Tech News Weekly 445 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Dan Moren of Six Colors is here with us this week and we talk about the state of gaming with the Xbox reset, the pricey, pricey Steam machine, and so much more. Then I talk about how wealthy, wealthy families are moving their kids into AI first schools. Talk about Claude's new sort of Spotify unwrapped but for AI usage and about many estate and many a cruise line of all things, banning smart glasses that can record you. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:51]:
This is Tech News Weekly, episode 445 with Dan Moren and me, Mikah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, July 9, 2026: The Rise of AI First Schools. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent and I am joined this week by Dan Morin of Six Colors. Welcome back to the show, Dan.

Dan Moren  [00:01:20]:
Always a pleasure to be here, Mikah. And it's newsiest of news time for us.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:27]:
Indeed. Indeed it is how news it is for people who are tuned in for the first time. Welcome. I hope you enjoyed the show. We like to kick off the show by talking about our stories of the week. These are stories that we find interesting and think are worth chatting about and telling you all about. So let's hear about your story of the week, Dan.

Dan Moren  [00:01:51]:
Well, it's bad times over in Redmond as a lot of, a lot of unfortunate things have befallen the Xbox division at Microsoft. We had a new CEO who took over earlier this year, Asha Sharma, and back in June, she had promised that there would be an upcoming Xbox reset, which is not just resetting your Xbox, as it turns out, but in fact resetting a lot of the people who work there. So this week the company announced mass layoffs, about 1600 staffers getting cut, with 1600 more scheduled to be cut over the course of Microsoft's next fiscal year. More interestingly, we've also seen that they've spun off a couple of the studios that they have bought, notably Compulsion Games and the legendary independent studio Double Fine Productions, which made Psychonauts, are both moving back to independent status, while some of the other studios that Microsoft had bought will go basically be sold to new new owners. And then you're going to have some more options with some of the other studios, including Arcane, which is another sort of big marquee name. This is obviously on top of a lot of other stuff that has happened, including cutting the Size of ID Software, the developer of Doom, as well as big price hikes for the Xbox. Lots of upheaval in Xbox World. And I think probably the large question on people's mind is why? What has happened? Why has the Xbox run aground on an iceberg? Well, it's a series of small icebergs, let's put it that way.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:30]:
Way.

Dan Moren  [00:03:31]:
Microsoft has struggled over the past several years with a lot of challenges, one of which is the fact that they bet heavily on Game Pass, which was essentially a subscription service. It's the Netflix for games, right? You, you subscribe to Game Pass, you can play any of the games that are on the service. But in order to build up that, that library of games, it went out and bought a whole ton of studios to develop games, as well as studios that had, you know, developed games in their libraries. This is not cheap, right? You got to pay for the studios and the employees, etc, and presumably you want them to keep making games. So you have to continue to fund those studios. Unfortunately, Game Pass subscriptions kind of hit a plateau. So rather than getting up towards the 100 million that they had originally forecast, it seemed to top up around 30 million. That is much, much lower than it needs to be.

Dan Moren  [00:04:21]:
The other challenges there are the world as we know it right now. Among gestures, wildly, you've seen the world, perhaps you're familiar with the world. The world. So prices, right? I mean, prices is a big issue. Ram's gone up, hard drives gone up, processors and, you know, manufacturing has gone up. As a result, Microsoft has already hiked the cost of the Xbox console, you know, and that has been another, another obstacle for them to overcome. Because if you're, you know, banking in on a lot of people, you know, buying your, your subscription service and they don't do that well, surely you can make up revenue through other things like hardware sales, only now your hardware is more expensive and therefore you are probably depressing sales. So, I mean, I think it was put most succinctly by Andrew Webster over at the Verge in his headline article which read, xbox is a disaster.

Dan Moren  [00:05:15]:
Does not seem like things are going great over there. Lots of stuff getting cut. I think console gaming is in a difficult inflection moment right now, and that's being exacerbated by the, the RAM crisis, right? I mean, consoles, all the consoles have gone up. Sony's raised the cost of PlayStation. Nintendo's raised the cost of the Switch to. Valve recently debuted their Steam machine, which is a very expensive product.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:44]:
I liked quickly about that. I liked that someone said Two things can be true. One, that it is too expensive, but two, that it is reasonably priced, meaning that gestures wildly. It makes sense why it costs what it does, but it also costs too much for what it is.

Dan Moren  [00:06:04]:
Right, exactly. I mean, that's. That is a. A challenge, right? Because, I mean, the Steam Machine is interesting because it's kind of a gaming PC, but it's one that's built for you as opposed to one that you build yourself. So the labor is taken out of it, but it's still not cheap because the component prices have all gone way up. And the promise of consoles has always been the idea. You plug it in, you turn it on, you play a game, right? You don't want spend your time mucking around with drivers and figuring out how to configure your gaming PC. And oh, no, that component you bought is bad, so you got to replace it.

Dan Moren  [00:06:33]:
This was the promise of all of these consoles, especially, I think, the Xbox. Right? I mean, Microsoft was leveraging their success with Windows and their success as a gaming platform and thought to themselves, let's produce a console that's essentially a PC and let's be able to marshal our development forces to have stuff that works in between Windows and the Xbox. In many cases, this was another part of their missteps. Apparently. You know, they sort of had this ad campaign they're going for a while called like. I think it was like, what is an Xbox? Or everything's an Xbox. I've forgotten what exactly it was called. But the idea essentially being like, hey, you can play your.

Dan Moren  [00:07:12]:
Your Xbox games on all these different devices and all these different platforms, whether it's mobile or a PC or an Xbox. And I think it got a lot of people being like, well, why do I need an Xbox? So a little bit of backfire there. There's been some talk as well about would Microsoft spin off the Xbox division and maybe try to recoup some of its losses that way? There's a challenge there, right? Because who. Who wants to buy it, right? I mean, there. There are people, you know, you, Amazon, Netflix have both made moves into gaming. Neither of them has a console. But I think, you know, there's some challenges there. Like, would you want to invest that much money into a business that is not generating huge amounts of revenue for you? What is the real advantage there? If anything, I think it seems more likely that you might see some of the IP get sold off piecemeal.

Dan Moren  [00:08:09]:
I mean, obviously Microsoft still owns incredibly valuable ip, whether it's Halo or Fallout. And the elder Scrolls from Bethesda. You know, it's all of these things are, are sort of assets that it could turn around and sell off if it wanted to. But again, to whom you're. You're reducing your number. Yeah, there aren't as many players in this market. Part of. Because like Microsoft and Sony kind of setting that Nintendo aside, which is a special case, stomped out a lot of, a lot of competition.

Dan Moren  [00:08:42]:
And so yeah, I don't know, it's, it seems pretty dire. I mean, I think that's the reason they're really, you're really seeing them cut this to the bone is they've got to get down to a point where they can subsist on what they have before they start trying to figure out where they can go. And so, you know, more recently, you know, they said they've started to see some uptick in, you know, Game Pass subscribers. Part of that has also been as a result of them basically shifting some titles they had announced to be Xbox exclusives. A thing that had, you know, kind of declined for a while. They had sort of, you know, stew the idea of doing exclusives and having more stuff that be cross platform. But you know, one way to drive people to your, to your console is to have games they can't get anywhere else. Ask, just ask Nintendo.

Dan Moren  [00:09:32]:
Right, that's, that's been a huge mover for them too. So it's going to be interesting to see exactly what is left after all of these studios are spun off and these people are laid off and where they're going. I mean generally the big move for a gaming company is a next generation console. And Microsoft has teased that they have something in development called Project Helix that they say they're still committed to. But game next generation game consoles by all accounts have been pushed back because of the hardware situation. Neither Sony nor Microsoft is going to be announcing a new console anytime soon. They would not be affordable if they did. Right.

Dan Moren  [00:10:13]:
I mean, yeah, I mean we've literally

Mikah Sargent [00:10:14]:
seen what that looks like. If you, if you release a console

Dan Moren  [00:10:17]:
right now, it'll look like the Steam machine. Probably more expensive, honestly.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:21]:
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, there have been some really interesting numbers out of this because of the way that the, the Xbox reset document went out. And so it kind of talks about good news which is that Xbox has over a billion. It's almost like it is a sales doc. Xbox has over a billion players, 72 billion hours played across the console, PC, mobile and streaming. And then saying that our competition is attention, meaning that the competition is not Sony it's not the other options, it's just that we need to have the attention here and not in other places. But then after saying all these very positive things, the memo goes on to say Xbox will end the fiscal year at about a 3%, what they call a accountability margin. That excludes Activision Blizzard or sorry, Activision Blizzard king, but has spent more than $20 billion.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:22]:
That's with a B on content, platform and hardware subsidy over five years.

Dan Moren  [00:11:27]:
They bought studios, right? They bought entire gaming studios to basically bring those titles to the Xbox. And that is a huge extension of the company. And if it doesn't pay off, then that is a real problem. I mean, they're even more frank. Asha Sharma is even more frank in the message sent this week in which she literally just writes, our business today is not healthy. We are operating margins that are 3 to 10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. And so all of these things are, you know, not great situations.

Dan Moren  [00:12:07]:
I mean they, again, I think to some degree they've been able to coast through because it's Microsoft. Right. This is still a giant tech company, but at the end of the day you don't want, even your giant tech company doesn't want to subsidize a sinking part of its business. So we're seeing some major, major changes right now. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what is left standing afterwards. Right. Because there are clearly some, some big crown jewel. I mean, Activision, Bethesda, Blizzard, I mean these are all really, really big names.

Dan Moren  [00:12:42]:
You know, it's hard for them. Those are like, like marquee titles that are, you know, you know, World Warcraft titles and stuff like that. High end things that are like, you can sell those off, but at that point you're, you're admitting defeat. I think if you're giving away those, those crown jewels.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:59]:
Wow. Yeah, there's, I mean, Obsidian and Bethesda and all of these companies that are talking about. Because when you look at the layoffs

Dan Moren  [00:13:10]:
from

Mikah Sargent [00:13:13]:
Microsoft's position, it could say, oh, we laid off 2.1% of our workforce. We laid off 4800 employees, which in the scheme of things there are a lot of people who work there. But when you look at where it's focused, yeah, this is having huge impacts on these studios, on these employees, on these games. And of course this is the second layoff. This is a year after Microsoft. You know, I think it was a little over 9,000 employees before.

Dan Moren  [00:13:41]:
Yeah. And they're not, they're not alone in that. Right. I mean, across the industry, we're seeing, we're seeing those kinds of layoffs. I will say. I mean, I, I think to, to step aside from the doom and gloom for a moment. I think there is a world where this is a positive decision for Xbox as a organization and a brand because it's forces them to be a little bit more nimble. It forces them to reduce.

Dan Moren  [00:14:03]:
One of the things they talk about in the memo is reducing layers of management. Right. Like we will reduce layers. Management layers to no more than five and where possible, three. It's like those are possibly still too many. Right. I mean, this was a big organization and I think the argument that you can make sort of something that's slimmed down and maybe more efficient at what it's doing is probably to the benefit long term if you're really planning for sustainability. So I think that that is something that has potential here, especially because you're not in a position right now to be able to be like, let's shift everything to a new platform, to a, to a new generation of console, because that's out in the future now.

Dan Moren  [00:14:43]:
This is your time. If you're going to reorganize and refocus, you might as well do it now. And I think that that is a potentially an opportunity, a silver lining to take out of this.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:54]:
Yeah, that's. That's a good point. I didn't think about. Because of course I thought about selling. I had not thought about a joint venture who would join Microsoft in owning Xbox OpenAI. No, I'm kidding.

Dan Moren  [00:15:13]:
It's a good question there. I mean, like I said, there's lots of people who are looking at gaming. Gaming still, I think a very big industry. But yeah, who has the money to invest at the Microsoft level that also wants to be in this market? And those are precious few, I think. So, yeah, we'll see over the next year or so what this ends up looking like. And I'm sure they've got some time to try and turn it around, but, you know, they got, they got hard work ahead of them.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:42]:
Absolutely. All right, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with my story of the week. All right. An interesting story kind of sitting at the intersection of where we have AI hype going on. But also there's a lot of parenting anxiety right now with, with the, the, the rules and the laws that are going forth regarding protecting kids online. And then of course, there's when it comes to these kinds of stories, there's a whole lot of money involved as well. Catherine. Excuse me.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:13]:
Catherine Bindley, who's a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal, often covering culture of Silicon Valley, has a piece out about wealthy families. These are, of course, hedge fund presidents, venture capitalists, tech workers who are pulling their kids out of schools and enrolling them in a new wave of alternative K through 8 programs. Now, these schools promise AI tutors that will personalize the curriculum. They instead of having teachers, have quote unquote guides and then lessons in negotiation, sales and building businesses. One of them, Alpha School, charges 75,000, just amazingly, $75,000 a year. This is in San Francisco. There's another called Forge Prep, which sounds terrifying in New Jersey, which markets itself as built for 2040, not 1940. And there's a catch.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:07]:
Unlike public schools, none of these places have to report performance data to the state, so nobody really knows if any of it work. All right, let's start with this because I thought this was a fascinating aspect of this story. Bin Lee, who wrote this piece, talks about how this one student, angkor Jain, who's 11 years old, excuse me, Ankur Jain has an 11 year old son, Arjun. And Arjun was attending a public school in Madison, New Jersey, and says, you know, nothing wrong with the school. Arjun was happy, was excelling academically. Jane decided to pull him out of this school and enroll him at Forge Prep. It's for fifth graders through eighth graders and of course teaches what it calls real world problem solving. So designing products, building businesses, learning about negotiation and public speaking.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:06]:
And Jane said that the reason why he chose to pull him out of the school he was in is that he hadn't learned about negotiation, sales and public speaking until he was in his 20s. And it's time to do this now. The quote is, if we're still teaching the kids the way we used to 60, 70, 80 years ago, how are we preparing them so they see the system that for them they feel is not solving things and are going to a system that they feel would solve things again without any of the data or research to back it up. Dan, you're a parent. I am you sending your kids to an to. To prep what is. I already forgot what it's called. Forge Prep.

Dan Moren  [00:18:53]:
I am not. Okay. I also come from a family of, of educators and librarians and things like that. And so I, I have a lot of respect and a lot of appreciation for the hard work of education. I find this kind of story dispiriting. I Guess from a personal standpoint, if for no other reason than I think let's take a step back here. First of all, this, this is a story being reported in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal has a, you know, obviously very business and economic genre and I think that that certainly is reflected by the kind of people they're talking to.

Dan Moren  [00:19:30]:
I mean you mentioned this, this parent, we should also note they're the president of a hedge fund.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:36]:
Yeah.

Dan Moren  [00:19:36]:
Take from that what you will. Yeah, a disposable income or I shouldn't say disposable, but high degree of income that lets them pay for private school. But I think the more dispiriting part to me is the, the focus on such a limited number of topics and skills. Because sure, negotiation, sales and public speaking are potentially interesting things to learn, but they are also very one dimensional in terms of the things that they are teaching. Right. They are not, not notably necessarily teaching math, science, art, literature, history. I mean I don't, I don't believe that those things are less important than the, the you know, business skills you could learn. I think it's very much an idea that like the only way to succeed in society is through business, which to me is a, a logical fallacy that maybe they would have learned if they had studied logic or rhetoric.

Dan Moren  [00:20:43]:
I think that there are some real challenges there when it comes to, you know, focusing so specifically especially I don't know, again as a parent here. Look, I don't like to judge other parents choices but I do think the idea that you took a kid out of a school where they were very happy and succeeding to put them in a school because you think they should learn different skills is a, is a choice. That is a choice and I'm not sure how that choice is really going to be paid off. I mean, I think the other risk here is, I mean a lot of these, these, you know, people like touting this. Oh, it's new, it's agile, it doesn't have to deal with all the bureaucracy. It's like, yeah, but it may also fold in two years.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:24]:
Exactly.

Dan Moren  [00:21:25]:
What happens to your kids education then?

Mikah Sargent [00:21:28]:
That is, that is the thing more than anything else for me that, that, well not more than anything else. That's one of the big things. That thing that I have too much, that's too much risk.

Dan Moren  [00:21:40]:
Pressure. Yeah, risk. I mean all those things and I think I, I, I don't know. Look, the state of public education in this country is not where I would like it to be. Obviously it's highly, highly Independent, depends where you live. But certainly the federal government has shown no appetite for improving public education. And that is unfortunate because I think that is a great resource for the future of a, of a country is making sure that your future citizens have, or sorry, future, your, your citizens who are growing up there are well rounded and have a large degree of education. But we've got a weird environment right now where we prioritize certain types of learning or certain fields over others in a way that is tremendously disturbing to me at times.

Dan Moren  [00:22:31]:
You know, I, I went to school, I went to college as an English major. I mean, not a thing that I necessarily was like, oh boy, how am I gonna, how am I gonna start a business and succeed as an English major? I was not perhaps super, you know, concerned with that at the time. And that's good because we need, you need people who are interested in things beyond business. You can't have that sort of one dimensional education. It's just, it's not enough. So I find this sad, I guess especially because, you know, there's also such a vibe too about, you know, and one of the other things I noted here was that one of the schools, the Alpha school you mentioned also sells homeschooling software and its skill based curriculum. I mean these are all profit endeavors and.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:19]:
Exactly.

Dan Moren  [00:23:20]:
That's another thing you need to ask yourself is who benefits from this? Is it your kids or is it the people running these schools and charging huge amounts, amounts of money?

Mikah Sargent [00:23:27]:
Exactly. There's a Stanford professor, Caroline Hoxby, who actually studies education economics and says that it is true that project based learning goes back centuries. Of course mixing in AI is the newer aspect of it. But very blunt about the evidence saying, quote, I am not a cheerleader for any type of education for which there is negligible scientific type empirical evidence. I love what Alpha had to say in return. That globally renowned learning scientists helped build the model based on decades of foundational research. Okay, interesting, these learning scientists. Yeah, I think you've touched on the biggest aspect of what feels so kind of gross about this, which is that, yeah, the fact that we're just going to, is 75, what was it? $75,000.

Dan Moren  [00:24:29]:
I mean, and that's, I'm not gonna lie, that's not that expensive for a private school. Fair enough, can be very expensive. But I will also add into this, you know, we barely touched on the use of AI here and I think obviously this is a buzzword. Every new business that comes out now, every story is about AI and trans trends in AI but let's not forget that, that AI as an educational tool is still highly in debate with a lot of real risks to it and the way it works, the inherent biases in it. Again, who benefits from that? What information is being consumed in order to provide the information that AI has? What environmental resources are being consumed? There are a lot of open questions about AI and, and I'm certainly not in any way reassured by the idea. No, no, we don't have teachers, we have guides. It's like, yeah, a guide is great when I'm going to a museum and I want to know what to see. A guide is not great when I'm trying to learn what I need to know for the rest of my life.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:28]:
Exactly. And this should be the time to lay like again, foundational learning to have all of the basic skills. We've got all of that. Well, not all of this time, but there's a lot of time to do that in those years. And yeah, years and years and years of data that suggests that for the most part this way of learning is beneficial to, to giving someone again the basic skills that they need and then some to sort of start to personalize and, and target more. Some of the conversation about AI or some of the use rather of AI involves monitoring a child's attention. And I thought there was. This is the one thing that I wanted to ask you about.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:19]:
If there was a way for humans to be able to better personalize teaching for students, do we think that would be a positive thing? Because I think back to school and I think about how in some classes you learn about the different ways that people might be a learner and so you have these hands on learners and the reading and I don't know if all of that still holds up to this day, but it was interesting that you know, if someone was given it was almost like all on the student to advocate, if the parent wasn't paying attention to advocate for themselves and say I'm falling behind in this or I'm not in that. And there's a lot of shame based learning, unfortunately. And so the one thing in this that I thought I could see how this idea could be a positive thing is if there's some feedback involved where it's like, okay, in comparison to the other students, this student seems to be struggling with this. So we're going to focus more on this and try to get them up. If you know, one teacher and too many students means that that can't happen. But there could be sort of like a fallback, I guess. That's also watching. I don't mind that.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:37]:
I think, I think that there's something to be said there. It'd be great if it could just be done by actual human beings.

Dan Moren  [00:27:42]:
Well, that's just it. I mean, the question is, why are you turning this over to AI, Right? I'm reminded of every single time and there have been multiple that some startup in Silicon Valley has announced, hey, we've got this great program where let's say you're going somewhere and let's say a lot of other people are going somewhere along the same route that you're going. We've got like a private car you can get, get and it will stop places and drop you off and pick up other people. And you just say you've reinvented the bus. And the point is, why do we need a private company to reinvent the bus, or in this case a private company to reinvent schools? We already have schools, we just don't fund them. So in the same way that public transportation is already an existing thing that you can take advantage of and does not need to be reinvented by Silicon Valley, but instead needs to be better funded by say, the government, I think there's a strong argument here, is like, well, rather than divert all these resources into the pockets of private citizens, why can we not divert some of the resources into the public pockets of public good and actually educate kids and bring those same resources to all of the kids, rather than just the kids that can afford to pay $75,000 a year.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:59]:
Yeah, it does seem to be that this is a little bit self selecting. You've got venture capitalists for the New York area and of course tech professions in the Bay Area for these schools, which makes sense whether that means that, that we're basically just sort of, it's like creating, it's a pipeline that creates the same sort of, of thinking.

Dan Moren  [00:29:28]:
I would argue, and I will also not to, not to, you know, impugn the Wall Street Journal's coverage of this, but let's keep in mind one of these schools, which one, the Alpha school, is only going to have 34 students. So we're still talking about very small. This is true. You know, is this a trend or is this a blip? I don't think we know well enough. And I agree that there is a good point that, that education is being challenged and how do we adapt? And the answer is not necessarily give up on public education to turn over to new quote, unquote ways of doing things. It's to figure out. How can we adapt our existing infrastructure to just take advantage of these new improvements or changes in our systems, in our lives, rather than just being like, well, we can't fix that, let's just go build an entirely new system.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:19]:
Yeah, I mean, as Braille teacher says in the discord, the answer is money. How often is the answer money? It's always money is always the answer.

Dan Moren  [00:30:34]:
If it's technology, it's always DNS, public goods, it's always money. So there you go.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:42]:
All right. Well, Dan Morin of Six Colors, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. If people would like to follow along with the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Dan Moren  [00:30:52]:
Well? Thank you for having me as always, Maika. It's a pleasure to be here. You can find all of my everything I do podcasts, tech, writing my many novels over at dmorren.com d m O-R-E n.com you can catch me over at sixcolors.com writing about all things Apple. And of course you can hear me every week over at Relay FM with Mikah on clockwise our tech show.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:15]:
Do you also sell mini novels on

Dan Moren  [00:31:17]:
your website or just, I mean, I sell short stories. Those are like mini novels.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:22]:
Those are mini novels, yeah.

Dan Moren  [00:31:23]:
You could go buy those. They're cheap.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:25]:
Buy them, print them out and tiny little book and give them, read them

Dan Moren  [00:31:29]:
on a tiny little E reader.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:30]:
That's fine too. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, thank you, Dan. We'll see you soon.

Dan Moren  [00:31:34]:
Thanks, Mikah.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:35]:
The year in review trend, right, that Spotify Wrapped kicked off has officially arrived in AI. This was noted by Hayden Field of the Verge, who is reporting on a new announcement from Anthropic as of today, Thursday, July 9th. There's a feature called Reflect for Claude, which of course is Anthropic's name for its generative AI. The Verge, of course, calls it Claude Wrapped. It's a dashboard that will analyze how you've been using the chatbot over the past month, three months or six months. Oh actually it also goes up to a full year. It talks about what topics you bring up, what tasks you delegate, when you use it most. And here's what makes it more interesting than just a kind of look back feature.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:30]:
It also ships with tools that are kind of like screen time controls. So it's got quiet hours, break reminders, it has prompts that ask you to consider what you'd rather keep doing yourself. And an AI company that building features that nudge you to use Its product less honestly not something you see every day. It kind of reminds me of the feature that Nintendo used to have, I think it was on the Wii that would pop up every once in a while and say, hey, you want to go outside? Maybe you want to stop playing Smash Bros. And go outside for a little bit. Interesting for sure. So let's talk about what Anthropic has announced. Well, well, in Beta right now for many of its users, there's a new dashboard and you can actually use it to set your own quiet hours.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:19]:
And so these are windows when Claude is off and so you aren't able to go in and make use of it. The idea I think is that you have a little bit more external control. If your internal controls, what have you otherwise gone going to Claude. You can also schedule break reminders. So these will nudge you after a session runs for a certain length of time. And what's great is that Anthropic says that there will be a view of total time spent using Claude. It's an idea that this is like tallied hours. So it therefore puts it squarely into screen time territory that you know you are managing and marking your screen time.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:04]:
Both quiet hours and break nudges are kind of framed by Anthropic as reminders of your own preferences. So you can dismiss them easily. You set them up, you dismiss them. You don't have to make use of them if you don't want to. Anthropic's not setting an expectation for when you should be turning it off. It's simply there as a choice that you can add and says that it's just a way to let you see your patterns and shape them. I think this is really interesting though, because there's long been this question, right, of too much AI use. And for some people, you may or may not have feel like you have the necessary internal communication with yourself to stop yourself from using tech or even if it's just a smartphone.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:03]:
These are things that we've seen added by Apple, by Google, by the companies that are rolling out hardware and then software platforms. Instagram has some of these tools. And of course, as I mentioned before, Nintendo very well known for doing so. And to see this come to a big tech product as of now is fascinating because it's all about the daily active users, right, and the continuous use. So the fact that it's saying, hey, you know, let's, let's do a pause or at least let's examine what we're doing is kind of, I think that this can be a good thing. But beyond the actual stats that you can see, to see how many hours you've been using it, what you've been doing, the Dashboard will also surface introspective questions. So one of those questions that Anthropic gave as an example is the question what's one thing you want to keep doing yourself, even if Claude could do it faster? But the thing is, once you answer one of these questions, the dashboard gives you the chance to talk it through with Claude. So.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:26]:
So this is something that the Verge points out. Even though the tool is trying to help you in theory use Claude less, it's also prompting you to use Claude more, but just for different things. In any case, the dashboard will show you a summary of your key topics. It'll show you the types of tasks that you delegate. It will show you your usage patterns. So that's peak usage times. It'll show you the days when you're most active. I like that it goes back a month, three months, six months, a year.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:59]:
And it says it will show you concrete examples of how you interact with Claude. So this isn't just a basic function, it's very likely in the background being generated using Claude, noting that you often it will say things like hey, I see that you often rework email drafts in your own voice or delegate tasks only after settling on the strategy yourself. It also offers practical suggestions which is kind of cool. So it says hey, you might want to start a project instead of re explaining context of ongoing work. So it will also help you use it better. And here's the thing, this only works if you have memory turned on. So the, the sort of cynical part of me has to wonder if part of the feature presentation here is to encourage the use of memory, which in theory helps to make your AI a more personalized AI. And so knowing the popularity of things like Spotify Wrapped and how it's very much a bandwagon sort of feature, it's not a surprise to see Anthropic also add this.

Mikah Sargent [00:38:22]:
Regardless of whether it's it's genuinely a health tool or a mental health tool or just a check in tool or if it also has kind of these underlying aspects of it that, that I mean because certainly when I saw this announced I thought I want to check this out, I want to see what my usage is when I use it the most, what what could possibly be improved. And I'm all about that. So this really drew me in and it had me kind of pause and go hold on here, hold on here. What's going from the marketing angle, the Verge notes that Anthropic has spent heavily marketing itself as the company behind an AI collaborator. That helps. That helps the people think more deeply, right? Instead of doing it itself, it's supposed to be your collaborator. And this reflect feature is built the same way. So the post tells users to use it to build AI skills that support your original thinking.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:22]:
The idea is fascinating that there's what Anthropic calls its quote 4D AI fluency framework. And that doesn't mean four dimensions, it means four of the letter D, delegation, description, discernment, and diligence. So it will actually break these out into these different categories as you reflect on your usage. The dashboard doesn't pull underlying files from connected tools, so it's not about, you know, showing you what's in your email and how you're using that. If you've connected other things, it's not pulling those up to talk about them. You know, source emails aren't going to show up. It may say, hey, you use Claude regularly to check your email. For example, Sample Incognito chats continue to be excluded.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:12]:
Any conversation that's connected to a health integration tool also excluded sensitive topics more broadly. Anthropic says that sensitive conversations can still appear as part of your reflection, but only at a high level. And it says that, you know, in reading the blog post, interesting, I find this interesting as well. Anthropics kind of vague on the whole idea of what sensitive topics are, so I'm not sure what exactly is involved there. Anthropic says it did develop this tool with digital well being experts from the MIT Media Labs Advancing Humans with AI program as well as the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital and the Family Online Safety Institute and says that the insights stay in the reflection and aren't used. Okay, that's interesting. Anthropic says the insights stay in the reflection and aren't used for any other purpose. But again, you do have to turn on memory to make this happen.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:11]:
It's currently in beta for Free Pro and Max users, but again only if you have memory turned on. Anthropic says as this is rolling out you go into if you use Claude, go into Settings on the web or the Claude desktop app and then look for the reflection tool. According to the company, this idea came from Claude users via interviews and does actually plan to roll it out to Claude cowork as well. So we should see this go across the whole board. You know, we all have different usages. Perhaps none at all. Perhaps a lot, perhaps some of AI I do have talked about it before make use of these tools sometimes for different coding projects and other, other projects that I've worked on and knowing how I'm using the tool and if I could use the tool better is, is nice. It is something that I am curious to see how it works, but I'm also curious to see how I will be impacted by a direct view of my usage of the tool.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:31]:
Because when I turned on screen time features in my phone and saw just how often Instagram was on screen on my phone, it certainly impacted my use of that app and made me kind of step away from it a little bit more. So we'll see if Anthropic gets out of this what it hopes to I know the company has long felt and certainly makes it clear and according to some reports also internally employees see themselves as the good guys in AI. And there have, there has been evidence of the company making humans a priority in its tools and its rollouts. And so where other companies move faster and break things more often, it is at the very least true that Anthropic seems to in this, you know, in this very specific scope, take a little bit more time and be a little bit more thoughtful or at the very least appear as though it is doing so. I will be using this tool and it's very likely I'll be sharing the insights that I come across in making use of it. So you can stay posted for that. All right, we are back from the break. My final story of the week and it is for those of you out there who may have made your first purchase of smart glasses because they've spent the past couple of years going mainstream, we've seen smart glasses really starting to take off more people using them.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:15]:
I've actually spotted some in the wild more often than I expected. But now the pushback is also going mainstream right along with them. In the span of about 7 months, we've seen a wave of institutions decide that camera equipped eyewear is a problem that we need rules for. And frankly, I agree. I've been thinking about this a long time, wondering when we were going to get this pushback and wondering how people were going to handle it. Maria Moon at Engadget reports that New York just became the first US State to ban smart glasses from every courthouse in the state. So, you know, look, it's not, it's not huge. It's very common sense.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:59]:
If you ask me. In Illinois, though, Mitchell Armentrout of the Chicago Sun Times Reports that lawmakers have passed what would be the nation's first ban on drivers wearing AI powered smart glasses. Fascinating. And out on the water, cruise critics Nusretta Baranak and security writer Graham Cluley. This is at bitdefender. Have covered Royal Caribbean and MSC cruises, adding smart glasses to their prohibited items lists. These are four different stories, all with one clear trend. The places we gather are decided one by one.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:37]:
They don't want cameras on our faces. So let's talk about where these bands are happening, why they're happening there, and then we can kind of figure out what it means for wearables going forward. I think this first one makes the most sense. It's easy to argue why this should be the case. It's clear that I, I would feel like anyone who hears this goes, oh, yeah, that's probably not a place for. For these smart glasses. Starting July 20, all courts in New York State ban smart glasses inside their premises. So that's 1,240 state, county, city, town, and village courts.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:16]:
That's right. There are village courts in New York State. Again, this was a report from Engadget, which cites the local publication Syracuse. And the ban went up last week at the Honorable James C. Tourney 3 Criminal Courthouse. So these are rather the signs explaining the ban went up. It's not just eyewear. The band covers all eyewear and headwear equipped with cameras and microphones.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:45]:
So that includes smart glasses with prescription lenses signs. Just ask people to bring a regular pair instead. So if the argument was going to be, these are my glasses, they've got my prescription. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter, you still gotta take them off. And enforcement is physical, meaning you can't bring them in at all. Wearers must leave the devices with uniformed court officers before entering. And that does include lawyers and staff members. Some individual courts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, those already prohibit smart glasses.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:19]:
But New York is the first state to issue a blanket ban. So as opposed to in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where there were some courts that said, we're not doing this. It wasn't Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the states that said so. Recording is already forbidden in New York courthouses. So if you can't record, then you can't record with this either. The court rules state, quote, taking photographs, films or videotapes or audio taping, broadcasting, or telecasting anywhere in a courthouse is prohibited in session or not. So sorry, but no, you can't have them here. Believe it or not, there's a big old, big old sort of sign as to why this happened.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:05]:
We were talking about how New York state has banned it in all courtroom has banned them all courtrooms. But of course there are courtrooms in the U.S. including in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have specifically prohibited smart glasses. The high profile trigger says. And Gadget was back in Febr when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in a jury trial over social media addiction. And the problem was members of his own team were wearing Meta ray Ban glasses while escorting him in. The judge ended up issuing a warning not to record proceedings with the devices and it wasn't clear whether anyone actually had recorded up to that point. But the judge was reportedly concerned about jurors being recorded and identified Met his glasses don't take photos or video if the system detects that the captured that the capture led is covered.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:55]:
So you cannot hide that from people. And Meta does say it's rolling out an update that will disable the camera if that capture LED has been physically tampered with or destroyed. But again New York is not going to rely on that. Whether it's modified or it's not modified, you can't bring them in the building. And this I I understand if your smart glasses have a little display in them. But I thought it was fascinating that in Illinois, lawmakers passed a bill late in the spring session that barred drivers from wearing AI powered smart glasses drivers and this would make Illinois the first state to do so. The bill did pass the General assembly unanimously. It's waiting Governor JB Pritzker's signature.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:41]:
So it's not yet law, it needs the governor's signature. But it does add artificial intelligence smart glasses to the existing list of banned electronic devices behind the wheel. That includes phones, phones, tablets, handheld PDAs, non integrated computers. So the hands free voice operated exemptions in existing law would not apply to these smart glasses. Secretary of State Alexi I'm not even going to try to pronounce that last name, who was the champion of the bill said distracted driving is the drunk driving of our generation. I agree AI glasses shouldn't become the next excuse for taking your attention off off the road. So note that they say AI glasses and all of this. It makes me wonder if there will be someone who's wearing some pair of smart glasses and says I didn't have the AI activated or these don't have AI.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:33]:
It's just think about the original Echo frames for example that just played music and you could talk to Amazon's virtual assistant. But in the pre AI days, in the pre generative AI days, would that still have counted what actually counts as AI glasses and to put into law, quote, artificial intelligence. Smart glasses does really narrow things in. I think that's, that's something that's a little bit worrisome. Perhaps the unexpected origin story according to the Secretary of State. He says, quote, we began seeing people wearing these smart glasses while taking their written exams and behind the wheel road tests. It raised legitimate concerns about cheating and other challenges that they can pose. That's interesting.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:21]:
If you are taking a driver test and you need help with a question, then it might be able to help you with that question. I do wonder though if there are ever instances where people are using them for one of the purposes that we've seen on stage that, that these companies use as a way a sort of feel good moment of translation. Right. That somebody who speaks a different language would be able to, to in the moment get assistance and be able to understand what's, what's going on. More than 3,200 people were killed and 315,000 people were injured in distracted driving crashes nationwide in 2024. So that's a lot of people and that is as a result of distracted driving. There's. I can't remember where I saw this,

Dan Moren  [00:52:13]:
but

Mikah Sargent [00:52:15]:
there's sort of a theory that part of what makes distracted driving, particularly with phone calls, so dangerous is that our minds tend to put ourselves, our imagination is at play and we tend to visualize ourselves or if you don't visualize think of ourselves in the place where the phone call is taken taking place. So whoever's on the other end, we sort of feel ourselves there with them and put ourselves there with them. And that part of the brain that is devoted to that is then no longer devoted on the road. And so it can be an incredibly distracting thing, even if we don't realize that that's the case. As far as cruise lines, they got their first MSC cruises in late 2025. Had a broadband, had a broad ban on smart glasses and other wearables in public areas shipwide. The language groups them with items capable of covertly recording or transmitting data and they can be confiscated. Royal Caribbean followed in February of 2026.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:22]:
There was a more sort of narrow policy put in place which said that they are recording capable smart glasses are not able to be used in public restrooms, youth program areas, medical areas and at the casino, which makes sense. Prescription lens smart glasses users are advised to bring a backup non smart pair because otherwise they will be confiscated. That said, Carnival still allows quote, Google type glasses in public areas and only Restricts them during gangway operations at boarding and disembarking. So what you need to understand is that the industry hasn't settled on one approach. But this always brings up the question that I have, because have we just gotten comfortable with phones so much that we see this new means of recording as some sort of alternative? Like, why is a GoPro not included in this? Why is a standard smartphone included in this? Cruise ships and courthouses are full of smartphones. One individual's analysis says that the difference is the is covert versus obvious recording because in theory, you can tell when someone is pointing a phone at you, but glasses sit on your face and record discreetly. And so you may not be paying attention to it. I feel like I'm a lot more sensitive these days to bulky looking glasses than I ever have been with a phone, or at least in my adult life have been with a phone.

Mikah Sargent [00:55:02]:
And so in my mind, phones just sort of blur past. I don't think a lot about them when they're in people's hands. But seeing a bulky pair of glasses, I'm going, oh, those might be. There might be something going on in there. But perhaps that's not the case for everybody. I am, you know, a tech, a tech guy. The newest Ray Ban metas are sold partly on the fact that they look like normal glasses. Of course, we have seen the introduction of, you know, you can go one of two ways.

Mikah Sargent [00:55:30]:
It's just audio, it's not video. When they do record, they have special safeguards, like a visible recording LED tech that blocks capture if the LED is covered. But again, some of these, not all of them, but some of them can be modded and in cruise line. There are, of course, security concerns about these sensitive areas. Gangways, behind the scenes operations, security checkpoints. Having these shared online could lead to danger for other people. Traveler reaction to the ban. I thought this was interesting.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:04]:
Has been mixed. Some said, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you've moved quicker than other people. We're so glad. Others said that the ban goes too far because smart glasses provide real time. This is what I was talking about. Real time, translation, navigation. They also help people with impaired vision or hearing. One passenger's verdict was.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:24]:
Verdict was, quote, won't be sailing msc then. I love my Ray Ban smart glasses. They don't go. Neither do I. And of course, there's the prescription lens problem. New York and Royal Caribbean both tell prescription wearers to bring a backup pair. If you don't have a backup pair, what are you to do? Well, it's not just cruise lines. And it's not just courtrooms.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:49]:
It's kind of a wearable issue overall as these glasses get harder to distinguish from regular frames as pendants and other wearables become more popular. I've got a ring where if I press a button on it, it's got a microphone and I can talk into it and leave myself notes. It doesn't automatically record, but if I press the button, it does. I've got a bracelet from B. Remember B. That would record at all times. I don't use it, but I did have it as the glasses, you know. And these other devices are harder to distinguish.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:20]:
Gyms, restaurants, concert halls, venues. They're going to have to write policies for this. And I like that institutions aren't waiting for incidents or crash data to sort of move forth with this. We're going, let's get this out of the way first. Very good, very good. So we will have to see how this goes forward and if we start to see cruise ships, for example, get together and figure out a policy that works across the board. And I imagine that there will be many an argument and disagreement as we try to figure out what happens next. Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:01]:
I want to thank you so much for being here today. If you would like to subscribe to the show, head to twit.tv/tnw you We have the show out in audio and video formats there. Thank you so much for checking out the show this week. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee, that's C H I H U A H U A.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows including iOS today, Hands-On Apple, Hands-On Tech, and as Dan mentioned earlier Clockwise, which I record every Wednesday over on Relay. I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly. But until then, goodbye.