Ep. 9 | Unintended Consequences: Taking Responsibility for What We Build | Tony Fadell

General Magic & The Soul of Tech · Sep 30, 2026 · 49m · transcript

At General Magic, we naively believed that if we built elegant tools and put them in people’s hands, the rest would take care of itself. Tony Fadell was there at the beginning, a young engineer with an uncommon gift for making technology disappear into the life of the person holding it, and he went on to help build the iPod, the iPhone, and Nest. So when he says that every barrier to our vision has since been knocked down—“the pipes are open and they’re flooding right to your eyeballs and your fingertips”—he is describing a demolition he took part in. He does not flinch from that. He calls…