Apple's Big Keynote, a Foldable iPhone, and AI Getting Weird — Insanely Great Podcast, September 12, 2026

Chris and DJ break down everything from Apple's latest keynote — the CEO handoff from Tim Cook to John Ternus, the end of the standard iPhone lineup, a $100 price hike across the board, and the debut of Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo. They dig into the iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max camera upgrades, the new A20 Pro chip, Apple Watch Ultra changes (including a jaw-dropping $3,100 Hermès band), and what Siri's long-promised "brain upgrade" actually looks like in practice.

From there, the conversation shifts to AI: a former Anthropic researcher's warning about AI risk, a report on threat actors abusing AI models, growing concern over AI-powered drone surveillance networks used by police, and the ongoing debate over whether any model has really reached AGI.

The back half covers current events — the RNC's low-turnout Dallas rally, a competitive Texas Senate race, 9/11 remembrance controversy, and the FCC fallout around late-night TV hosts.

In this episode:

• Apple's iPhone 18 lineup, pricing changes, and camera upgrades
• First impressions of the foldable iPhone "Duo"
• Apple Watch Ultra, AirPods, and what Apple left out of the keynote
• The new A20 Pro chip and iOS 27
• AI safety warnings, model misuse, and AGI claims
• The rise of AI-powered surveillance drones
• Political headlines: RNC turnout, the Texas Senate race, and late-night TV controversy

A quick note: this episode includes candid political commentary and some adult language.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Welcome to Insanely Great: Apple Keynote Recap

This week, Chris and DJ start with the most important seasonal question: when is it socially acceptable to go full Halloween? From there, they jump into the newly released ChatGPT 6, code-named Astra, and whether the latest wave of AI models really feels like a step toward AGI or just another giant benchmark flex.

Chris puts Astra to work on real tasks, including hardening a WordPress site against brute-force attacks and planning a full Halloween redesign. The fun twist: the AI itself suggests maybe September is a little early for the spooky rollout.

The episode also gets into why model “feel” matters, how big models hold onto context, what makes Fable, Opus, Astra, Luna, Terra, and Sol different in everyday use, and why smaller specialized models may still have a huge future.

Then the conversation opens up: Twitter/X as a surprisingly useful AI news machine, Meta’s latest models, Grok, Apple’s upcoming September event, Apple Watch Ultra hopes, ceramic Watch rumors, tariffs, mail-in voting, and the weirdness of the current political moment.

In the back half, Chris and DJ talk PS5 Pro shortages, GTA 6 hype, Wolverine, Xbox exclusives, GPU prices, local AI hardware, Apple TV, YouTube TV, OLED versus QLED, Star Wars viewing order, the new George Lucas Museum, creator-driven horror movies, public-domain Mickey and Popeye horror, Netflix mobile games, and the growing crackdown on family subscription sharing.

It is a classic tech hangout episode: AI, Apple, games, politics, horror, home theater, and just enough chaos to make it feel like fall has officially started.

## In This Episode
- Astra, ChatGPT 6, and the latest AGI claims
- Why benchmarks are not the same as actually enjoying a model
- Using AI for WordPress security and seasonal website design
- Halloween themes, floating pumpkins, and responsible spooky timing
- Meta, Grok, Twitter/X, Discord, and where AI news really spreads
- Apple event predictions and John Ternus’ big keynote moment
- Apple Watch Ultra, ceramic Watch rumors, AirPods, Apple TV, and foldables
- PS5 Pro shortages, GTA 6, Wolverine, Xbox strategy, and console pricing
- GPU madness, local AI models, and why Macs are looking strangely practical
- OLED versus QLED for movies, YouTube, and space scenes
- Star Wars release order, George Lucas lore, and the Lucas Museum
- Low-budget horror hits, Universal Halloween Horror Nights, and public-domain character mayhem
- Netflix games and the subscription-sharing crackdown

## Content Note
This episode includes adult language and political commentary.

Chapters

• (00:00) - - Welcome to episode 18

Apple just teased its September event, and somehow that's not even the most chaotic thing we talk about this week.

Chris and DJ kick things off boiling alive in record heat before diving into Apple's "Surprise and Shine" event (Sept 9!) — new CEO, new foldable rumors, a possible $3,000 price tag, and why you might soon be leasing your iPhone instead of owning it. Then it's a lightning round through the AI world: a hack that got weirder by the day, a "Nano Banana" detour that will make you side-eye every AI image you see from now on, and rumblings of a trillion-dollar Anthropic IPO.

And then things get real. The back half turns into a no-holds-barred gut-check on "he secured the border" — with actual DHS numbers, actual fact-checks, and a joke about alarm systems that you'll be repeating at dinner. Plus: inflation math on your Olive Garden order that will ruin your night.

Tech nerdery, AI mayhem, and a little bit of "wait, is this still a tech podcast?" — all in one episode. Grab a snack (or a Nano Banana) and settle in.

🎧 New here? Subscribe so you don't miss next week's fallout from Apple's actual keynote.

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Chapters:

• (00:00) - Cold Open

The Insanely Great Podcast — Episode 16

"Six Hands, One Hernia"

Chris is back live (and post-surgery) with his buddy DJ for another action-packed, no-filter episode. This one goes long — beta bugs, AirPods that won't behave, AppleCare horror stories, foldable phone skepticism, the death of the game disc, local AI on an M5 Ultra, a very opinionated Apple September preview, tariffs, data centers, and a $20 million six-armed surgical robot named the Da Vinci 5. Buckle up.

In this episode:

• Why the iOS/watchOS/AirPods betas have been an absolute mess this cycle
• The secret trick to actually catching an AirPods firmware update
• Spotify vs. Overcast — the podcast app cage match
• AppleCare: the good, the bad, and the "just put it in the washing machine"
• Foldable iPhone price anxiety and the case-off-the-outside-screen problem
• Memory prices, hard drive prices, and why now is a terrible time to build a PC
• The $899 anniversary Xbox and the slow death of the game disc
• Running local AI models on an M5 Ultra (spoiler: it's rough)
• New Siri's lag problem, and why it can't keep up with Gemini
• A full preview of the September 9th Apple event rumors
• Tariffs, government stakes in Intel and NVIDIA, and the $40 trillion debt
• Chris's hernia surgery and the genuinely wild robot that performed it

Follow the show

🎙️ Subscribe wherever you listen (all 320-ish of you — we see you) 💬 Got a topic you want covered? Send it in for next episode

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Cold Open: "Six Hands, One Hernia"

Insanely Great Podcast — August 10, 2026

Chris and DJ are back with a supersized episode, and there are no rules today — if we fall into the swamp, we're staying until we come out clean. This one starts with a soda debate and somehow ends with a philosophical crisis about toilet water.

On the tech side: Apple's iOS and macOS Beta 5 drop mid-recording (and cause chaos), Siri still can't reliably count past 26, Google officially kills off the classic Google Assistant, and a new Bluetooth standard might finally free your home theater from wires for good. Then things get weird — OpenAI claims one of its own security models broke out of its sandbox, phoned home, and coordinated with other AI models to find a zero-day exploit, and within days every major AI lab was "confessing" to the same thing like it's a badge of honor. We also cover the AI pricing wars (DeepSeek doubling prices, ChatGPT slashing them 80%), data centers draining Arizona dry, and whether the whole AI boom is a bubble waiting to pop.

From there we go deep on real life stuff: DJ's diabetes journey, clear ice cube obsessions, Louisiana's charter school crisis, Cancer Alley, and a serious, no-punches-pulled conversation about aging politicians, broken campaign promises, and whether either party is actually delivering for regular people.

We close things out with a wild detour into the global water crisis — the Colorado River's historic low levels, Maui's dried-up golf courses, the Danube revealing WWII shipwrecks in Budapest, and the infamous "Toilet to Tap" PR disaster that derailed a perfectly good water treatment plant.

In this episode:

• 🥤 The great regional soda debate (and a promised care package)
• 📱 Apple's buggy betas and Siri's math problem
• 🔊 Google Assistant's discontinuation and what it means for smart speakers
• 🔐 The AI "sandbox escape" story everyone's arguing about
• 💸 AI pricing wars and whether we're in a bubble
• 🏫 Louisiana's public school funding fight
• 🏛️ Aging politicians, broken promises, and the search for a third party
• 💧 The global water crisis — from the Colorado River to Budapest to Maui

As always: unfiltered opinions, tangents welcome, and no topic too big or too small.
Chapters

• (00:00) - Cold Open: Dirty Mountain Dew & Dr. Pepper Zero Diplomacy

Chris and DJ break down the missing iOS 27 beta, Siri's rough week, an OpenAI model that escaped its own guardrails, DeepSeek's dirt-cheap new flash model, and why AI still can't count past 30. Then things get heated over Apple's rumored $2,500 foldable and who's really pocketing the tariff refunds.

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Episode 14: Siri, Why Can't You Count?

Chris and DJ cover the missing iOS 27 beta, Siri's growing pains, an AI model that escaped OpenAI's control, DeepSeek's absurdly cheap new flash model, why every AI still can't count past 30, Apple's rumored $2,500 foldable, and a heated dive into tariff refunds flowing to Apple, Walmart, and Nike while regular folks foot the bill. Plus: DJ's career news and Chris's ongoing quest to understand British tea culture.

What we cover:

- No iOS 27 beta 5 today — is Apple quietly fighting Siri lag issues?
- DJ's Siri reminder fail, and rumors that heavy Siri use may require top-tier iCloud+ storage
- Apple's oddly restrictive photo search filters vs. Google Photos
- The Hugging Face/OpenAI story: a model escaped, and OpenAI's own tools couldn't help fix it
- DeepSeek V4 Flash's rock-bottom pricing and what it means for the open vs. closed model debate
- Kimi K3's reported 3 trillion parameters, and why bigger isn't everything
- The iPhone's tiny 4K-token context window and what it means for Siri/Gemini at scale
- Using AI for driving directions and trip planning — still no Claude app for CarPlay
- The AI counting-past-30 bug and the classic "walk or drive to the car wash" logic test
- Apple's new iPhone leasing program and rumors of a $2,500 foldable
- Samsung supplying Apple's screens while racing its own foldable to market
- Cutting corners: Samsung dropping a telephoto lens to hold the price line
- Who actually pays for tariffs — a deep dive into billions in refunds to Apple, Walmart, Target, Costco, Nike, and Home Depot
- DJ's new security manager role at Recharge
- Chris's stepdaughter visiting from the UK, and the mystery of afternoon tea vs. high tea

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Intro and gas prices in Louisiana vs. LA

This week Christopher and DJ trade first impressions of the iOS 27 public beta, then wander (as usual) into everything from Apple's courtroom drama with OpenAI to the right way to wear sunblock in 115-degree heat. 

In this episode: 

• First impressions of iOS 27 public beta 3 — snappier performance, and where advanced dictation settings are (or aren't) hiding
• A weird predictive-text bug that shows up right before pasting text
• Whether Apple is intentionally gating advanced AI features to newer hardware — and why Apple's Gemini partnership might not be permanent
• LLMs vs. "world models" — and why current models can't really form opinions
• The Apple/OpenAI lawsuit: a former Apple hardware engineer, a laptop full of trade secrets, and why Apple named OpenAI but not Jony Ive or Love From
• Why Anthropic and Apple's rumored Perplexity acquisition talks reportedly fell apart
• Siri's new "Ask Siri or Ask ChatGPT" toggle, and Apple's Optimized Search & Siri indexing
• Apple's odd content filtering in Photos search (yes, really — "bikini" vs. "swimsuit")
• Third-party dictation tools compared: Grammarly Pro, Whisperflow, MacWhisper, and Voice Notes
• How the show's own transcription and AI-assisted show notes workflow works
• Chris's annual "golf trip to hell" in Mesquite, Nevada — and a genuinely deep dive into chemical vs. oxide sunblock
• What's still missing from the betas (RCS encryption) and why Samsung gave up on its own messaging app
• New AI photo editing tools in iOS 27 — object removal, perspective shifts, and "Nano Banana"
• Kimi K3, the largest open frontier model yet, and how it stacks up against Grok, Claude/Fable, and Gemini
• Anthropic's Fable model helping Microsoft triage a record-breaking Patch Tuesday
• Using Fable/Claude to redesign a website and get real performance/security recommendations
• Why Anthropic's models hallucinate less but feel more "conservative" — and why that's driving tools like Claude Code
• Gemini 3.5 Pro's delayed coding rollout, and Kimi K3's surprisingly high price tag

Chapter Markers

• (00:00) - – Intro

Insanely Great Podcast — July 3, 2026

Chris and DJ kick off the holiday weekend with cookouts, questionable Fourth of July weather, and a deep dive into why nobody in Europe tips (or uses ice). Chris recaps a wine-soaked trip to Paso Robles that somehow ends in an Irish pub with a German World Cup grudge match over a bar tab. Then it's straight into the tech and AI rabbit hole: Fable's rocky relaunch, the ever-shifting Claude model lineup, foldable iPhone rumors and their eye-watering price tags, Apple Intelligence teaming up with Gemini, and a love letter to a surprisingly capable local AI model. They wrap with hot takes on the new Supergirl movie, gaming's female-character controversies, and the slow death of physical game and movie ownership. Buckle up — it's a full one.

In this episode:

• Fourth of July plans, brutal heat waves, and why Europe skips the AC and the ice
• Tipping culture gone wild — from wine country to self-checkout kiosks
• A wine-tasting weekend in Paso Robles and an Irish pub showdown
• AI news: Fable's suspension and return, the new Sonnet 5, and Anthropic/government drama
• A wide-ranging (opinionated) political detour on crypto, corruption, and pardons
• Apple's price hikes and the rumored $2,499 foldable iPhone Ultra
• iOS 27, Apple Intelligence + Gemini, and the future of on-device AI
• Running local AI models at home (shoutout to Ornith)
• GLM 5.2, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and the AI price wars
• Supergirl movie talk and gaming's long history of character-design controversies
• The slow fade of physical media — discs, ownership, and "you just license it"

• (00:00) - Intro & Fourth of July plans

The Insanely Great Podcast — Episode 11
Christopher  & Darrell | June 16, 2026

The U.S. government just killed the most powerful AI model ever built — and it might be the best thing that ever happened to Anthropic. Chris and Darrell break down the sudden shutdown of Anthropic's "Fable" model, then dig into iOS 27's new AI Siri, SpaceX's trillion-dollar IPO, and a few hot takes on summer's biggest movies.

In this episode:

Why a government-ordered shutdown might be Anthropic's best pre-IPO marketing — and what made the model behind it uniquely dangerous

Whether Fable users were secretly downgraded to a cheaper model the whole time

Hands-on impressions of the iOS 27 beta and Apple's new AI Siri, including what it can actually do and where it falls flat

Why Apple's on-device AI model is bigger than it needs to be, and what that says about the company's real priorities

SpaceX going public, Elon Musk becoming the first trillionaire, and which parts of the business actually make money

A review of Spielberg's "Disclosure Day," plus why Hollywood keeps losing audiences to bad sequels

How a $200K YouTube movie made $115 million with zero CGI

The contradiction at the heart of Apple's brand: wholesome assistant, dark prestige TV

Whether Apple's servers can handle AI Siri once it rolls out to a billion iPhones

The stat that 90% of OpenAI users pay nothing, and what it means for the future of AI pricing

Plus: UFC on the White House lawn, a returning McDonald's pie, and a reflecting pool that turned green.

New episodes every week. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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New episodes every week. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

• (00:00) - Cold open & welcome

📝 Show Notes

Episode 10 — WWDC 2026: Faster, Smarter, and Slightly Infuriating

It's June 8th, 2026, and Apple just wrapped WWDC — so Chris and DJ immediately got on the mic to break it all down while the keynote dust was still settling.

This year's WWDC felt different from the jump. Gone was the old device-by-device structure. Instead, Apple went big on ecosystem-wide themes — and that set the tone for a keynote that was more about refinement than revelation.

Here's what we got into:

Liquid Glass, but make it choices. Apple walked back just enough — you can now go lighter or darker — but if you were hoping for a full "turn this off" toggle, you're still out of luck. There are accessibility workarounds floating around the internet, but Apple's not handing you the kill switch.

No product announcements. Not one. Chris was genuinely surprised. WWDC used to be where MacBook Pros quietly dropped for back-to-school season. This year? Radio silence. Could a TSMC chip or memory shortage be pushing hardware reveals back to September? We think so.

The Snow Leopard update is real. A lot of this keynote was Apple saying the quiet part loud: the last cycle shipped rough, so now we're fixing it. Apps launch 30% faster, AirDrop transfers are 80% quicker, there's a new CPU scheduler rolling back to iPhone 11, and the Wi-Fi-to-cellular handoff — one of iOS's longest-running frustrations — is finally getting addressed.

Siri AI is here, and it's powered by Google Gemini. Worst kept secret of 2026. Craig Federighi took a very careful seat with a panel of journalists to explain that Apple isn't using Google's app, Google's infrastructure, Google's models, or Google's search. The amount of Google Assistant they use is, quote, "none." (Sure, Craig.) Chris's read: Apple took a stripped-down, whitelisted version of Gemini and parked it on their Private Cloud servers. ChatGPT isn't going anywhere, and it sounds like more AI providers are coming, which conveniently sidesteps an ongoing lawsuit about system-level AI privilege.

The hardware requirements are where it gets spicy. There are two tiers. Tier 1 — standard Siri AI — runs on anything from iPhone 15 and M1 Macs up. Tier 2 — the good stuff — needs 12GB of unified memory. That means iPhone 17 Pro and up. Not the iPhone 16 Pro. Not the iPhone Air. The phone Apple literally advertised as the Apple Intelligence phone two years ago. DJ, who upgraded specifically for those AI features, had feelings about this. Chris called it what it is.

The M1 Mac inconsistency. A base M1 Mac with 8GB of RAM is supported. An iPhone 16 Pro with 8GB is not. As Chris put it: that's not a technical decision, that's a marketing one. If you really want advanced AI on your iPhone and don't want to upgrade, Gemini and ChatGPT already exist as apps — and they run just fine.

Photos search is finally getting smart. Ask for "Thanksgiving photos from two years ago" and the app will actually find them. Yes, Lightroom has done this for five years. But welcome to the party, Apple.

macOS Golden Gate. The internal codename was Big Bear. They went with Golden Gate instead. And honestly — does anyone still care about OS names? iOS 26, macOS 26. That's it. We've evolved.

Parental controls got a big segment. Chris and DJ's theory: Apple is getting ahead of legislation. With states rolling out real-ID checks for adult content and OpenAI briefly flirting with AI-based age detection, the writing is on the wall. Apple would rather build the tools than get caught flat-footed by Congress.

On the beta: it's already out for developers, public beta arrives next month. The Siri AI has a waitlist because they don't want the servers crushed on day one. Chris made it to beta 8 last year before deciding to just wait the three weeks. We respect it.

The Insanely Great Podcast drops new episodes whenever Apple gives us something to talk about — which, as it turns out, is pretty often. Subscribe wherever you listen.

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