Tim Cook is destroying his own legacy

The Vergecast

Vox Media Podcast Network

News, Tech News, Technology

4.3 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2026

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We've been covering what's happening in Minnesota, and the killing of Alex Pretti, all week on The Verge. To begin this episode, Nilay explains why — and why so many others seem to feel the same way right now. After that, the hosts talk about the CEO-studded screening of Melania Trump's documentary last weekend, the disastrous public appearance from Tim Cook, and whether Cook and other CEOs have any other option but to capitulate to the Trump administration. Then it's time for some gadgets: we talk about the super-foldy, super-expensive Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, the Clawdbot / Moltbot phenomenon, and whether Google can finally put Chrome OS and Android together the right way. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy, Tesla's anti-car pivot, Apple's design hires, and more. Further reading: On the ground in Minneapolis after the killing of Alex Pretti I grew up with Alex Pretti Creators and communities everywhere take a stand against ICE It doesn’t matter if Alex Pretti had a gun Why won’t anyone stop ICE from masking? Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, and AMD CEO Lisa Su are at the White House for a VIP screening of the Melania doc. Tim Cook had ‘a good conversation’ with Trump about deescalation Cook in 2020: Speaking up on racism From The New York Times: Amazon’s $35 Million ‘Melania’ Promotion Has Critics Questioning Its Motives From The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Melania’ Set for a $3 Million Opening Despite Amazon’s $35 Million Marketing Push Here’s Tim Cook hanging out with accused rapist Brett Ratner at the Melania screening What TikTok’s new owners mean for your feed TikTok USA is broken TikTok is still down, here are all the latest updates TikTok is still struggling in the US due to a “cascading systems failure.” TikTok US is mostly back up and running TikTok blames its US problems on a power outage Oracle admits it broke TikTok. Congress doesn’t seem to know if the TikTok deal complies with its law Is New TikTok banning the word “Epstein” in DMs? Not really. TikTokers are heading to UpScrolled following US takeover Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media Meta is stopping teens from chatting with its AI characters Bluesky is testing ‘live’ features to take on X Best gas masks The Samsung Trifold will cost nearly three grand Google just leaked a first look at Android for PC in action Chromebooks train schoolkids to be loyal customers, internal Google document suggests Moltbot, the AI agent that ‘actually does things,’ is tech’s new obsession Clawdbot’s bad day I used Claude to vibe-code my wildly overcomplicated smart home The FCC’s Late Night Comedy Show Tesla discontinuing Model S and Model X to make room for robots Tesla says production-ready Optimus robot is coming soon Tesla hits a grim milestone: its second straight year of decline Elon Musk invests $2 billion in Elon Musk Hang on, there’s a Trump Phone Ultra coming too? Halide co-founder Sebastiaan de With is joining Apple’s design team The Stream Deck-packed gaming keyboard is a monster of good ideas Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Vergecasts, the flagship podcast of catastrophic system failures, a sentence that is going to pay off several times, both literally and figuratively throughout the course of this episode.
0:13.0	I'm your friend David Pearson-Diab tell us here. Hey, buddy.
0:15.0	How's it going?
0:16.0	How are you?
0:17.0	Do you know?
0:18.0	We were just talking before we started recording about your podcast studio dreams.
0:21.6	Would you like to very briefly tell the people of your podcast video dreams? Okay, so here's what I got.
0:26.6	So I record in the attic of my house. I mean, right now, the thing you're looking at is the
0:31.1	attic of our house. And that's fine, except that I have two small children who are noisy
0:36.2	and do not care that I record a podcast in the attic of this house.
0:40.3	That's correct.
0:41.1	And so my dream, I have two dreams.
0:43.2	One is that we'll build a podcast studio above the garage, which is just a thing I say all the time.
0:47.4	I have no idea if we'll ever actually accomplish this and like whether I can get through like the small village politics of zoning variances I need to do that.
0:56.4	The other idea I have, which is very important, and I just want to throw this out there, behind my house, there's our backyard, there's a fence, and then there's a thing behind the house.
1:03.6	Behind the house is a broken down parking lot that is owned by the Catholic Church.
1:09.0	And my dream is to buy that parking lot and then build like a
1:12.4	podcast village back there. I have no idea how to do any of that. Like I don't, you cannot
1:17.8	just call the Catholic Church from what I gather. And the fact that the Pope is from Chicago,
1:23.5	my family is in Chicago has gotten me approximately zero progress.
1:27.8	Not done.
1:28.5	So if you know how to get a whole of the person in the Catholic Church who can sell me a parking lot, give me a call.
	...

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