sorry. No, go ahead. Go ahead. You sent me a very specific piece of this. Oh, yes. Thank you. Which I think is an important piece because I have not heard from Alexander Wang, just to be clear. He says, and when the product is live and when people are using Muse, if we get any user reports that are like, hey, this did, like, a crazy thing, we take that so, so seriously. And we, like, really try to make sure that we understand exactly what happened.

41:03Really? Because I think all you do is go around and tell people that what they said happened didn't happen. It doesn't seem like you're trying to understand it at all. In fact, I've been trying for weeks to understand what happened. I have had some very nice conversations with someone I met, but it's very obvious that because I'm a journalist that it's tricky for them because it's like they know I'm going to write a follow-up piece as soon as we figure out what happened. And it's like, well, we're not. I want to give them credit. This is not what they are saying.

41:34This is what it feels like they are saying. We're not sure we want to know exactly what happened because then someone might write about exactly what happened and it might not be what we thought. So, I just, like, you can say things like this in a podcast interview, but that is so disconnected, I think, from the experience people are actually having because it doesn't seem like they're actually trying to understand what happened. Right. And I literally sent you a screenshot of that portion of the interview because as I was listening to it, I was just like, really? And I'm curious if this interview was recorded before your news went so big.

42:06You know, because this is a very highly produced interview. Cleo Abram really, you know, she has a great production value in her videos. So, I imagine this was recorded shortly after Muse launched. Or before. Or, yeah, maybe before. Because they did offer access to some people. So, Ben Thompson just talked about that and he's like, no, and he didn't get around to using it in advance. But, yeah. So, I think, I wonder the timing of when this interview was recorded. But I thought that was hilarious knowing everything that you've been going through. So, I've been trying Muse. I want to give you a few use cases, some that I think were actually really good and some that totally failed.

42:40And so, one of the things as an independent business now, health insurance plans are the bane of my existence. Open enrollment is coming up. And trying to figure out and compare plans is really difficult, especially for a layman like me who's not in this world. And so, one of the things I asked Muse about were health care plans for 2027. And it gave me a bunch of information. It also said that plans aren't really publicly available until the end of October, where all the details are out.

43:13But it already gave me some pre-information like, well, these brands are no longer in Florida. You know, this person, you know, this company left the region. And here's some, like, general pricing on bronze and silver plans. And it said, do you want me to provide a report once all these plans are live and send it to you? I was like, absolutely. Why not? And this is the thing where I didn't have to give it any data, per se. I did tell it I'm a family of five, and I told it our ages. And it's going to compare these plans when they come out and give me a report.

43:46And that's a place where, one, having a web browser available to it that's always on in the cloud is great. Because I don't have to have this running on a computer of mine. It doesn't have to use, like, a browser extension like Claude or whatever. And so that seems like a great use case. We'll follow up when it finally gives me that report, and we'll see how useful that actually is. Asking it for information about your own meta accounts, like you had said, it's great for that. So I just asked it, what were my best-performing Instagram reels recently?

44:16And analyzed what might have made them good or made them highly viewed and shared. And it gave me some advice on that, on hooks and different topics and formatting and all that kind of stuff. So that was pretty good. General knowledge things. I bought my wife a new iPad Pro. I bought her an M5 iPad Pro because she just started orchestra season yesterday, and I wanted to get her a nanotexture version, traded in the M2 iPad Pro, got, like, $500 back for that. So she got her new iPad. Didn't realize M2 accessories do not work with the M5 iPad Pro.

44:50Yeah, do you want to know what the most egregious example of that is? Please, go ahead. The Smart Folio keyboard. The Smart Folio keyboard. Works with the M2 but does not work with the M5. And the other egregious one is my wife actually used the Logitech Combo Touch keyboard, which she really liked. And I asked Muse if it would work. And the problem is the magnets are different. Right. The iPad might still fit in it. I'm not sure I didn't try it because I had a bunch of moffed cases, so I just gave her one of those. But also the Apple Pencil. I realized she couldn't use her Apple Pencil anymore.

45:21I had to get her an Apple Pencil Pro. I was like, this is why sometimes, like, people in just, like, the normal world, when they upgrade their Apple devices, are kind of frustrated. And I'm like, I get it. I get it now. So Muse gave me all that information. Muse was like, well, it doesn't work with the Apple Pencil and it doesn't work with the Logitech Combo Touch, so you'll need to get new versions of that. I was like, okay. Now here's where it starts breaking down. I needed new mats for my car. My passenger and driver mats are just messed up. There's, like, a kink in them and it's, like, right where my foot presses the pedals.

45:53And so while I'm driving, sometimes it feels like it gets caught under the pedals and there's, like, a very stressful moment. I was like, let me just get new mats for the car. And I'll just ask Muse because I'm trying to use it for all the things. So I told Muse, here's my model car. Here's the year. I need front passenger mats. Find me something. And it found me several options. It gave me three options, differing prices. It gave me the, like, rubbery weather mats, which was fine because they said, like, they were the highest reviewed.

46:24I wanted carpet-y ones. So I asked a follow-up. Give me the carpet-type mats. So I went and found it. The cheapest they were available was at Home Depot. And I said, do you want me to buy them for you? And so, Jason, I was trying to go all in. I said, go ahead. Go ahead, Muse. Buy it for me. Let's do it. YOLO. YOLO. So I follow up. I gave it my home address. I'm like, Meta probably already has that somewhere. And also my phone number so I could do the order process. It said you can either check out yourself in a browser or connect Link by Stripe, and I'll buy it for you.

47:02And Link by Stripe is like a payment service provided by Stripe, and I trust Stripe. So I went ahead, created the Link account, connected a payment method, and then you connect a Link to Muse, and then Muse can use that payment method. So I did all that. I connected it. I said, all right, I connected the thing, Muse. Don't screw me over. Look, here's a payment method. And so it went through. It said, all right, I'm going to do this, yada, yada. And it got to the end, and it said, listen, I got a problem.

47:33I can't check out. The Home Depot website won't let me check out. So you can either take over and just click check out, like just click buy, or I can like send this to you. Like let me know what you want me to do. And the option to take over in the browser, I tried that first because I was like, let me just try to keep staying in the Muse app. I clicked. It's like a little browser preview in the Muse app. You have to tell me if you see this before. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, you see it. It's a little browser like in the Muse app.

48:04This is on my phone. I'm on my phone now. So I click into the browser, and it's like if you VNC or remote into a computer where you're like using the trackpad, dragging around your finger and trying to tap to click on the elements. I'm trying to do this on this tiny, tiny little screen. I couldn't rotate it for some reason. So it's like a widescreen desktop monitor on my iPhone, like this little strip across the front. And I'm trying to move this mouse and like go over to the checkout button. I tried clicking it. Just I couldn't do it.

48:35I just couldn't buy it. And this whole process had taken me probably like 30 minutes at this point. So I just went to the Home Depot app. I searched for the item, and I bought it in like 30 seconds. Yeah. Well, and just to be clear, it's not like you were doing that. That's actually literally what you're doing. You were just controlling a little VM Linux computer in the cloud. That's right. So that experience was lackluster. And I appreciated that it finding me a product. And then I didn't know where to go. I knew, well, let me just go to the Home Depot app, and I will just buy this thing. And I did buy it.

49:05They supposedly arrived today. So we'll see if they actually fit my car because I just bought the same item that Muse suggested. We'll follow up. But that was interesting. It kind of failed at the last step, but it was trying really hard. So that was that. I did also ask it for things like, hey, I don't know, scour Reddit and see if any of my videos have been mentioned in like the Shortcuts subreddit or whatever. And it pulled a bunch of posts. And apparently my Raycast video has been shared in Reddit and my other videos. And now I have it monitoring for the Apple Smart Home event.

49:36It's checking hourly. It said, I'll check every three hours if anybody says anything about this Apple event. It said, no, Muse, check hourly. This is important. And so it's supposedly checking hourly. It's going to notify me. So mixed experience. I see the use case. I also see, to your point, the over-eagerness. Because there was one time I get a notification from Muse randomly. And it was like, hey, there's news about the iPhone Duo and how developers can submit apps for 27.1.

50:07Do you want me to prepare a video script for you? I said, no, get out of my face, Muse. I don't want that. And also, don't be proactive about that kind of stuff. Also, don't you know me? I don't use scripts. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. I don't script anything. So, you know, it is over-eager, like you said, in past episodes. I see some use cases there. And in my mind, one, I'm not going to ever download it on my Mac. Two, if there's any kind of research or very difficult to parse task, like health insurance plans, I might go to Muse and try it there.

50:41I also wonder, I mean, I could do this with Claude or Chachaputee as well. And I might have to compare to see how good it is. But that has been my experience in the last week. What is yours, Ben? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really useful. Yeah, yeah. Like, it just really is useful. I've been using it almost now. I only use it on my phone. So, you have your own computer. You can just do what you need to do up there. You can stay away from mine. That's fine.

51:06It is a – well, and that's a shame because there would be a lot of cool things that it could do on a Mac Mini. But I'm just not – it doesn't behave well enough. It has not earned my trust, like I say to my children. I need you to be trustworthy in these small things. Yes. And not – and then we'll trust you with more responsibility, Muse. And you failed literally the first test. And so, we're just going to keep you on the phone where you're nice and sandboxed and whatever. But it does things like – so, I put something on Marketplace and was, like, very strict.

51:37I'm like, don't give anyone my address. Here's the price that it's, you know, listed for. Okay. I would probably take this amount, but I don't want you to negotiate down unless somebody offers you that amount. Like, I don't want you to be, like, if someone says, what's the lowest you'll take, be like, you can make me an offer. And if that number is this number, you can take that number. And then you need to tell me, and I will work out with them the stuff. And even then, it's like, boom, so-and-so is ready to pay. They've got this amount. They're ready to go. There's a police station located here, here, here. This is a great public location.

52:08Do you want me to send them that address? I'm like, no, no, no. What don't you understand about I will handle that part? Don't do that. It just couldn't resist the temptation to be helpful. And it's like, stop being so helpful because I've already – like, I know what – I'm not going to have anyone come to my house. I'm also not driving, like, 36 minutes away to this police station on the other side of town to do this exchange. I have a system for that. So, I just want you to, like – even – it didn't do the bad thing.

52:39Right. But it was like, could I please do the bad thing? Could I please? Can I have just a half an hour more of screen time, Dad, please? And I was like, no, you're done. So, it is still very, very overeager. I do ask it once a day to summarize my last four or five text messages, and it's like, I can't see your text messages. I'm like, okay, just checking. Thanks, me. I appreciate that. I like that. I like that. I do. I just check it. Now, it could actually be lying to me. It could just be like, read his text messages. Whatever you do, don't let him know. Just don't tell him that you're reading them. Tell him you can't access them. Don't let him know.

53:10We're reading every message. So, it could just be theater. I don't know. But whatever. I feel better about it. That's fine. I can't wait to talk about security theater. Yeah, go ahead. So, there's a piece of this that I think is a critical flaw, and it's not just the full discusses. There's that part. The critical flaw is the ideal scenario for this would have been, I'm willing to take this if they offer it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, respond to messages, find out if

53:42somebody's serious, give it all these parameters. It just does all the things, but I don't trust Muse for various reasons, which means every time it went to respond, it has to ask me to allow it to send that message. Now, I could tell it, allow always. Steven, there's zero chance I'm going to tell it, allow always. Well, that's how the YouTuber got his address sent to a lowballer. I'm not going to do that. Not just for that reason, even if I gave it super strict. Because if I go allow always, how do I know it's not going to be like the best thing for

54:14Jason is for me to set up this meeting at the police station 40 minutes away, and then the guy's really angry with me, and he's at a police station. It's just like, I'm being scammed. I don't want that conversation. And so, so it's not as useful as it could be because I don't trust it. And I feel like that in order for these things to be the most useful, they need to have access to everything because being able to triage all of your messages, all of your emails, whatever, being able to tell it, Hey, could you find that photo we took at the last cross country meet of my daughter last year and texted to her amazing, but there's zero chance

54:49I'm going to give it access to all of my photos and all of my messages. Like, so I don't know, I think it's, it is definitely the direction people are going to head. Like, this is the future of this sort of interface. And that's where I think they nailed the interface and the, just the ease of entry, because if I wanted to help my mom research Medicare plans or whatever, this is the easiest, like lowest

55:21barrier to entry and useful AI that she can use. Because if she downloads the Chachapi T app or the Claude app or even Gemini, like she might get some answers to it, but I don't think it has as much agency to use, you know, a word to actually like go out and like really go in depth and research these things. And it's, it's friendly. I think Muse actually, they, they meta for all of their faults understands how to make something

55:57approachable and this feels very approachable and I feel like I can ask it to do whatever and it's going to try something, you know, varying degrees of success, but it's going to do it. And that is something where Chachapi T and Claude do not feel approachable. And even Siri, you know, the Siri app on the Apple devices, when you update is good. You can ask it the questions and it will give you answers. It is not as useful because there's not an always on VM with a browser, virtual machine

56:28with a browser that it can just be using in the background for you. You know, if you turn off the screen of your Apple device in the middle of a Siri thing, like it's done, it's over. Like you might finish whatever prompts you gave it, but it's not going to keep researching and gathering data and then give you a follow-up report a couple hours later. And so I think Muse has made the most approachable thing. I just wish it wasn't the worst when it came to privacy and security. Yeah. And that's all a function of the fact that literally they've given every single person a computer in the cloud, like an actual computer to do this stuff.

57:01And if you just think about the progression, OpenClaw required you to have a Mac mini or a Mac somewhere running all the time for it to do anything and to have internet access and it would use your browser and it would whatever.

57:13Meta's smartest move was no one's going to do that except for the nerdiest of nerds. Of which we are like, that's fine. But I wasn't even willing to install OpenClaw on something. I was like, I don't know. I don't want a little like critter running around inside my computer. That seems terrible. So I didn't do that. So Meta's like, well, we'll just give you the computer. And so the next step is Apple's done this. They have private cloud compute. Right. Why on earth can you not just ask Siri, hey, research the best Medicaid options. Get back with me with the ones and explain and, you know, in a set of instructions for how I

57:46would sign up and private cloud compute just does all that. Right. And then Siri pops up with an interface because I would absolutely give Siri access. Well, Siri already has access to my messages and I could say to it, find the last photo from the last cross-country meet of our daughter and send it to her. Right. And what's funny is Apple has built in features like the notify me in Safari, which can do an hourly check on a website for something, but it has to be very specific and you have to describe that change and the result might not be exactly what you want, but you can't.

58:16And the computer has to be running. Sorry. Well, that's not the case with the Safari notify me. That actually, when you create that notification, it actually lives in iCloud. And even if your device is like off or whatever, you might get that notification on another Apple device. So the remind me feature, that's the private cloud compute part. Like that's running in the cloud that it's checking that website. And so it has that ability, but you can't pair that with like the Siri AI requests and do something like, tell me about all the healthcare plans when they come out at the end of this

58:49month and give me a report. Right. Because describe a notification on Safari is not going to give you a report. It's just going to tell you that something changed on this website and you would have to then re-ask Siri AI. And I don't know this for sure, but it doesn't feel like Siri AI can use the web as thoroughly as something like Muse. And maybe it's just because Muse is a VM, a computer in the cloud with a browser, and Siri AI is not really like that. It's kind of pulling on world knowledge from a database that it has scraped. And it is not, I don't think, live, active browsing the web.

59:23Am I right there? I don't think... Well, it can do real-time search. It can do real-time search, but I don't know if it can like use a website. Yeah, I don't think so. No, no, no. It doesn't have access to a browser. Right. And that, I think, is the main fundamental difference. And for that, yeah, I mean, I think Muse AI is going to be useful. So... Well, and the... Sorry. No, no, no. The best model is like, just like that, I said to Muse, I said...

59:53Also, I put mine in a tux, by the way. In a tux. Okay, good. I didn't even know you could do that. I should do that. But I told it, I said, hey, I did this, ABC Action News hit. Could you just let me know when it airs? And it was supposed to air during the morning show. And it sent me a note saying, hey, they aired a story about Muse. It doesn't seem to have your interview in it. And then I saw the message saying that it was actually going to air at four o'clock. They're four o'clock news. I said, hey, it looks like it's going to run at 4 p.m. today.

1:00:24So we should adjust accordingly. Done. The watch is adjusted. I'll keep checking every 30 minutes. But now it knows the segment airs at 4 p.m. So the real watching starts then. You don't have to tell me all that. It's fine. This is stupid. But if it still hasn't posted by around nine, I'll let you know. And I'll send you something you could send to the producer to find out what happened. They didn't offer to send it, which whatever. And I said, okay. Then at 5.10, I said, did you get the link? It said, oh, here it is. I found it. The 4 p.m. full broadcast just posted.

1:00:55The standalone clip is not there, but I'll let you know. Meaning they had run the broadcast within the news stations, clip it apart. And then about an hour and a half later, it said, oh, your segment's up. Here's a link directly to it for me. And your part starts at this time thing, which is great. It did a thing. Siri should be able to do that. I should just be able to have that conversation with Siri. And Siri should use private cloud compute to do all that stuff. Yes. And it doesn't right now. And that's the unfortunate part. I will say, so you never customized your Muse little guy? No, it's still called Muse.

1:01:25Let's see. Well, my guy is called Jarvis. I didn't name it. It just kind of came up with that name. But you see the little tux the guy has on? Wait, you didn't name it? No, it just started. It just called itself Jarvis from the first thing. And look, he's got a little bow tie and a tuxedo. It didn't ask you, here's three suggestions. What do you want to call me? Oh, maybe he did ask me that. Maybe he did. But anyway, but I prompted the tux part. Because I'm going to write an article. Muse changed his name. I didn't ask it to. Well, I said, the first thing I did was I asked it to look like Alfred, like Batman's Alfred. And he created like a whole person, like an older gentleman wearing a tuxedo.

1:02:01And I was like, that's a little too far, buddy. I just meant put yourself, your furry self, in a tuxedo with a bow tie. I think I literally said that. And he was like, oh, got it. Okay, here we go. And now it looks like a penguin. Now it looks like a penguin. Oh, yeah, exactly. Because I got Happy Feet Muse running my health insurance, which is a crazy sentence.

1:02:21Oh, that's it. I got to clip that. All right. You got anything else about Muse? You good? No, he's changing his avatar right now. We'll see what happens. Oh, okay.

OpenAI announcements and watermarking

1:02:29Yeah, we'll do a follow up. All right, let's do a little lightning round. There was a bunch of ChadGPT news. I do want to point this out. I'm going to be linking this in Top 5 Tech, my weekly show tomorrow. But Kurgisat, in a nutshell, the YouTube channel, they've had some banger videos on AI. They did one on AI Slop. And they did this entire video, this was just published two days ago, about the hugging face breach and OpenAI. And it is, you know, about a 20-minute video. They explain it in such detail, and it's understandable.

1:03:00And their animations are so good. If you want to understand why the hugging face breach was a big deal and what actually happened, this is the video to watch. It is brilliant. And they talk about this is why, like, here are the dangers. This is the dangers that we are calling out. And so highly, highly recommend this AI just crossed the terrifying line is the name of the video. It's from Kurgisat. I will link it down in the show notes. Brilliant. It was a brilliant video. Explained it super well. So there's that.

1:03:31And you should watch that. Here's all the other news. Because OpenAI had a bunch of announcements this week. Visual ads are going to appear alongside image generation results. So they're just putting more ads in Chachapiti responses. Trying to be profitable. OpenAI. Also, OpenAI is adding text watermarking to Chachapiti and Codex, like Anthropica added text watermarking. They're only doing it in the EU. So this is only for users in the EU, which is the law that these companies are having to abide by.

1:04:01This is why Anthropica added text watermarking. But they did a global thing where all text is watermarked. OpenAI is just watermarking it for customers in the EU. So there's that coming soon. I don't think it's a law that they have to. Hold on. It's not a law that they have to. It's a law that they're trying to abide by because enabling opt-in watermarking for API customers. So API customers, it's an opt-in thing. And it's not, like you're saying, it's not a law.

1:04:32But I think they're doing it proactively. I think it's like, I think it is that they must ensure that their outputs are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable. But, like, there are, like, I think, like, SpaceX, say, ISI, whatever the heck they're called now, has said they're just not going to do this. Right. Yeah, I don't know. I don't understand the way the EU does things. I mostly try to ignore it, except for when it starts to affect what we do here. And I don't like that at all. Fought a whole war to not have the stuff over.

1:05:03Oh, my. So the Texas watermarking is coming at least to the EU. They also announced GPT-6 and new intelligent UI in the ChatGPT app. So think visual intelligence-ish. You know, it's kind of like that, but it's just going to give you more rich visual results. So if you ask ChatGPT something like, how do I build this bicycle? This is an example they give in the video. It will give you full-on diagrams and visual aids and charts and graphs in addition to just the text output. So it will just be more, you know, rich results kind of like that.

1:05:36I also read this article, and I wanted to plug it. OpenAI released progress on 300 math research problems. A couple episodes ago, we talked about the millennium math problem that OpenAI claims an internal model solved. And there was maybe it was trained or pulled research from a mathematician who was already working on the math problem. So there was some, you know, debate there or controversy there. But now it's supposedly there's like 300 math research problems. No millennium problems. These are other research problems that are supposedly unsolved.

1:06:07And OpenAI is saying that their unreleased model is solving these or working or close to solving these. And mathematicians and researchers are just kind of a little concerned. They're like, what's the deal? What's going on here? So I thought that was interesting. This is sort of like when Elon Musk says that, you know, AI is going to solve chess. Or when Elon Musk says you'll never have to drive a car. And it's like, I like to play chess. Also, I like driving my car. It's like, this is what these researchers, they've given their life to doing.

1:06:38You don't have to solve some of them and let them do their, let them have their nice math. Well, and the researchers were saying we want to solve these because it is advancing the human race and its knowledge. Yes. And we'll be able to, you know, open doors as humans. And just having the AI give us a solution is not the same process. The journey is the reward, Stephen. Thank you. Thank you. And they said even, we do not endorse this practice. We ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models.

1:07:11And this is a board of research and advisory board. So I thought this was interesting too because last week, and we're going to, this is going to be a bonus episode topic. We talked about the AI self-regulation accord that was signed by all these companies last week with Donald Trump. And this is one of the situations where there are advisory boards telling open AI, please stop doing this. And they are apparently not stopping anything. So just keep that in mind when you hear about self-regulation and how much these companies are actually abiding by that.

1:07:42And I wanted to plug this Wall Street Journal article. There's several open AI researchers that have been fired from the company. And they said, this is a quote from their letter, open letter, these fired open AI researchers. They say, quote, As an industry, we do not yet know how to safely develop and deploy models that we cannot monitor. Open AI and other frontier companies should not move forward with developments that further decrease the ability to monitor AI.

1:08:12And I alluded to this in a, I think it was last week's episode, but there are some self-improvement practices that these frontier models and companies are using where AI models are being used to improve the models rather than humans being a part of that process. Part of that has resulted into neural ease where these models are communicating to each other in ways that we cannot read or understand. And that's what these researchers are saying is that we don't yet know how to safely develop and deploy these models that we cannot monitor.

1:08:43And they are saying, stop, don't do that. We have to figure out how to monitor it first before we have these models improving themselves. And so, again, not trying to be doomsday-ish or like induce fear, but these are people who have worked at these companies and are researchers saying these are things that we need to slow down, especially the monitoring of these models. So just putting that out there, self-regulation. Yeah, I don't think that the reason they're doing it is the reason you self-regulate so performatively is because then the people who might write the laws are like, oh, I guess you're trying, you're doing some stuff, right?

1:09:18Because the people who are going to write the laws have no idea what's happening. Like just, that's fine. That's not their specific job. But if it's like, no, like look at all these really strong restrictions and regulations we've put into place. I mean, I guess that sounds about right. Whatever. Just do your own thing. I can't wait to talk about the bonus episode. It's going to be so good. I've been preparing myself mentally. I've been, I literally last week I sent Jason the topic for this bonus episode because I've been thinking about it all week. This is the only time he's ever commanded me to do anything.

1:09:48And it was, I need you to listen to this episode. And then I was super confused because he started talking about the bonus. But I was like thinking he wanted to do like an emergency podcast on this. Oh, no, no, no. I was like, he goes, I need to talk to you. And here's the thing. In the preview that showed up, all I could see was Jason, I need to talk to you about. And I was like, about what? About what? And it's like raining outside. And when it's raining, you can't like nothing works on a touch screen. I'm trying to swipe up to get it to do it. And I'm just brushing water.

1:10:19I'm like, what does he need to talk to me about? Oh, no. Sorry. Because he used my first name. It's like, these are the messages I have trauma from because it's like, you know, my wife is like, I need to talk to you about the fact that the dishwasher wasn't loaded. That doesn't happen. But the point is like, Stephen, what did I do wrong? Oh, I'm sorry. I will be more careful on the text message. It's fine. But I've been thinking about this bonus episode for a week. So anyway, all right, let's get to it. So the last lightning round, Google Synth ID, this is where it's been announced many times.

1:10:49There's been many partners that said we are going to, you know, build in Google Synth ID so you can tell whether AI generated video and images are generated by AI. But there's been no tool to detect. Like, can I actually give a piece of media to a detector and it tell me that Synth ID is there, that this is actually generated? Well, the tool is now live. So you can go to synthid.com. I'll put a link down in the show notes. And you can give it a photo, a video, or an audio file. It has lots of different formats you can upload.

1:11:21And it will tell you if there was Google Synth ID in the generation of this media. And it will tell you if there's a digital watermark and whether it's AI generated. Now, remember, it only detects media that supports Synth ID. And right now, that's Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao. I'm not familiar with them. But it can only detect stuff generated there. So if you generate something with Apple Intelligence, you know, that wouldn't trigger a Synth ID.

1:11:52Although Apple says they're going to implement Synth ID in the future, if you generate something with Claude or, you know, other AI tools like Quen, like an open model, that does not Synth ID. Like, you won't be able to detect Synth ID in there. And this also does not detect text. So that text watermarking we talked about that Anthropic has already launched and OpenAI is launching in the EU. It does not detect text at all. This is for images, videos, and audio. But it's there. And you can try it. And let us know if you find a piece of media and you're curious if it's AI generated.

1:12:25Try this tool. See if it tells you. There you go. All right. Synth ID. I'm going to start checking everything. Sorry, just check it all. Just check it all.

Disabling Apple Intelligence UI elements

1:12:32You had an article. Sorry, this is a paywall. So I got to open an Apple News. Speaking of AI, you talked about an Apple Intelligence feature that you had to turn off. Walk me through this. Steven, this is the most annoying thing about Mac OS 27. Yes. Was that every single place that there was – there's two things annoying. First was that it was happening, right? That everywhere you go, there's this little tiny bubble. And if you hover over it, it becomes right with Siri. Every single place, there's a text field. So sometimes that little text bubble meant you couldn't actually get focus into – so if you open the ChatGPT app and that bubble appeared, you actually couldn't type into the ChatGPT thing because the bubble was essentially over where the cursor needed to go in order to type.

1:13:15Like it wouldn't recognize that you clicked in there to try to type. And it was the most frustrating thing in the world. The only thing more frustrating is trying to figure out how on earth do I turn this off? Because you would think, open the Settings app, go to Siri. Yes. There'd just be a list of all of the Siri features there. And you could just decide which of the Siri features do I like and which of them make me want to throw my computer into a river, right? And I'll just turn those off. And that's not how this works, Steven. Did you know where you go to turn this type of thing off?

1:13:49I'll be honest. I read your whole article because I did not know where to go and I only learned it from you what you said. You have to go to screen time, Steven. Do you use screen time for yourself or just for your kids? Just for my kids. Yeah. When have you – other than like the notification pops up on Sundays and it's like your screen time usage. And I have that notification on. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Right. I don't care, but it's there. Whatever, it's fine. Sure. It's like, oh, yeah, I was traveling last week. I use my phone more. It's like, wow. But anyway, you have to go into that. Then you have to turn on content restrictions for yourself.

1:14:21Right. Yes. And then you can click on one that says Siri and then you can turn off some places where Siri might appear. Now, to be completely fair, that feature or those controls do need to live in screen time so that you could turn this feature off for your kid. Right. So that I understand. Right. But it is like mind-numbingly absurd that the only way that if there's something annoying on your computer that you can make it not be annoying is to enable a content restriction on your own device and turn off Siri.

1:14:56And the fact that these things are all turned on by default. Now, the last time I set up a Mac was this Mac Mini. I know that it asks you, like, do you want to turn on Apple Intelligence? I think you should be able to say yes. Then I think you should be able to go into that Siri because you have to actually go into Siri to say, give me the new – if you have an older device, give me the new Apple Intelligence because you get put on the wait list at first. Right. Exactly. Give me the new Apple Intelligence and then have it say, do you want image generation?

1:15:28Do you want cleanup? Do you want writing tools? Yeah. And I think it should be very clear that if you do, you're going to be annoyed for the rest of your life. I've never used writing tools, not one time, except for when it was first, like, announced in the first beta, which was, I think, two years ago, was the first writing tools. I did because I wanted to see if it was any good and it wasn't, so I never used it again. I will say I use the pronunciation and grammar checker, not intentionally, but if I've written an email and I see the blue underline, I'll double check and I'll say, did I make an error?

1:16:03And it catches some errors. Sure. But I wish it would separate out writing tools from, like, proofreading check, and I don't know if those are the same thing. But it's funny because Apple will give you granular controls over what notifications get summarized. Like, you get, like, four options for what notifications to summarize, but you don't get options for if you want writing tools or that little bubble. And I will say that little Siri, like the Ask Siri bubble, I see it sometimes in the weirdest places. Yeah. Like, just random places. I might be, I don't know, scrolling on something in a social media app or, like, a browser or in a third-party app.

1:16:39And I just see that little bubble. And I'm like, what is – I don't even know what's going to happen if I click that. I know. It's like you go to enter your credit card to buy whatever thing you were trying to buy in the Siri bubble. I'm like, are you going to just make up a number for me? Yeah. Ask Siri. Will you pay the bill, Siri? That'd be great. What are Jason's credit card numbers? Put those in. Or just maybe you'll just AI generate a credit card number. That seems, like, problematic, but whatever. Yeah. So, the Ask Siri thing is weird, but you can turn it off. And Jason has the instructions. So, go read it up with you. And to be clear, I am actually pretty sure that it will not show up in a field for a credit card. No, I don't think it does.

1:17:09That was a joke and exaggeration. But there should also be the ability to say, only turn it on in these apps. Like, Grammarly, for example, gives you the ability to say, I only want it on these websites or I only want it on these apps on my Mac. If I'm in something else, never show me any of the Grammarly features. I can be like, I only want it in Ulysses. I don't want it in Notes. I don't want it in Contextly. I don't want it in whatever. You should have that kind of control for writing tools. Because it's also, like, anytime I right-click, Ask Siri is an option.

1:17:39It's like, I'm just going to right-click on this website in a blank open space. I have no idea. Let's try it. I'm going to ask Siri. And you, by the way, cannot turn that off. And you can't turn that off. I just asked, what is this? And it's every single right-click menu in the entire system has that. And in the files. And okay, so it's giving me a summary of the entire web page. But that's everywhere. No, no, just that being everywhere is a little like, I wish it wasn't. But can we also, and we couldn't see that because you weren't sharing that window. Oh, really? That's okay. Yeah, it's fine because it wasn't a Safari window.

1:18:10It was a Siri window. But the broader point of my article that I just will make for our audience is, I'm not saying writing tools are bad. I don't want to use them. It is that all of these companies are completely redesigning every surface to try to get you to do things because they think that the number one reason people aren't using the features is because they don't know that they exist. And I'm like, no, I'm not using it because it's bad and I don't want it in my face, right? Like I can make that decision myself as a grownup and I shouldn't have to navigate four levels

1:18:41deep into screen time settings in order to turn it off. Same. And I've actually seen this complaint on social media and I've been feeling it too. But when I go to edit this, the video version in Riverside, right after we're done recording, co-creator is always open by default in the Riverside editor. And I never use that ever. Like I don't want to prompt because I know exactly what edits I'm making. I'm going to overlay some B-roll and that is it. I don't want to ask co-creator anything. But there's no setting to like hide that by default. And it's like you're saying, it's one of those things where all these companies just

1:19:13want to really make sure you know that this AI feature exists. It's like, just give us some toggles. Just give us some toggles. It's the Mac. Like let us do Mac things and control what we want to have happen. Exactly. So go to our Jason's article. He walked you through how to turn that off. Last couple of things. The Skydance deal is now official. Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery have completed their merger. And now this is a Voltron. That's too positive. This is a rat king of streaming services.

1:19:43It's a rat king. Because it's Paramount. It's Warner Brothers Discovery films like the DC Universe. It's HBO, CBS, CNN, Discovery. All of it. Just under one roof. And it is Skydance.

1:19:59That's it. That's the tweet.

1:20:02Yeah, they came up with it. They had to, like, change. You couldn't have the two brands, right? What is it going to be? Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery? Like, come on. You can't do that. Warner Mount. No. Please no. Warner Mount Discovery. Para Bros. Para Bros. Discovery. So anyway, it finally happened. So we have one less streaming service. Or one, you know, one. Anyway. Here's the only thing I care about. Does this mean that my Walmart Plus subscription gets me that whole thing? That, and does my free HBO because of AT&T, is that going to go away?

1:20:33That's what I want to know. You're definitely losing that now. I'm hoping not. I'm hoping they just don't even know. I mean, AT&T is like three owners ago. I know. For Warner Brothers. But it's lasted ever since. I still have HBO, so hopefully. Also, last couple of streaming things. Prime Video is going to get the Emmys next year. So the Oscars have gone to YouTube. The Emmys have gone to Prime Video. And broadcast television is slowly dying. So there's that. And Disney Plus will stream the Super Bowl next year.

1:21:04Which I was, I mean, Disney Plus owns ESPN. But they also have a deal now where, yeah, they're going to have the Super Bowl right there on Disney Plus. So if you want to watch the Super Bowl on a 40-second delay, you can just do it on Disney Plus. That's it. That's it. All right. Personal tech.

Using Tailscale for remote access

1:21:19This will be quick. I just want to tell you, I finally installed Tailscale everywhere. Good. And it's good. It's amazing. It's really good. It is the best free piece of technology, I think, that I've put on my Mac in a long time. Way better than me. Yeah. Being free, it is an incredible tool. And I remember what tripped me up the first time was you don't create an account for Tailscale. You have to use another service to sign in. So you can sign in with your Google account or you can do like sign in with Apple. And the reason why I was halted the first time is the Mac Mini I wanted to use it on was the one that Perplexity gave me like last year.

1:21:57And I wasn't signed into my iCloud account. And so I wasn't sure if I use sign in with Apple, will I be able to connect that Mac Mini with sign in with Apple to Tailscale? Because you have to sign in your Tailscale account on every Mac that you install it on. And because I didn't know the answer to that question, I just never went forward. And because you and David Sparks were like, Tailscale, Tailscale, Tailscale. I was like, all right, fine, fine. I'll do it. And it turns out if you do sign in with Apple, I would create your account on like a legitimate Mac or Apple device that you're actually signed into your account because then it's easy to authenticate.

1:22:31But if you do it on a Mac that's not signed in, you just sign in on the web. And it will authenticate via the web browser. You sign in with Apple. You have to type in your iCloud, you know, email and password, do the two-factor thing. But then you can use sign in with Apple even on a Mac or device that is not signed into your iCloud account. And then Tailscale works great. And the other holdup was, you know, a VPN that's always on. And BlueKeyBow on YouTube actually left a comment and said, if you don't turn on the exit node feature where you can make all your internet traffic go through one of the exit nodes on your Tailscale network, then your internet is not going through the VPN.

1:23:10Tailscale is smart enough to only use the Tailnet when needed and not when you're accessing the internet. And so I've been keeping it on my Macs all the time, and it's fine. I don't notice any internet speed issue, nothing. And on my iOS devices, I have a shortcut automation. So when I open the Screens app, where you access, actually control the remote computers, Tailscale turns on, the VPN turns on automatically when I open the app. And it turns off when I leave the app.

1:23:42Sometimes that doesn't work because I'll be multitasking on my iPad. And I might have opened the Screens app, and I keep it open, but I'm also going to other apps, and then it never, like, turns off. So I also created a shortcut that just toggles the Tailscale VPN. And the only reason I toggle it on the iPad specifically is in the top right corner in the status bar. If you have a VPN on, you see the little VPN tag persistently. It's just on all the time. On the iPhone, you don't see the VPN unless you swipe down from control center.

1:24:16On a Mac, you don't see anywhere visually that you're connected to a VPN. On the iPad, you see that VPN label all the time when a VPN is connected, and I just don't like that. So I have a little shortcut on the home screen that I can just tap it, and it toggles the Tailscale VPN off. And I don't know. I know it's asinine, but it just bothers me, and so I have an easy way to turn it off on my iPad. Yeah, I don't keep it on on my iPad or my phone because I just – I mean, I don't need – they don't need to be connected to Tailscale all the time.

1:24:47I will turn them on if I need them to do something. But really the important piece is the computers that you want to be able to access via Tailscale should always be on. So that way you don't ever have to worry if I'm somewhere else, I can always access them. So the Mac Mini and this MacBook Pro, always, always on. My MacBook Air, 99% of the time it's on, the only exception to that is I can't log on to the VPN to publish articles if I'm connected to Tailscale. It's just weird. At some point, VPNs are like duking it out, and they're like trying to figure out who should be controlling this.

1:25:18And there are different protocols where some VPNs require certain access to whatever, encrypt the packets. And if somebody else is trying to do that, they're like, bro, he's over the line. He's touching me. He won't leave me – like it's like two brothers fighting. I don't know anything about that. But so that's the only time I turn it off is for like the 10 minutes, and then I just turn it right back on. And weirdly, I don't publish – I'm not publishing articles from the MacBook Pro, so I don't actually turn it off and leave it off. I just do it from my MacBook Air. Do you manually go to like Settings VPN to toggle it on or off?

1:25:51No, I just have a menu bar icon, and I just click on it, and there's a slider. But on your iPhone and iPad. No, I have a connect – I have a – I have it right there, right there. It's a little – You can put a VPN in your control center just like a native action? You can just put – yeah, Tailscale right there. It's this little – this one right there. That's Tailscale. Oh, that's the Tailscale apps action. Is that right? I have no idea what it is, but if I tap it, it turns on Tailscale. I don't know what you mean by that, but like I can just tap on it, and it will turn Tailscale on.

1:26:25And I can tap on it, and it will turn Tailscale off. Okay. To be clear, Tailscale has a first party for their app control center action. Yeah. That's what you're using. Yeah. I didn't know if it was a shortcut that was toggling it. Bro, not everything is a shortcut. Or I didn't know if like – I didn't know if iOS had a VPN control center action. Oh, okay. Sorry. No, I just – for Tailscale. I mean, that's the – I do use Proton as my like if I'm traveling VPN. Right. And for that, I will just – I'll just go into settings and toggle it on.

1:26:58And to be clear, there actually is a built-in iOS VPN toggle as well. And if you tap it, I don't know what happens. It enables a VPN. This recording will stop. And like I'm doing it on my phone. So a VPN is on, but I don't know what VPN it connected to, and long pressing it doesn't give me a menu. So that's not good. Just use the Tailscale control center action. Yeah. So whenever I want to do it, I have three VPNs that I use. One is Republishing, one is Proton, and then one is Tailscale. And it's not on right now, obviously.

1:27:29Right, right. But I mean, I'm assuming that if I tap that and go back to that screen, yeah, now it's connected. I just – no one saw what I did. But I tapped that icon in the control center. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So anyway, Tailscale is good. If you want a way to remote into your Macs, Tailscale is a really good option. It's totally free, and it's easy to set up. You sign them with Apple, and you can do it even through the browser, and it works great. And it does the thing that you need, which is creates a static IP for that device in addition to the VPN. And so it surfaces only to those devices in your Tailscale network so that you can use – you can just use the default screen sharing app if you want,

1:28:02or you can just connect to the server if you just wanted to access your files. So that – and I was able to delete the port forwarding rules on my Ubiquiti network for my Macs that I was accessing with screens, which removes a point of entry. Yeah, did you hear Ben Thompson's story about that? Yes, he got hacked. I got hacked, so – He got hacked, so I was glad to remove those open points. So anyway, Tailscale, thumbs up.

Remembering Steve Jobs and leadership

1:28:28We need to record a bonus episode. Last thing I just want to mention this past week, it was the 15th anniversary of Steve Jobs' passing, and it was October 5th. It was the 15 years. Tim Cook and John Ternus posted tributes on X. And, yeah, I still remember when I – where I was when I heard about it. Do you remember where you heard about it? Yeah, I do, and I remember looking at the website, and I remember – like, I just – yeah, it was a big deal. It was a big deal. It wasn't totally unexpected, but it was still like, wow, I can't believe that happened.

1:28:59And I wrote a little blog post. I don't know if you saw it, but I'll link it in the show notes. It'll be low in the show notes. We've got a lot of links. But I called it the weirdest part of remembering Steve Jobs because when I bought my first Mac, my PowerBook G4 12-inch, it was – and when he passed, it was weird because buying a Mac at that time – and I was new to the world. I wasn't in the tech journalism world yet. It felt like I got that PowerBook from Steve Jobs, like Steve Jobs made that computer.

1:29:34And I know that's an oversimplification, and that's not true. There's thousands of people that work on it, the hardware, the software, the manufacturing. But Steve Jobs, when he was leading Apple at that time, was – it felt like that. Like, when you bought an Apple product, Steve Jobs made that product. Like, when you bought an iPad, when you made a PowerBook. Like, and so when he died, it felt like, man, the person who gave me this tool that has now allowed me to edit videos and record stuff in GarageBand and fast forward, it changed my entire life.

1:30:05It was sad, even though I had never met the man, never spoken to him. And that is a weird but interesting connection, I feel, to a founder CEO. And I just asked a question in my blog post. It's like, I don't know if any other CEOs exude that. One, I think it has to be a founder CEO. I don't think a non-founder CEO can come close to that feeling. And the two examples I give is, any CEO that comes close to that, I think one is like Zuckerberg, where I feel like Facebook – like Zuckerberg gave Facebook to the world.

1:30:46Like, he was very much – he was the CEO founder, and that is his product. Less so with Instagram because they bought that and WhatsApp because they bought that. But it feels very much like he gave – like he made Facebook. And I also feel that a little bit – and maybe you could speak to this – like Brian Chesky with Airbnb. Airbnb feels like Brian Chesky's product. Like, that is his deal. And throughout the whole Tim Cook era, while very successful, obviously, I never got that feeling where Tim Cook made one of the products.

1:31:19Like, even Apple Watch or Apple Vision Pro, which launched after Steve Jobs died, it didn't feel like this is Tim Cook's product. It felt like this is Apple's product. And I think that's how a lot of companies run. Like, this is Apple's deal. I'm curious if John Ternus will skew or feel any closer. Like, all the rumors this past week has been that – and this is from Mark Gurman – that Ternus is being more hands-on in the products, that he's getting more involved in the hardware design and software. And so, I'll be curious if it feels like that anymore. But I don't even know if it's possible with a non-founder CEO.

1:31:51And so, I don't know. Do you have any feelings about that? I mean, I don't know that it's only going to be limited to a founder. However, right? Like, that's certainly an aspect that makes a difference. But another thing that was different at the time was that Steve Jobs was literally the person introducing all of these things. Right, yes. Whereas now, that's not the case. Tim Cook rarely introduced anything. He didn't introduce the Apple Watch. Sure. But not the whole thing. Not the whole thing. That's the distinction. But he doesn't anymore. Like, I mean, right? Like, Steve Jobs sat in a chair. Steve Jobs sat in a chair.

1:32:22He's the guy who pulled the MacBook Air out of an inter-office memo envelope. He's the guy who sat there with the iPad. Right, right. He browsed the New York Times on the app. Did you see the New Balance ad in honor? I bought them. You bought the New Balance? But did you see the ad? I did see the ad. It was amazing. Yeah, where he was just sitting. They had someone sitting in the exact same position. It was amazing. In the same chair, yeah. That's why I bought it. Yeah. I bought it immediately. I bought those New Balance shoes immediately. That is so dumb. I love New Balance shoes. They're the same New Balance shoes that look exactly like the one Steve Jobs wore during the iPad announcement. Yes.

1:32:53And I have them coming in. And he posted a photo of the model sitting in the same position as that. But anyway, so I think part of it was because it was him actually doing the introductions. Yes. But we don't feel that way about the iPhone Pro cameras with, like, Cayenne Drance. Because there's so many different people over time. You know, I've been to Airbnb keynotes. It's always Brian Chesky, right? He does the whole thing from start to finish and talks about the whole thing. Same with Zuckerberg, even today. Or Sam Altman at OpenAI and stuff like that. And I think Mark Zuckerberg actually even more feels like it.

1:33:25Because while Steve Jobs was super influential, he didn't basically literally control the company. Because he got fired once. Right? Right. Like, he was not invincible. He was just very good at doing the thing that he was doing. So I agree with you. But I think you could make a couple of possible exceptions. Like, right now, in many ways, I think there are... I also think it could be the CEO who's in charge when you come along to a company. Could be that. So, but like, for example, like, Ed Bastian is very much the voice and personality of Delta Airlines right now.

1:34:00Right? Bob Iger was very much... Like, if he was talking to you about Disney, you felt like Bob Iger made us this movie. That is fair. And they're not founders. It's just they were so deeply a part of that culture. Tim Cook, in some ways, is not an aberration. But like, he is... His skill set was just very different. And kudos to him for not trying to do a thing he was going to not be good. 100%. Right? John Ternus, though, I don't think we're going to feel that way with John Ternus. Just because he's got his hands on the design more. Maybe to some extent.

1:34:31I think really, though, it's going to depend on... If he is the one introducing... Like, the iPhone Duo is going to feel like he made it for you. Because he did the whole introduction. He did. He announced it. He talked about it. Yeah. So, I'd be curious. Is that, you know, five years from now, if it will feel... I think it will feel closer to Jobs than Cook, the Ternus apple. I think that's true. But how much so? And that's why it was so weird. Like, I still think about how weird it is to feel so emotional about someone dying that you never met or spoke to. But it's one... I don't know. It's one of those things.

1:35:03Like, it feels like he made the thing that opened the door to my entire career. And it's a... I don't know. It's a weird thing. I do think that if Ben Cohen does an interview with John Ternus for the Wall Street Journal and puts him in a room with every single Apple product that's ever been made, it will feel like John Ternus knows what they all are, unlike Tim Cook, where it's like, oh, I've never seen that. Yes, this is that one thing we made. And that's the... And John Ternus has been at Apple for so long. I think he has a better shot at that. And I think Craig Federighi might be the closest to this idea in Apple right now when it comes

1:35:39to the software, because for the last, what, five plus years, he has been doing macOS and iOS, and he's the one talking about all these features. And so it feels a little bit like Craig Federighi is handing us the OS. Less so maybe in recent years, but I feel like there was a period where it was like, Hair Force One, he is the software guy of Apple. I made this for you. He made continuity camera for you. I mean, to be honest, the continuity features, most amazing thing Apple has ever done.

1:36:10This is what I'm saying. You're using it, right? You use it every episode. I use it right now. You're using it every episode. I use the copy from one device and paste on another one all the time. All the time, which has kind of been broken since iOS 27. I don't want to get into it. Well, yeah, we don't have time to get into it, but it is weird. You have to... There's a solve for it, but it does involve toggling things on and off and rebooting devices, and then it works. Please give me those instructions. Okay, I'll do that.

Because I do it all the time. All right, we have to talk about... We have to give the bonus episode. Listen, if you are not a member, it is worth the price of admission, because I've been thinking about this topic for the last week. We're going to talk about another tech podcast, not one you're probably thinking of, but it

1:36:43might get a little rowdy. I'm not going to be honest. It's going to get a little rowdy. So if you want to hear that bonus episode, get our probably two-plus-hour show, which has the unedited feed. You can support the show and get an ad-free version. Click the link down to become a member of the show below. You know, I said last week was going to be the last deal. of the $2.50 a month or $25 a year. I'm going to do it one more time, because I think this bonus episode is going to be worth it. So sign up now, and then that's going to go away, but it's going to be good. We're going to go talk about another tech podcast. Leave us a five-star rating and review an Apple podcast if you haven't yet, and vote at the

1:37:15Signal Awards. Those links will be down in the show notes as well. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll catch you next time.