Is your iPhone about to change forever?

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1:42They're calling this a psyop. To go to the point where you're actually creating fake fans, that's where things kind of cross into a kind of betrayal. Hello and welcome to The Interface, the show that decodes the tech, rewiring your week and your world. I'm Nicky Wolf. I'm Karen Howe. And I'm Thomas Germain. Today on The Interface, Apple's Tim Cook is resigning. What does that mean for your smartphone? Is the world's biggest new band a psyop? And has the AI boom finally met its match, the people?

2:24Okay, so big news broke this week that Tim Cook, Apple's longtime CEO, is stepping down. He'll be replaced by John Ternus, who was the head of engineering at Apple. This is a seed change. The CEO of Apple is a role in Silicon Valley, almost like kind of king of Silicon Valley. Would that be a... I don't know if he's the king of Silicon Valley, but he's definitely one of the most influential people in the world. Like if you just think about the sheer number of people who use iPhones alone, but when you add all of Apple's other products and the fact that like so many other tech products are designed to work with Apple, like the level of influence is just enormous.

3:09Yeah. And the fact that the way phones are, the way we use all of our technologies, Apple's kind of led the way in terms of hardware at least, right? Yeah, totally. And it feels like because Tim Cook has been in this role for 15 years, that there is, he was a mainstay within the upper echelons of the tech industry that is going to be changing it. And that doesn't change often, you know, for any of the companies. So it is a pretty big shakeup. Tim Cook took over from... From Steve, right? From Steve Jobs. Yeah, that's just blanked on Steve Jobs. Yeah. For some reason. So there was this guy named Steve.

3:52Steve Jobs. May have heard of him. But yeah, we don't yet know exactly what this means for Apple. We have seen that they're doing a major shakeup of the engineering division. They're merging technologies with platform engineering. That, unclear exactly what will change of that now. But they have said they're going to hire, quote, thousands more engineers. So it seems like this will be a doubling down on hardware. This probably comes as a surprise to a lot of people who don't follow this stuff closely, but there have been rumors for years now that Tim Cook is getting ready to step down. I think being the head of Apple has got to be one of the most intense jobs in the world.

4:34Like, it's the biggest, most valuable company on earth. It's a trillion dollars, Apple. Four trillion dollars. Mind-bending amount of money. Unbelievable. It's an amount of money that, like, it doesn't even make sense if you think about it. But Apple's been at this kind of, you know, precarious, like edgier moment than it's been in quite a while. And there's this conversation happening that AI, large language models, you know, the technology that runs tools like ChatGPT, is going to completely change the way we interact with our computers. And there was this huge debacle where Apple announced that it was going to launch a new revamped Siri that was going to run on the latest AI, and then it never arrived.

5:22There was like a class action lawsuit because they said, if you buy our new phone, then you'll get this new tool. And then it never came because they just couldn't get it together inside the company, apparently. But also there's been this other shift where they became one of the biggest companies in the world from telling the iPhone more than anything else. But over time, the technology has gotten so good that it's hard to make a new, exciting phone. Like for a while, like years and years and years, the CEO of Apple would get on stage, whether it was Tim Cook or before him, Steve Jobs, and announce some new phone.

5:59and it would be like way different and really exciting. But it just got so good that they like hit a wall. And iPhone sales have slowed down. They're lasting longer. People are keeping them for longer. And there's this fear that Apple needs to make a major change. And there have been a number of things that Tim Cook kind of bungled, right? Yeah, the vision. The Apple Vision Pro. Was it kind of disaster? Yeah, they launched this product. It wasn't like really clear who it's for. Sales were terrible. than last year. You know, usually Apple launches a big new product at its developer conference. But as we got closer and closer, people didn't know what that product was going to be.

6:39And then it turned out the big thing they were announcing was iOS 26, a new operating system for the phone, which was kind of universally panned, right? You might remember, like, it was this weird, like, they called it liquid glass, like it was clear. People really didn't like it. It seemed like it was kind of thrown together at the last minute. I'm sure it wasn't literally. They've probably been working on it for a while. But there's been this perception that the company is faltering. And I think what's happening now is they're trying to signal to the world and to investors that Apple is entering a new era where everything is going to change.

7:12And it's a critical moment for the company. Like basically right now, it's sink or swim. They need to prove that they've still got a vision, that they're going to continue to change the world the way that they have for, you know, decades now. and they aren't, you know, falling behind, which it's something that inevitably happens. If you look at all the biggest companies in the world, you know, they reach the top and then they kind of fade away. They don't always disappear. But it's hard for one company to stay as big as Apple has for this long. Right. And I think the message they want you to take is that everything's going to be different now.

7:48We're switching it up. And what struck me was reading through the announcement, reading through Kirk's letter that he sent out to the team, no AI play was announced in this thing. We've just become so used to every big announcement from every big tech company being like, we're going to pivot to AI. And I think it's kind of notable that Apple didn't mention AI once in any of these hints and announcements at what they're going to do. They're very, very big on doubling down on hardware. And I think that's a very loud silence on AI in terms of part of their plans. There's been such a series of weird bungled attempts with Apple trying to catch up to AI without an actual clear articulated vision of what that would actually bring to the product.

8:42So in addition to the upgraded Siri that failed, there was also that attempt to create Apple intelligence with these news notifications. Do you remember this? Where they were supposed to summarize the news and send it out on notification as part of a new AI feature. And one of the first weeks, I think, that the feature was deployed was during Luigi Maggioni's unfolding trial. And it summarized a headline about shooter Luigi Maggioni something, something, something into Luigi Maggioni shoots himself. And it was actually a BBC story that it was summarizing. And it branded the notification with the BBC logo.

9:26So it looks like the BBC had actually pushed that out. And there was such a backlash that they actually had to pull that feature almost immediately after it was launched. And so I think Apple's probably being a lot more cautious now because of these series of mishaps. And at the end of the day, like that's not really the company's strength. So it is, yeah, to me, it's personally refreshing. Like I recently was in an Apple store, just buying some new accessories for my various Apple products. And the sales rep tried to upsell me on the latest iPhone and the latest Mac and whatever, da da da. By saying, hey, these new products are going to have Apple intelligence and it's going to be AI enabled.

10:11And I looked her straight in the eye and was like, and that is why I want nothing to do with them and walked out of the store. Yeah, you're talking to them like, yeah, yeah. Do you know who I am? Yeah. Right. The other thing that's interesting about the AI stuff is like our relationship with apps, everyone is expecting is about to be completely different. Like until a couple years ago, if you wanted to do something on your phone, it required a guy or a team of engineers, sometimes a huge team, to make a little computer program, to make a little app that would do the thing that you wanted. And Apple's App Store was a huge, I think,$100 billion a year business, like not the biggest moneymaker in Apple's toolkit here, but pretty significant.

10:59and there's some speculation that that's all about to change that if ai gets a little better and you can just ask chat gpt or whatever ai tool you're using to go do stuff for you that you won't need as many apps you won't need to go through the app store like one individual app or one device will be able to take on a lot of those projects so you know there's all these different parts of apple's businesses, because there are many of them that it's in, are changing. And then simultaneously, Johnny Ive, who's Apple's like famous designer, golden boy who left the company a long time ago, has now partnered up with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.

11:40They are apparently working on a hardware product that no matter what it is, will be a direct competitor with Apple. And then if we talk about one more headwind, China, enormous, you know, important factor for Apple here, both because all of its products, for the most part, are manufactured in China, and because Chinese tech companies like Huawei are eating into its market share in Asia. That's another big wild card. And I think we're about to enter a really, you know, kind of rocky period for the company. And it'll be up to this new guy, John Ternus, to be like, no, no, no, everything's fine.

12:19Don't worry. We've got it under control. We'll see how things go. Yeah, his first job is definitely to kind of steady the ship, steady the ship for investors, steady the ship for customers, and then see exactly what is needed in order to bring this behemoth company into this uncertain future. I think the one thing we have to look forward to is Apple's going to have this big event in the fall around the time that Tim Cook says he's stepping down, he's going to take over as, you know, the leader of Apple's corporate board. John Turner steps in. He's going to give a speech. He's going to address the public for the first time.

13:00And one thing I think is absolutely certain is he is going to paint a picture of a way that this company is changing in radical ways. And that will have a big impact in the way that you stare at your phone and what kind of phone you're staring at in the future. So I think this is something for people to look forward to because he's going to present a big new vision. And don't worry, we will be following that very, very closely as it unfolds. So stay tuned. Yeah. Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford, and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty. When Dr. Sabah and I decided to do a skincare line together, he said to me, we are going to give women meaningful beauty.

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15:07Now let's talk about geese. If you hadn't gotten enough of me talking on this episode yet, I've got great news. because now we're going to ship it over to my story. Because now Tom is going to sing. Finally, I get a minute to speak, you know. I want to talk to you guys about this band, Geese. Have you heard of Geese? Yeah. Not until you brought it up. I think Geese is kind of a pretty cool band. I heard about them for the first time maybe, I don't know, six months ago or so. They've been around for a while. You know, they've been putting out albums for years. Never heard of them before. And over the course of like a month, it felt like they had become the biggest thing in the world.

15:53They went from like, I think a band that almost no one, you know, not no one, but like they certainly weren't a household name to like playing Saturday Night Live. They just played one of the biggest slots at the music festival, Coachella. They exploded everywhere. Yeah, there's been a bit of a backlash to this, right? People were saying, this is an industry plant. How could this be organic? How could something go from zero to absolutely everywhere? And in our age where what you experience is a lot of the time algorithmically determined, the question is how much can the industry, how much can a record label game that system to put a band that they want in front of everyone and get it into that sudden superstardom non-organically.

16:52And that's what the backlash is about, is because people feel like there's no longer any choice. And there's also no longer that feeling of kismet where you discover something, and a lot of the time this is kind of pretentious, where you get like music snobs. But music as a genre is all about that kind of feeling of discovery, you know, going into record stores, finding something obscure. And if that is gone, if basically the music we like is just the music that has been decided will be the big music of this month, of this year, people are really angry about that. And I can totally see that anger.

17:31Yeah. So this conversation was happening. people who were suspicious. Turns out their suspicions were correct. There's a marketing company called Chaotic Good. And at South by Southwest, which is this big music festival and now also like a tech conference that happens in Austin, Texas, the head of this company, Chaotic Good, got on stage to talk about their new techniques. And he explained that it was his company that was behind the rise of geese. they said they had this coordinated campaign where they set up all these like fan accounts, essentially, to promote a band, in this case, Geese, but they've done it for plenty of others, and make it look like they've got this kind of, you know, organic attention that it's just like people posting about how much they love this band.

18:27And he essentially said, we can make anything go viral. and like through this coordinated campaign where they had, according to him, thousands of fake accounts that they're running, like posting and commenting. When you say a fake account, are these people who are being paid to have these opinions, but they're real people or are they completely fake accounts? Yeah, so there was some discussion about, is this bots, right? Are these like automated, you know, fake accounts that are operating on their own? Chaotic, good, like stop short of saying that? They didn't say they're using bots, but it's like not, it's like accounts that the company is running.

19:05They're posing as just like some regular guy who likes to post about the band Geese, but there's like one or a couple people that are running hundreds add up to like, you know, a thousand or a couple thousand accounts. They aren't real. And people are saying, they're calling this a psyop. That like, Nikki, can you explain what a psyop is? I think you're conspiracy theory term it's like uh psychological operation basically it's a casual term for when your attention when you know the the body of human culture and human communication is being gamed essentially and there's a specific word for what's going on here which is astroturfing which is fake grassroots campaign and it's not just in music you see this when a movie comes out, for example, you also, this has been, you know, a point of controversy for at least 10 years now, you see it a lot in politics.

20:05So you get this in almost everywhere where in, you know, there's that old saying, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Anything, anything you see. You haven't seen the comic that might not translate. You haven't seen the comic. Yeah, it's a far side comic, I think. No, it's the New Yorker. It's like it's a little dog. He's sitting at a computer. He's talking to another dog. He says on the Internet, nobody knows your dog. It's like the funniest thing in the whole world. Yeah, because you don't know whether what you're seeing at any given point is authentic or paid for or what the backstory might be of any piece of content you're seeing.

20:45It's very easy to make fake support for something like a band, like Geese. Well, the funny thing here, right? If you've like started a fake grassroots political movement that doesn't exist, or if, you know, like the government is convincing people to believe something that isn't real, some crazy conspiracy, that's one thing. In this context, there's another word for psyop and it's marketing. And what I think is so interesting about this is people were shocked, outraged that this band grew and it wasn't, you know, just the fans. It wasn't real people promoting this. It didn't just get big because it's great.

21:32And what I think is so interesting about that is we've got this idea that social media is a meritocracy, that things rise and fall because the algorithm is in general, most of the time, responding to people liking or not liking something. and that is just not true. 20 years ago, Justin Bieber became super famous because he was just posting great, you know, people loved it songs on YouTube and he became the biggest thing in the world and then like he got so many views, they invited him on Ellen DeGeneres. That's not how it works anymore. There's a formula to this. There's a reason that some things go viral.

22:18There's people whose whole job it is to figure it out and make it happen again. Here's where I think we disagree. If we go back 20 or 30 years ago, right? If you go back to the 90s, no one would be shocked to hear that a band that was playing on Saturday Night Live had manufactured attention through a coordinated marketing campaign, right? That they'd gotten people to write and talk about them on TV and in print. but social media feels like you're just talking to another person. It feels like it's real. There's this veneer of authenticity. And I think that's what it is. I think it's a veneer. I think it's not real and that's not actually how the world works.

23:06And we've all gotten a little bit mixed up about what is happening when we go on the internet. At the end of the day, there's sort of a spectrum with how much marketing involves fake accounts. Like, I think most people would say it's totally acceptable to pay for ads for marketing. And maybe it's also accessible to pay for influencers, like real influencers for marketing. But then to go to the point where you're actually creating fake fans, that's where things kind of cross into, okay, people know that that happens, but to find out that a beloved band used those kinds of tactics, like I think it gives this sense of this feeling of, oh, that's kind of dirty.

23:50You know, like there's certain brands, certain personalities, certain celebrities, whatever, that you want to feel like a feel-good story about their rise. And if they lean into that brand as well and say like, you know, we're the folksy one that like we worked really hard. This was all based on pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. And then you discover, actually, they're one in the same with all of these other inauthentic brands that kind of gamed their way to the top. That does make it's a kind of betrayal. No, you're not wrong. And I also I want to defend Geese here. Like, it wouldn't have happened if they, you know, weren't good at what they were doing, if their music wasn't interesting.

24:35And they do have this kind of indie outsider feel. I think people felt like, oh, I'm watching onto this thing. It's special. It's just for me. I get it and other people don't, which you don't feel. I don't think anyone would be shocked to find out that something like this was happening with Sabrina Carpenter. It might be like, oh, well, yeah, sure. Right. Exactly. It's a major act. Yeah, exactly. But on the other hand, the shock and the outrage, I think people know this happens, but I don't think they get the scale that it's happening on. I mean, so one of the things that's kind of because I didn't really know this story.

25:10So I didn't I didn't realize until you just mentioned it, Tom, that the people found out about the quote unquote sci-off that was happening because the marketing firm just went on stage and announced it at South by Southwest. And so the other thing I would say in defense of Geese is this marketing company could also just be like really tooting their own horn and ascribing way more of Geese's popularity to their tactics than the music of the band. And so like this is this kind of an extra layer of intrigue here, which is why would they have announced this to the world? I mean, one, probably because it is so normalized for them, for people who work within this industry.

25:57But the second one is that they are also just trying to get more clients. They're trying to talk themselves up. So they might also convey an outsized impact of the work that they're doing. And to your point, Tom, people could also, they could just like the fact that Gisa's music is good, you know? So it is kind of an interesting situation where it's really hard to determine in hindsight how much of these inauthentic coordinated campaigns might have actually floated Deese to the top or whether Deese would have floated to the top anyway. Maybe they just simply got to the top faster and a little bit bigger.

26:38But yeah, it's because everything is so enmeshed now, the authenticity and the inauthenticity, it's impossible to disentangle. It's the fact that it's unfair, I think, is what's got people really upset about this. And with Geese and every time this kind of thing comes up is that it is unfair. It's pay to play. it's if you aren't cheating, then you're going to get pushed out by someone who is. And rightly, people are upset about that. I would love to hear from people. There's definitely people who are listening to this who like this band that have feelings about this. If you're upset about how Geese is a psyop, reach out.

27:21Our email is theinterface at bbc.com. I kind of feel bad for Geese. I think they're almost like a victim here. Probably some people are upset about that. But like, you know, you hire, you know, somebody say, we want to help your band go viral. We think your music is great. Sure, go ahead. This probably stinks if you're like a real indie musician. You know, there's some people who are like legitimately outraged about the way that the music industry manipulates things and makes it impossible for like the little guy to succeed. That's absolutely real. But geese, they're just like, this is just what big bands are doing right now.

27:53And they're paying the cost. Serious reputational damage. I mean, it's hard to get your street cred back as an indie band after something like this. But they're pretty good. I really like the song where he yells about how there's a bug in his car over and over. It's a pretty good lyric. How much are you being paid to say this, Tom? Well, they told me the checks in the mail. I'm actually not even a real guy. Are you a dog, Thomas? This is a wig. So I guess what I'm saying is just like what you like. Like if it's a marketing ploy, like, and that's bugging you, you know, just go listen to the music and decide if it's resonating with you or not.