Waveform Guests Best Of!
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Hey, what is up people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast. I'm your host kinda today. I'm Marquez. You might notice it looks a little different and sounds a little different from normal because Andrew's not here. First of all, and I'm in my basement. That is because I and a lot of the rest of the team on the podcast all got COVID this past week.

Not to worry, we're all feeling better, thankfully, but we're just being safe about it. We're not going back in until we all test negative. But in the meantime, that left us out of the studio. And it's crazy. We've realized that over time we've had all these backup plans where we're like, oh, if one of us is sick, you know, the other can host and vice versa. That's cool. But if we're all out, what do we do? And I think we've realized we've had 140 people

consecutive weeks of this pod and didn't even blink. Didn't even realize we'd done that streak for that long, which is crazy. So we didn't want to leave you hanging with nothing, but we came up with a really cool idea, which is that basically we just got all these Spotify wrapped things and everybody sees what's on the top of their playlist this year. And actually, if you upload a podcast to Spotify, you get a wrapped thing.

And what we realize is Waveform has grown immensely in the past couple months and the past year, and we're super grateful for that. But what that also means is a lot of you listening and watching here are new, which also means that a lot of you haven't seen or heard some of our best episodes from the past year or two, especially the ones with guests. And this is one of my favorite things we've gotten to do in the past few years, which is like have great fun conversations with fellow creators and interesting people and

Honestly, our guest list is just straight heat. A lot of bangers on there. So if you've missed them, that's what this is all about. This is going to be sort of a little curated highlights section of some of my favorite guests we've had on Waveform in the past year or two. And if you want to go back and listen to the full episodes, well, this is a great opportunity to do that. So just filling in for this week. Hopefully we're back next week. Wish us luck. But in the meantime...

These are some of my favorite guests we've had on the Waveform podcast lately. Let's get into it with a conversation with one of my favorite creators, a YouTuber in the car space, the man, the myth, the legend himself, Doug DeMura. But yeah, it's an interesting world. And yes, part of the problem, I think, with the...

the believing what companies say is an interesting concept. You know, the, the Tesla Twitter people are just a completely different level of insane that I've never experienced before. And what that company says is, is the word of God to them. And, and they don't believe that there's any, ever any, uh, and I'm pretty positive about Tesla's compared to most car reviewers. Um,

Um, and yet I can still get in, I still get like vicious complaints from some of these people sometimes because I don't believe this thing. Yeah, that, that might be the, they might be the most defended cars by people who have never actually used them, which is very strange to me because in the tech world there's, there are, there are rampant fanboys of certain companies and products even if they don't use them.

Like a product will come out from a company they love, and even if they've never used it, they will trust the gospel that is that company's advertising messaging. And if your review goes against it, you must be paid or you must be a shill or you're a fanboy of the other guy. Thanks, Chris.

The frequency of which I'm accused of being paid is quite unbelievable. I'm sure you get this also. I don't get it as much as I see some other people get it, as much as I expect. I think it's really clear that I try to be really objective. But still, like, and some of the stuff I'm being accused of being paid about is so insane. And I'm just like, what could you possibly be thinking? But that's, I guess, the reality when you're dealing with the general public. Yeah, there's got to be a reason why you don't like the same thing I like. Maybe it's because you're paid. I don't know. Right. That's...

It can't be because my taste is wrong or our tastes differ or whatever. And the other thing – the thing that really is crazy to me, I suspect you don't see this quite as much because the gadgets you're reviewing are less valuable, although you probably do. But in the car world, the amount of personal investment people have –

in the cars is insane. I frequently make fun of my own cars. Like they're unreliable. I own this convertible Mercedes G wagon, which I think is one of the ugliest cars ever made. I talk about that. I'm like totally fine with all that. But when I say something like negative like that about somebody else's car, people, it's like you insulted their child. And I'm like, how could you take a possession of this personally? I never have understood that behavior. You know what's funny about that? I think...

I think it's, I actually understand that in the car world because that is probably one of the top two most expensive, important buying decisions you make. And so in a way it reflects a lot about you and your priorities and your knowledge of the things you could have done, right? So if you get, you spend all that effort and energy and you make this huge purchase in your life and someone says something bad about it, you kind of feel like you need to defend yourself against it.

But in the tech world, I see a very high level of this around smartphones. And I think it's because not that they're super valuable, but because they are some of the most personal pieces of tech that you can possibly own. What is more personal? Oh, interesting. It's always with you. It has all your equipment. It runs your life, basically. You're holding it all the time. It's a borderline fashion accessory to some people. Yeah.

To speak negatively about someone's smartphone purchase decision would be like speaking negatively about their hairstyle or something. It's like that's a part of me, and that's the way people react, which is always funny. Yeah. I've never gotten into the things that I possess. I've never gotten into personally defending them, even the cars. I get that it's an expensive decision, but like –

You made like who care, you know, like if that's what you decided, that's what you decided. And I just I think people are so, so, so crazy, but they can be so militant about some of this stuff. And sometimes I will say something in a video and just be like nervous. Like, I know. Oh, yeah. You always know.

I know there's a these days I like to defend it just by recognizing like smartphones aren't like young anymore. Like it's kind of hard to get a bad new phone. If you're anywhere in the 300 plus dollar price range of new phones from the big companies, like you can't really get a bad one anymore. Does it feel kind of the same way in the car industry? Like, obviously, if you buy an old car now, it can be bad. But if you buy a new car, it's probably fine.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of funny. Sometimes I get friends or family members coming up to me and saying, listen, I've spent hours researching this. I've watched your videos, watched everybody's videos. I'm trying to figure out the best small crossover to buy. Is it the CR-V or the RAV4 or the Mazda CX-5? And they'll be floored when I tell them which dealership is physically closer to your home. Like we're not talking about – none of these will be bad. No.

You're not going to make a mistake here. There are very, very, very, very few bad cars, maybe none on sale right now. And so that makes things a little bit easier. Yeah, I'm not ever starting a review ripping up a car anymore. It wasn't quite like that when I first started. There were some like Maseratis were pretty weak four or five years ago, and I did some tough reviews on those that got a lot of pushback.

but generally speaking, I, sometimes I just find it insane that people can even get to that level of granularity. If it was me, the CX five versus the whatever, which sales person was nicer. Just, just, this is not a decision you need my help with. Do you have any regrets from things you've said in videos in the past? Things you wish you didn't maybe wish you edited out or, or I always regret when I make a mistake. I'm sure you feel like this too. Like,

And sometimes they're small, but sometimes like I still lie awake at night, you know. But no, I don't think I've ever been wrong, you know. Yeah, there's like there's being a little bit wrong where it's like maybe you slip in and say the wrong number or the wrong part name or whatever, but it doesn't substantially change the point you were trying to make.

And then there's like being wrong where you're like, this is bad when it wasn't bad or this is. Yeah, right. Relying. Right. Making a making an objective individual mistake like a number or something. Those are annoying. I always wish I could take them out. I see the flood of email starts coming in immediately and I'm like, oh, crap. But actually being wrong about a review. I don't know. I like to think that I got them all right. The viewers may have different opinions, but that's kind of.

the whole point of this, you know, that's kind of what we're doing here. I wanted to ask you about your background because you came from, I guess I would say a more traditional media. I mean, you were writing basically before you were making videos and then went to being a YouTuber and in this tech world,

There are tech writers and there are tech YouTubers, and the tech YouTubers I feel like are still trying to earn some level of respect and consideration that traditional media have always had.

Do you find, now that you've been in both worlds, do you find there's a big difference between doing written and doing YouTube in the way you talk to brands and companies, for example? - You know, that's a really interesting question. A lot of people ask me just on a general level how do the brands handle YouTube, but it's a really interesting question, the difference between writing and YouTube. One important point is I never wrote for print.

And in the car space, print is still – probably this isn't true in the tech space anymore, I hope. But print is still in the car space sort of viewed as like the old medium that's the most important. The brand is still viewed as the most important, which I think is beyond insane. But –

Compared to digital writing versus YouTube, I don't see a huge difference. But I still have an enormous amount of trouble getting some brands to care about YouTube. And I can look at them and say, look, I'll get two, three million views. This is more in the circulation of these magazines that you're bending over backwards to try to impress. Yeah.

You know, this is going to be a big thing. And it's still like you're an influencer. You're not a journalist. We don't, you know, some for some of them, some of the brands have clearly figured it out. But it's amazing because there are studies out there that say over 80% of new car shoppers will watch at least one video before buying. And I think it's probably more like 90 plus, you know, I don't know who's not right.

And I try to tell them that and it's just kind of an old, there's still an old mentality of that sort of thing. I imagine in the tech space it's a little bit better, I hope.

I mean, there is some element of both sides to it. Like I, I think it probably depends on the demographic. I think for a lot of people under probably about 30, somewhere around my age, maybe, uh, they look at YouTube and they look at videos just as seriously as they would anything else. If we're buying a phone, for example, like you're going to watch a new video about the phone before it comes out or before you buy it. But you know, there,

There's obviously a lot of older people. My grandparents basically can't find a way to acknowledge anything that I do unless it's printed somewhere and they're like, okay, now that's cool. That is real. That's very cool.

So I always found that funny. And I, I've recently started contributing to top gear magazine, which is a printed magazine. And that was the same like sort of experience. I've been making these autofocus videos for like a couple months now. It's not as many, but top gear magazine. Oh, that's, that's established. That's traditional. So that, that's always, it's always been there. It is kind of funny. I, um,

When this started and people would start coming up to me on the street and recognize me and such, people would say, oh, you're internet famous. And I've tried to – it's an interesting thing. When you get to a certain level, I mean, it's –

The internet is it now. I don't know like TV actors anymore, really. Like when I was a kid, you grew up with like friends and Seinfeld, you knew all those people. If you ever saw one on the street, which I would be like, oh my God, this is the craziest thing in the world. But that stuff is fractured and splintered so much that like this is kind of like what it is now. But yes, it's very hard to explain that to older generations. And I still have older relatives being like, so are you still doing that video stuff? You still doing that? Yes, mom. And I'm like, yeah, I'm doing it. Yeah. Yeah.

Alright, next up, a chat with a fellow creator as well. This one in the tech space. This is with Quinn from Snazzy Labs. Do you think full self-driving is like the future of all cars on the road? Like Tesla can get really good at this as good as they want, but there's still going to be a very large percent of other cars on the road not doing self-driving for many, many more years. Is that like...

A future you can imagine? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the question I think that we, again, get to is, A, when do we reach the point where, in all instances, computers and self-driving cars are safer than human drivers? Up until that they're always safer, I don't think there's going to be regulatory requirements or whatever. And then the other side of the equation is, when does it become accessible to everyone?

Because if I can only buy a $20,000 car and now I need a car that drives itself, how long is it going to take for this tech that's in Teslas now or in Teslas 10 years from now going to come down market to the masses? And I think it's going to be decades before nobody's really driving their cars anymore. I mean, it might not even happen in our lifetime. But I'm a bit...

more skeptical than a lot of people, certainly more than Elon Musk. And so maybe it's coming sooner than we think. And we've certainly made huge steps in the last few years. And Tesla's system, make no mistake, is impressive. But I think it's going to be years, probably at least more than five, probably 10 before you can get in your Tesla, you put the address in where you want to go, and you don't have to watch the road a single time. It's a long time away. Yeah.

Yeah, it feels like every year at CES we see like a prototype of a car where like the driver's seat faces backwards and the screen is like a projection and you don't even look at the outside of the car. It's like that's...

That's very optimistic. And I applaud that optimism, but I don't know how soon that's going to happen. I feel like the approach towards everyone going electric is much more quickly happening. And that's, frankly, more interesting to me. Yeah. And I think that that kind of ultimately will affect the world at a greater scale.

I think that's more valuable to the planet and to civilization moving to more sustainable fuels and electric vehicles than it is to fix full self-driving. Now, don't get me wrong. I think it's important. If we can get to the point where we've reduced the millions of automobile crashes that happen every year and millions of deaths that happen, that's awesome. But –

It's chicken before the egg, I guess. Like you got to – one thing at a time. And I think we're still a ways out. And the transition to electric vehicles is probably more likely. But the great thing that Tesla has demonstrated is that you can kind of do both at the same time. I know the Cybertruck was going to be a lot of people's first truck also. Yeah. Probably for a lot of the same reasons. Like if you didn't think you needed a truck at all but you were –

somehow enamored with other parts of it, like the fact that it's an EV or it has this crazy design or the quad in the back, whatever else it is about that. It was going to be a lot of people's first truck. But I guess the R1T... Do you want me to say something controversial? I would love that. I would love that. Go for it. I mean, I think that the F-150...

No, I'm going to get in trouble by people. The F-150 is the truck you want. If you want a kind of everyday truck, I'm going to haul lumber from Home Depot occasionally. I want to go to the grocery store. But if you're...

towing stuff every day, you're not buying an F-150. You're buying a super duty or a heavy duty truck from one of these larger brands. And so these early electric vehicles are not going to replace that because those are people that need to tow 20,000 pounds, hundreds of miles a day, and they're out on a ranch and they're not people that are interested in these small form factor trucks. And I think that the F-150 is probably unique in the sense that it's the only truck, I guess the entry level F-150

Silverado is and the Tacoma kind of is, but they're these small trucks that are mostly just bought by normal people that go to the grocery store, but they are powerful and capable enough to tow a boat or whatever. And these early kind of EV trucks are more grocery store getters than they are I want to haul, you know,

haze and bales or I don't know what people do with trucks. That was my thing is like, okay, I've seen all these videos about people who are like, this is why I have a truck. This is why I use a truck. Anytime I need to carry something or like I need to put a bunch of rocks in the back. I'm like, I've never seen any of this happening, but okay, I'll trust it. But yeah, you're right. The second I learned there's definitely a, a

I forgot the name of this phenomenon, but when you learn something, you start seeing it everywhere. Oh, yeah. We did the video on the F-150 Lightning, and we learned about how popular it was. And then I just couldn't stop seeing F-150s everywhere, all over the highways, at every grocery store. There's F-150s all over the road. It's the best-selling car in America. It's the number one-selling car, the number one-selling vehicle. Yeah.

that made it much more apparent that it's like, no, these, this isn't like the, the landscaping truck or like the actual like heavy duty use. This is just like people who just get 'em, who just want one. Yeah. They're fun. And, uh, yeah, it turns out I can put like two bicycles in the back of my car without any like equipment and just drive around with them. So I've, I've never needed a pickup truck, but maybe one day I'll carry rocks around. I don't know. We'll see. All right. Next up a conversation I couldn't wait to have, which is like,

your favorite creator's favorite creator. And I mean this because I also love their channel. They just talk about creators in general, the creator economy. I got to chat with Colin and Samir.

There is one thing that I think we would like to come back that would help us a lot. And that's, and I get why they took it away, but annotations coming back for us would be huge. I mean, ultimately being able to re-upload a video in the same position would be the best, but I also kind of understand why, you know, you don't put that in. But the amount of times we make these like very, very small mistakes that don't change the video at all. Like we say,

the new iPhone has titanium rails instead of aluminum rails and the amount of people that call us out for stuff like that, we could just toss an annotation in there. Good for engagement though. Yeah, that is true.

It just gets to this point where I'd love to just put a little asterisk, like, we meant the Snapdragon 888, not the 887 or something like that. Yeah, I think in the tech world, that specifically, it would be so useful. Like, product names are eight words long, and you have to get every single one right, and specs are very, very long and very detailed numbers, and you just want to be able to just...

add a little asterisk inside a video. And when there is one, the best I can do is pin a comment in the top of the description, but there's no way to just tweet about it. But that's not on YouTube, so it doesn't really help. I don't get why a partner, like having partners like get annotations. I remember the days of, you know, like 12 annotations or a full screen clear one. So when you click on it, it brings you to a link. Get rid of that. But yeah, partners with annotations feel like it would make sense. I do think that

in in a tech review like purposefully sometimes not not not the tech itself but even like fumbling or saying a word that's completely off at times like would create a lot of like

you know, retention of like, wait, what did he just say? Yeah. We did it one time in a short, which was really fun. Yeah. We said, we, we, we said the head of Robert Kinsel, YouTube. Yeah. Like we should have said the head of YouTube, Robert Kinsel said this. And we said the head of Robert Kinsel. Comments tripled. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

That's funny. I think some people assume... We'll say that's why we're doing it. Yeah, I think people assume that that's what's happening when really it's like we just went from reviewing a phone to reviewing a camera to reviewing a car to reviewing a tablet. It's like I forgot that it's the 888. My bad. So annotations, I'll put in. If anyone on YouTube is watching this,

We'll take it. We'll test it for you. Yeah. I also think we're going to see video replies make a comeback. Really? Yeah. I liked video responses. Because now that they have YouTube shorts. Oh, yeah. Interesting. So they could tie in. So people would reply to videos with specific short form. With a short. Yeah. Yeah.

And that would create more creators because there's this whole ecosystem where even people like us, we talk about YouTube creators. So you could just go into the comments, drop a short video and start building an audience. That was a really big part. I mean, you see the way TikTok does it now where videos are embedded in comments, but like that was a whole YouTube ecosystem thing. There were reply channels everywhere.

Yeah. And under any video, you could either... So if I was the creator, I could enable anyone to submit a video reply and they'd all just show up. But then people started spamming them or people would just like spam replies or whatever. So you could only approve...

you could set it to approve only and then approve whichever ones you wanted. And so you would often find that the biggest creators would always approve replies from the same creators. And then those creators who were just replying to people would have their own ecosystem because of the people they replied to, which is fascinating. And I really like the idea of bringing shorts back as video reply or bringing video replies back as shorts. Because it's so easy.

Because if we made a video about you, and then we approved you to be able to make a video, why, if we got something wrong or if you wanted to add something. Yeah. And then it's on my channel, so people link to what I just made a video about. Interesting. That's actually really good. It's honestly the best idea I've heard for shorts. Actually, I'd love to talk to you guys about shorts, to do them. We've been pretty negative about them, maybe. Or we've been vocal about them, I'll say. But we don't really do them. They're very...

Against, not against, but they're not like our regular content. They're very different. They're definitely not our original content. And that's like on the main channel, the number one thing we know is like we have a format and we're sticking with it and we love it. So obviously a 40 second video doesn't fit in that format. A vertical 40 second video in the same feed as our regular videos. Exactly. Feels off. Yeah.

But you guys have, you've done shorts on the main channel. You guys have experimented with shorts in the past. How would you summarize, first of all, your experience with YouTube shorts? Because I've heard a variety of versions of responses. Very positive. Yes, generally positive. I would say that for us, you know, we had...

We had a creator on our show who goes by Nas Daily, and he said something to us about platforms, which is really interesting around like just the concept of supply and demand. There are some platforms that have enough supply of content and enough demand. They've reached equilibrium. There's 50,000 pieces of videos uploaded per day and 500 million viewers per day. Like that's average of 10 views per video or whatever. That's equilibrium platforms. There are platforms that don't have equilibrium.

Right? Where they have incredible demand for views, not enough supply for content. That is the place you want to be in. And that's why creators have such big opportunity because the platform wants that content. They want to experiment with it. They want to try it. Yeah. But on the other side of it, for us, what we notice is it takes us a really long time to make a video.

But we have a lot of thoughts. Like we have quick takes that we want to get out. And yes, there's, you know, there's a vlog or like just pop open the camera and start talking, but then they're still editing and like, they're just so much. And I think vertical short form content lowered our barrier to entry to just

have like some forgiveness around it and be like, it's okay. It's just a vertical video. Yeah. And we shoot it straight through the phone and we do some editing, but it is this first opportunity for us in a long time to film something and get it out on our YouTube channel in the same day. So if something happens, we can react to it. Yeah. And from our conversations with people at YouTube,

the shorts feed and the main channel feed, like short form videos and long form videos are kind of bifurcated in the backend. And so it's not one in the same. It's not like, they know it's a different type of video. - It's not gonna bring your average view duration down or anything like that. - So for us, we were like, okay, if there's no real big risk to the channel, why not? Like why not try them? And from what we've seen is,

In the past 28 days, I think we've done around like 25 million views on the channel. And there's like, I think above 60% of that is coming from shorts. And that has just generally made our entire catalog of content

generate more viewership because there's just more traffic to our channel. Right. And so if you think about it as like a retail shop, like our channel is like a retail shop, we've just increased our traffic significantly. And when that happens, then they're going to look at other stuff in our shop too, right? And so they're going to look at our back catalog. They're going to look at all of our, and our subscribers have grown, our just overall brand exposure has,

has grown because of shorts. I mean, one of our shorts has 15 million views and that converted about 16 or 17,000 subscribers. Wow. Okay. And the value prop in the short is, you know, explaining things that are happening on YouTube and in media. So if someone likes that and that's their first entrance to us, Yeah.

Makes a lot of sense. I mean, I, so my experience has just been watching other people experiment with shorts. And so I've seen people try it on the main channel. I think I probably will eventually start a channel just to experiment with shorts because I have a lot of ideas that I think would be good shorts. That channel should be called MKB.

Shorts. Just MKB. Oh, MKB because it's the shortened version? Short version. Yeah. I like that. MKB HD. But also like the studio to me feels like a space to experiment. Like why not experiment with shorts on the studio channel? True. And especially for me, I look at it as like,

Right now, again, the demand is high and the supply is just catching up. Right, that's what I was going to talk about. So there's going to be a moment where that swaps. Viewership's going to change. They're going to test and iterate and test and iterate. And there's just a moment right now where...

They're just serving everyone the same small amount of shorts. Yeah. Or they're just like, at least from what we've seen, we've seen creators who have just taken shorts and grown to 6 million subs. True. There's a creator called Dental Digest. Have you seen him? No. He's like a dental creator. Okay. And every short form video is...

Very similar. It's it's like one format where he tests different brushes and sees how well they brush his teeth He's a dental student. He grew from zero to six million subs this year That's why all through shorts and now he's making long-form content right and it's trending and it's doing well Yeah, one of his one of his longer form videos was number one on trending and so he basically used shorts to build a platform and

I think the thing that's dangerous is if the shorts have a completely different function than the long form video, right? It has to all fall in the same value prop. And if it does, then why not? I think it's YouTube's play to get creators from TikTok over to YouTube. As you saying it, it makes perfect sense because I've heard from multiple different people, you know, TikTok creators are getting huge, but ultimately even the biggest TikTokers want to be YouTubers. But converting that from a whole different app is hard. So if you're in the app already...

and you can just be on the same channel and there's the long form contact that they now converted for, that's perfect. They just took away the barrier to entry, which was really high. Now you can literally just repurpose a lot of your TikToks, download them, take the logo off, upload them to YouTube Shorts.

And you could have, if you've been on TikTok for the last three years, you could have years worth of valuable content ready to go. Also though, you don't have to upload a thumbnail for shorts. I mean, we just don't even do it. You don't have to, but you can. You can. Yeah. So if you go to our like videos tab, it's not very aesthetic anymore. Right. It's like, it is just these like vertical shorts mixed in with like our editable shorts.

edited thumbnail. So that is not very aesthetic. But the fact that it's just playing in a, you know, autoplay. Yeah. So you're not really thinking about the thumbnail and shorts. You're not thinking about the packaging because actually the audience isn't even choosing to watch it. The app is choosing the audience. And so it's like the inverse of the traditional YouTube video. And I think for that, it's really interesting. And I think YouTube,

The thing that YouTube has from an opportunity perspective is that TikTok, like you mentioned, a lot of TikTok creators are coming over to YouTube to graduate for their career, right? And we've heard the classic comparison on Twitter all the time of like, would you rather have 50,000 YouTube subscribers or 5 million TikTok followers and almost

it's like so amazing that it always trends towards 50,000 YouTube subscribers just because you can make a career on YouTube. So I think this is the play to say, hey, we are the, we are YouTube. We are the better place to launch your career.

So we'll have these short form videos too. And so if you were thinking about TikTok, just do it over here because then you're already building that foundation like Dental Digest where it's like, now you have 6 million subscribers. Now you have a career. It's YouTube. You're already there. You're already there. Yeah. I think that one point you brought up about supply and demand is really interesting. When I see new features get launched, especially by YouTube, but kind of by any social network, I always really like...

diving into how much it looks like they've embraced this new feature. Does it look like they're just kind of trying it on the side? Or does it look like they are building part of their site around it? And to me, Shorts does look like YouTube is like committing really hard to making Shorts a big thing.

Sometimes I see features where like, you know, for example, there's podcasts on Facebook or like there's a video podcast on Spotify and I don't really see that many of them. And I kind of wonder how committed they are because I see the feature ad, but I don't want to pivot my whole business around something that might disappear in a year. Um,

So I am glad to see shorts get the attention that I think it's rightly deserving. And I'm definitely going to want to experiment with a little bit. You know those restaurants and strip malls that say like – we have these in LA. I don't know if you guys have these here. It says like Chinese food and donuts. It sounds amazing, but I want one. Yeah. I see where you're going. Okay. You see where I'm going. But basically like for me personally –

I want to go to a Chinese restaurant for Chinese food and I want to go to a donut shop for donuts. So when I think about apps that are trying to do a lot, I think that like it overwhelms me. I'm like, are you a specialist in this? Is this the thing you make? Are you trying to serve me Chinese food and donuts at the same time? Yeah. Because you saw an opportunity. So I think for me as a consumer, I'm so specific. Like I listen to podcasts on Spotify. I watch video on YouTube. I might also be the old guy who's just like doesn't want to change my ways. I worry about that. But-

But that's just who I am. And I think a lot of consumers are like that too, where it's simplicity wins a lot and singular focus wins a lot of the time. So YouTube was based in short form video. When we first started in 2011, we were uploading 20 second videos to YouTube because that's where short form video lived. There was no Instagram video. There was no TikToks. There was no Vine at the time. So short form video lived on YouTube. So I think they actually do have an expertise in it where they can solve how to serve you videos and then

their video monetization is better than other platforms. So they will also solve down the line how those are monetized. I think it's only a matter of time until, you know, you open up the Instagram app and you're just in reels and potentially even with YouTube as well, because it's an extra step that keeps you away from a view, keeps you away from creator discovery. Right. All right. It's time for a quick ad break. We'll be right back.

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Okay, next up is a chat with Sam and Micah from So Crispy Media. This was hot off the heels of them helping to edit and produce the MrBeast Squid Game video that now has like 300 million views or something ridiculous. Probably my favorite MrBeast video ever. So this is a chat with them.

Our channel audience really likes tech and gadgets and they really like film and production and you guys are bringing that about as close together as possible. I mean, we do a lot of a lot of practical effects in here, like almost all the stuff we do is practical. We have a motion graphics person, but that's mostly titles and stuff like that. You guys are bringing that just right on top of each other with like motion tracking and all that. And it's

It's fascinating to watch. I think our audience would super, super enjoy that. And I was dying to see behind the stuff, the behind the scenes stuff of all of your things. Sam, you might have a better way to explain this. I'll take a second. But there's kind of this mantra that we found that we love to be able to kind of like...

I didn't explain it. Find the marriage of technology and innovative technology and how can you apply that to storytelling? A lot of it boils down to this idea that we can take tech that's being used by massive Hollywood studios and find ways to democratize it to be able to allow content creators to utilize it. A great example is motion capture, right?

five, four years ago, that was very inaccessible to now. For content creators, now we've been able to access motion control suits that are cheaper, and we can use them. And now we can find ways to integrate those into our content. So we love to be able to find those, whether it's innovative tech or these little moments where new software is coming out, whatever, to be able to then say, oh, hey, actually, let's try to take this, and let's tell a story with it. And that's kind of the thought process of how it eventually evolves in these short films.

Like we have a lot of really fun short film ideas for the sake of like, oh, that'd be a hilarious short film. But more often than not, there's even tech behind it that we can think, oh, now that this is possible, let's make a film about this. This is the film you're making. I feel like that's the robots for us like that too. It's like we have the robot. Now we think of an intro shot that we want to do of it. Or just we're begging for a video that we can use the robot arm in. Yeah. He brings up an interesting point because it is kind of about like a marriage of tech where we have, for a while we wanted

We don't make a lot of content, but when we do, we try to make it something new and refreshing with what we've recently learned. So a good instance of this is around 2015, 2016, we really got into VR. And then we did a cool VR

series with Google Daydream where we made like three pieces of content so we have like 25 minutes of content where it's literally in stereoscopic VR and like that might not sound that you might not know what that would mean but for video wise like for video sake making a YouTube piece of content in 360 degree with stereo that's the equivalent of making like six videos per one video and

because you're literally doing a left eye and a right eye and it's and then it had stereo or it had a spatial audio so when you turned as well it felt very immersive I think this is the year I also did my only 360 video yeah when it was like a huge deal and I did a studio tour in 360 and I had to sort of like navigate around like having this camera in the middle and walking around it and touring things it was fascinating and I remember that it was like back when the like the

The Odyssey was a thing, right? Was that what it was? I think that's what we used, yeah. Super cool stuff. But we loved like getting involved with that and then figuring out a way to make our content with that. So when you watch those videos, it's like those were a production nightmare. And I think if anyone who was like making a YouTube channel where we're like, yeah, we need to get content out regularly, we would have never done that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the Mr. Beast Squid Games project, I think was the, maybe the perfect,

combination of like how you would get maximum interest in a behind the scenes because Most mr. Beast videos and I've talked to Jimmy about this It's like people want to know how it was done and kind of the most amazing part of the video is that it was real it actually happened He really did say that word a million times to a camera He really did run a marathon in the biggest shoes like that's actually what happened and that's the amazing part of the video and

And this latest one was like, all right, we all know what Squid Games is. We've seen it. There's these crazy challenges. And he's going to put real people through these challenges to find an overall winner at the end. And watching that video, to me, I'm in the mode that I sort of go in when I go to watch a Mr. Beast video, which is, all right, this is going to be real. Let's see how I pulled it off.

And so slowly my mind starts to realize more and more, oh, there's a little bit of VFX happening in this video. This is really interesting. I'm curious. There are multiple people here who said, no, it's good. That's what it is. He's already built it. So, I mean, that should be a compliment to y'all. Hayato was like, no, this is real. I was like, I think it's close to real, but there's some help involved. It's interesting because it's such a like hidden, like,

It's interesting because in a way, the better we do our jobs, the less people realize we're doing the job. That's always the joke. It's like, if we do our job well, you're not supposed to know we did our job. Which is awesome and hurts at the same time. So it's like a great thing and a bad thing. It's like, oh, it's awesome you didn't notice those VFX. But also at the same time, it's like,

hey, like, you know, we did do a lot of work to make that shot. It's kind of like a really well done video game. You can tell when something runs really smoothly, it's just great and immersive. And when someone steps weird over a curb, it's like, what were they thinking? This is terrible and just broke immersion. Exactly. And going back to the practicality of Mr. Beast, like,

I think it's the perfect marriage when we added these visual effects because everything that you saw was still done practically. It was all still done and like we can tell you that stuff the stuff he does is real like it was done practically and it was it's like incredible and we are really just bringing in our style and being able to allow them to do stuff that is impossible.

- It's like an enhanced subversion. - Yes, yes. - I'm trying to imagine you guys, put yourselves in our shoes for a second when we're there and we know for VFX it's really important to shoot things a certain way and do things a certain way. The footage you get is like, that's our canvas that we paint on. And if that canvas is

perfectly white and clean and ready to go. And it's like, you know, we can do whatever we want on it. That's fantastic. If the canvas gets muddied, that's a problem. So it's a little bit terrifying going into a production where they're literally, and this is completely true, there is no take two. Like you go in and when the cameras roll and the game's played, you get what you get.

So there's a little bit of that like, oh crap kind of feeling of like when you're getting this all set up where we're like, oh man, like, you know, let's, let's, we have one chance to knock this out and do it right. And so we're really fortunate. Like the footage came out fantastic. Like, you know, the final end product we're super proud of. So, but it was definitely a little bit, it was pretty scary getting up to that point. There was a moment I think before the first game in your video where he comes up to you and is like, everything going to go well. Oh yeah. At least from your side. Yeah.

-Okay, good. -Good luck out there, man. -Let's do it. -You're ready for this? There was a pause for a second. I was like, "They're nervous?" That's got to be terrifying to go through all of this. -Yes, it's interesting because we do so much preparation to get everything right, but there's variables you can't control. It's just like when you're out there and you're filming, the game is going to go on. -All right, next up is a chat with a fellow creator again. This one is Hank Green.

How do you feel about Twitter as a platform? Twitter is just sort of like all over the place at this point. I actually really like Twitter and there's not that many pieces to review, but I use it more than I think any other social platform other than TikTok right now.

Yeah, Twitter is such an interesting case because it is like far more influential than it is successful, especially by like market cap metrics like Google and even TikTok. And of course, Facebook just dwarf the valuation of Twitter. But Twitter is extraordinarily influential and important. And like the people who use it are oftentimes influential.

defining culture and really in specific and powerful places. It's big in journalist circles and then it's big in DC. And so it's a, it's a huge deal. And, and I like, I like it as a platform and I hate it as a platform. I like it when I, when I can convince myself to use it in the ways that I enjoy it. And I hate it when I am subject to its whims and, and get drawn into things that I,

you know, know aren't my lane and I know are just me being mad about something that I'm oversimplifying in my brain, which is something that all social media are good at. And I just feel like, you know, there's a beauty in Twitter's long-term inability to innovate

because it just remains what it is. But there's also just a huge missed opportunity there. Twitter owned Vine, and they had this extraordinarily interesting, powerful short-form video platform. Do you know how many employees Vine had when it closed? That's a really good question. I'm going to guess Vine had 100 employees. It had 50 employees. It had fewer employees than I do. Wow.

That's insane. That is incredible. Just try to – just invest in it. Just figure it out. But like they can't – like they just can't – Jack Dorsey obviously has always been very drawn in many directions and not interested always in focusing on one thing. And I think that that was not – all the love to Jack if you're listening. I think it's not – it's a hard way to be a CEO and I know that because I'm the same way.

And I think that there were there are a lot of missed opportunities at Twitter But at the same time I kind of like that. It's like chugging along. Yeah, they can zero dollars of

Having not a lot of intrusive advertising and not like launching shorts. The moment that that becomes interesting like all the other platforms have. Yeah. No, they kept it simple for sure. I mean that's kind of how it started. It started with just like 140 characters or 160 or whatever it was. Text message platform basically. Exactly. Yeah.

But I think maybe the most interesting platform of the hour is TikTok. I mean, it's ever-consuming. What was the stat now? It just passed...

It passed something, right? It passed one of the other largest sites in the world to be like one of the top five biggest sites. And I think by traffic, they're probably one of the biggest, period. TikTok is fascinating to me. So we've got these top, these couple top creators that are household names. We've got the D'Amelio's, Addison Rae's, all these at the time. Everyone knows who these people are. They're basically broken to mainstream. And then you have this sort of

upper tier of of the biggest tick tock creators and I pay attention to a lot of them because the the for you page serves me videos from them all the time and it seems like they're all sort of itching to graduate from tick tock and it's kind of fascinating to see and a lot of them go to make a YouTube channel a lot of them graduate from social media in general and they go on to do TV stuff and

You talked about this in your video, but I'm curious for your quick take on why are all the biggest TikTokers trying to just get out of TikTok, even though TikTok is massive and gaining momentum the way it is? I mean, so there's two reasons. One is the story that you feel like you're a part of. And this was a thing when I was coming up on YouTube, every YouTuber wanted to be on TV.

And so like they wanted to be a part of the story that their heroes were a part of rather than the story that they were inside of, which is just how we are. And that is a bad reason. Like in my experience, YouTubers who focused on YouTube did way better than YouTubers who were like, how do I do TV now? There's not a lot of examples of YouTubers who made that transition well.

But there are examples of certainly people who started on Vine and made the transition to YouTube really effectively and have become household names. And I think that that is also definitely an option for TikTokers. And the other reason is a very good reason, which is that

You can't it is more valuable to be a youtuber than to be a tick tocker and that is both Economically like you make more money per minute of time people spend on your content but also because you develop a deeper relationship with your audience because you have them for more than 15 seconds or a minute or three minutes at that outside and that

That is how you, that is how you like, you know, TikTok is very intentionally a user first platform and likes to the extent that

It will sacrifice everything else for the user experience. Like ads are extremely easy to skip by. The content is like it's like I know that you I know that deep in your heart you feel like you would want to give that creator who you like vibe with. You feel like you want to give them more of your time.

But you don't really. You want to watch this guy hurt himself on a snowboard. Let's be honest with ourselves. And maybe they're right. So like they are giving you what you – not what you would choose but what you actually want. And that's wild. And so that's why it's such a sticky platform. But it makes it a more – a harder place to build a business as a creator and to build an audience as a creator. It's harder to develop a deeper relationship with people. Yeah.

Which is democratizing. It gives it creates way more opportunity for people to constantly be breaking in and getting that first exposure to audience and to attention. But it is because of that, you know, opportunity for breakthrough. There's always somebody ready to take your place. And so you have to figure out.

how to convert those people into something except for just a TikTok audience. And, you know, YouTube is the best place for that. Yeah. And with YouTube launching and being successful about shorts, it does seem a little bit like maybe there's it's amazing to think that this is the way I'm thinking now, but maybe there is a threat to TikTok in YouTube's short strategy. Whereas, you know, a year ago, I would have been thinking like,

you know, is TikTok a threat to YouTube? Now I'm like, I mean, of course it's a huge threat to YouTube. It is the first threat to YouTube, really. Like Facebook couldn't take them on, but TikTok can. And the, you know, that,

Now I'm thinking like how does YouTube take market share away from TikTok because YouTube is much better at making money. I was just about to say – Like the platform. I have a stat just recently that YouTube had a larger quarter four of last year than Netflix in revenue. I think it was like $8.5 billion of revenue. YouTube is making a lot of money. Now it costs a lot of money to run, but they're making a lot of money. Yep.

And also one of the points you brought up earlier that I've thought about a lot is like the intrinsic value of an audience on one platform versus the other. Like would you rather have 10 million views on a TikTok or one million views on a YouTube video? And it's kind of still weighted for the YouTube video at that point. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So that's always been really interesting. And you look at the numbers, actually the biggest piece of content I have ever created by views

Is it TikTok? Of course it is.

And it's like 33 million views on a seven second video or something crazy like that. But yeah, if you find yourself, like if you come up as a TikToker, you've built your brand, but not your business necessarily. You do, as a smart person, want to build a business around it on something more stable, like a YouTube channel. So it does make a lot of sense to what we see being built. Are you, you make TikToks. Do you consider yourself a TikToker at this point? You've made enough of them. You have like a presence there.

At this point, it would be almost embarrassing to not call myself a TikToker. It'd be like I'm trying to pretend I'm not a TikToker. And the other reason I kind of consider myself a TikToker is because I really admire a lot of the people I follow on TikTok. And we have, you know, in the same way as my colleagues on YouTube, you know, talked a bit on direct messages and stuff. And I just think that they're amazing.

so cool and interesting and smart in the way that they are approaching their content and their audience that like I feel like if I if I the only reason I don't have to call myself a TikToker would be like that I don't think it's it's a that I would that I'm embarrassed by it and when I think about those people I'm like I'd be I'd be like almost

deriding their creativity and thoughtful content if I pretend like I'm not one of them. - Yeah, I mean it used to be embarrassing to say you're a YouTuber and now it's got a different connotation every month, but now it's like, oh, nice. Like I understand what that is. Which is, that's kind of funny because I've said to people I don't know that, like an Uber driver, if you just say you're a YouTuber, they're like, oh yeah, I know some of those. They understand it already. - All right, next up, I actually got to talk with the inventor

of Wordle. I still play Wordle every morning to this day. I know not a lot of you guys are still on that grind, but I am. And I also got to chat with Josh Wardle himself. I went to powerlanguage.co.uk and I played the Wordle game that I have played so often. I've never gotten it in two before, so I was really excited because on my first guess, I got three greens.

and i really thought this was it i thought it was finally happening i was going to get three greens on the second i was going to get all of them green on the second one my second guess was wrong though and then my third guess was wrong

And then my fourth guess was wrong. And so I got it in five out of six. And I was kind of mad, but I also felt I posted it on the internet and I felt sort of united with the rest of the world in our collective frustration. So today we have the man responsible for that united collective frustration, Josh Wardle. Thanks for joining us on Waveform today.

Thank you for having me on. So I guess, first of all, your name is very close to the Wordle game. It's one letter off, basically. Well done. Please break down the background of, I guess, how you created it, why you created Wordle, the sort of origin story. I'm sure you've probably told it a million times.

Yeah, yeah. So on the name front, yeah, it's a play on my name. It's a word game. It was one of those things. I'm sure you've had this with a project where you start it and you just give it a dumb name. It needs a name.

You give it a dumb name and you're like, that's a dumb name. I'll change it in the future. And then obviously like a bunch of things about this project, the domain, for instance, powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle, probably not where you want to launch a viral game, given that no one can remember any of that and they have to Google it. But yeah, so I actually, this was a game that I made for my partner.

She and I really enjoy playing word games, especially some of the ones that the New York Times offers. So they have daily crosswords, a game called Spelling Bee that's kind of you play once a day and it's a word game. So my goal was to make a game for her that she would enjoy playing. And Wordle was it. Like I made a prototype of it myself.

a long time ago, back in 2013. And it was similar but had some key differences and I basically just put it away. I shared it with a few friends, people were like, "Yeah, not really." And then at the beginning of 2021, we were playing a lot of games. I got a bit more confident as a developer and I was like, "I think that idea had some legs." So I dusted it off.

And I made it and it was literally just the two of us playing it for six months. And then I introduced it to some friends and family in the UK. And then...

kind of November, it just started. It got picked up by a few like tech bloggers and then it really, really took off beginning of December. And then, yeah, it's been a roller coaster. So it started really just with a couple people you shared it with. And did it always have that share metric at the end? Because as soon as I saw those bars, I knew that was going to accelerate it. But at one point, did that get added? Yeah.

Yeah, so that was added sometime in late November, I think. So what happened, a tech blogger, Andy Bio, he runs Waxy.org, where he kind of collects interesting things online. He had tweeted about it and posted a blog post about it, and it got picked up in a New York Times newsletter. And then as a result of that, for reasons that I don't understand, it got really popular in New Zealand.

And I've heard about New Zealand that it has a very interconnected Twitterverse, right? Not many people live in New Zealand comparatively to somewhere like the US. So people tend to be very connected. And at this point, that share grid, the emoji share grid that you're talking about didn't exist. So people would just say, I got the wordle in three, you know, and a player over there who I don't know, a woman named Elizabeth S.,

she started typing out her results as that emoji grid and then I saw other people copying it so people literally opening their emoji keyboard and then going back and forth between the two and typing it out so I was like I can integrate that into you know into the game really easily and then that obviously has had a huge impact because it gives you this artifact that's

Even though I did a bunch of things and I did this throughout Wordle, I did a bunch of things that are the opposite of what you're meant to do if you're trying to make something go viral or grow. Like there's no link back to the game, for instance, in the share grid. It did give you this artifact and invited you to share. And that's obviously done wonders for it in terms of it catching on and spreading around. Yeah, that is definitely how I found it. I think there was a couple of people who shared their grids in my timeline. And by the way, a funny story is I still know some people who

typed out the emoji grid manually for some reason, which is hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's how I found it. It was funny, though. You mentioned, you know, you did a couple things in the game that were not necessarily designed to help accelerate its growth. It was just like, it's almost this like pure, simple thing that you sort of stumble across on the internet, kind of like the old days, almost a little bit.

Were there things you thought about like it starts growing and then you've had other experiments like this in the past I want to talk about but did you think of other things you could do with Wordle to maybe change it up or was there sort of a beauty to keeping it simple? Yeah I think that's a really good question. I think because I had started it simple and I had a really clear idea of what I was doing with it it made it really easy to say no to any of those compulsions as they came up because

Whereas if my goal had been to make a viral game from the outset, I think I would have been capitalizing on this in a bunch of different ways. But it felt like, I don't know, with all the projects that I've done that have been successful, I've found part of it is just kind of doing the thing that feels authentic to me. And if people happen to like that, then great. If they don't, not. And so then allowing Wordle's success to like...

make me change it, which obviously I was willing to do, right? I did add the share grid, which was something that wasn't there originally. So there is a boundary there, but I don't know. If I start, I have to think about what are my motivations when I'm doing this thing and are they aligned with it?

It gets really hard when you're doing things for the wrong reasons, basically. So I find it simpler to keep it the same. Are there any features you would like to see? Is this a feature request coming? Yeah, no, no, no. I like that it's simple. I think as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, well, I can't believe there's only one word a day. I just want to keep playing. But maybe they'd add five, six-letter words, seven-letter words. Maybe they'd do a bunch of other stuff. But I like that it was simple. It was just a clean...

One single purpose for it the entire time and I actually when I wanted to talk to you because I feel like as a creator I feel like I relate a lot to you because one of the things I've said for a long time is one of the best things that never happened to me was having a video of mine just spike and just go super viral and then feel like I have to chase that carrot or an end like evolve and become sort of defined by that viral success and

Um, how do you feel about like you've had other projects? I want to talk about uh, the place and the button and what those are um How do you think about like the success of those projects and not letting it define you? Yeah, I mean this is incredibly hard and uh It kind of does define me in a way that I don't actually feel comfortable with uh, like I

feel good when a project I make does well. I feel bad when a project I make doesn't do well. And that is not healthy, I think. I think to a certain degree, it's unavoidable as a creator, putting stuff out and sharing it.

But at the same time, I think it's like it's led to some quite unpleasant places for me personally. And and then again, in terms of when we're talking about what is your motivation, it kind of gets confusing if you're making things to be a success. But that wasn't the motivation when you made the original things that were successful. Like, how does all that get? It all gets a bit all gets a bit murky. And so, yeah, I had these projects at Reddit that are kind of more.

I would call like social experiments than games. And they, Silicon Valley tends to do these really dumb April Fool's Day things where they like make a prank and it's super lame and everyone looks at it. And I read it. I was like, what if we do something different? Like we use this day where we can do, we're kind of locked in so that things we can do with our users. What if we use this one day a year where you can kind of do anything online that people are really kind of wasting, in my opinion, and we do something, just try something completely different. And so that is where,

kind of the Reddit approach now of like often doing a social experiment that explores

the way that humans interact at large scales online kind of came from. And just like a general disappointment with the lack of imagination in the tech world. I think we're on the same page about tech world April Fools, yeah. The button was really interesting. I kind of vaguely remember it because it was so long ago. So you were working at Reddit and you had the opportunity to try something cool, something fun, like a social experiment, and that was a great day to do it. What was the button? Just break down what exactly that was.

Yeah, so the button's super simple. It is a subreddit. So Reddit is organized into communities called subreddits of people who share similar interests. There was a subreddit called The Button. And at the top of The Button, there was a button and a timer. The timer counts down from 60 seconds.

If you press the button, the timer resets back up to 60 and starts counting down. The key thing is that you can only ever press the button once. You have to be logged in and once you press the button, you can never press it again. So then the question becomes, how long will the collective internet decide to keep pressing this button? If it reaches zero, it stops and it will never run again.

And so you have a 60 second window in which to press the button and it turns out the answer is two months. So over two months, every 60 seconds, someone somewhere chose to press the button, which ended up being over a million people. And there was a bunch of stuff there, like the time that you pressed, we gave you on Reddit, we called it flare. It's like a little tag that appears next to your username in the community.

And so if you pressed it early, you got a different color next to your name than if you pressed it later. And then, so all these social hierarchies started forming, you know, people who pressed it early were seen as impulsive and they couldn't wait. Whereas if you held it, if you waited for two months, you could press it when there were only two seconds left on the button, you get red flare. And then people would be like, whoa. But, uh, so that all these weird social dynamics emerged from this like really, really simple, uh,

idea. And that's one thing that I found works really well for me. It's kind of, we were talking about earlier, like, have you been, you know, all the what ifs, like, what if you change this? What if you change this? And I

And I think what I found worked for me with the projects at Reddit and to an extent Wordle is like trying to make things as simple as possible. It's so easy to say with a creative project, what if we do this? What if we do this? Because no one knows the answer, right? And instead I found it easier to be like, well, how much can we remove

and still leave the core idea here and still make it an enjoyable experience. All right, next up is also a fellow YouTube creator, Tom Scott. I mean, he's got a bunch of different channels about a bunch of different things. Kind of hard to define actually what he does. And we talked about that a bit, but this is me chatting with Tom Scott.

I'll tell you a video that I want to do but can't. Okay. And I'm going to throw this out because by throwing this out here, I will finally get the video out of my head and I don't have to pour over this on my ideas board. Right. I've got it out. Someone out there can have it. Which is on content for kids on YouTube.

not really being... So we're not talking about the stuff from years ago with algorithmically generated Elsa and Spider-Man videos. And we're not talking about stuff that is for younger kids. We're talking about stuff that's for the ages, maybe 9 to 13, that kind of age. If you ever looked at YouTube trending, that'll show up there quite a lot.

And what... So, there's a couple of reasons I don't want to do this. First, it would involve actively calling specific creators out. I could not tell the story without naming people. And I don't want to do that. I don't think that's a fair thing to do. Certainly, if you're ever going to do that, then the thing to do is do right of reply. You reach out to them, you get their response to it. Like, there's a whole ethical thing that you're required to do that apparently is mostly ignored on YouTube. But, like, basic ethics, you reach out, you get the response. Yeah.

I don't do that. I don't want to do that. I don't want to name this is the problem. But for the examples I know, I would have to specifically go, this is the problem. Fine doing that for television. I did a video about advertising disclosures. And I'm okay to call out a television show because that is run by a corporation with 100 employees. I'm not saying you there, you have made the mistake.

Most YouTube operations, I would be pointing at a person. It also feels like punching up instead of punching down. Absolutely. Yeah. So, anyway, setting that aside, I would have to make specific examples. Maybe I could get someone to animate. You're still talking about people. And secondly, I don't want to deal with the backlash from that audience. You know, I don't want kids angrily... I don't want internet kids defending their heroes...

to come at me because you're not gonna be able to reason with any internet crowd, but it's just, I don't want that hassle. So this is what this came from, is comparing two videos on what was judged age-restricted and safe. So again, the title would be something like, how safe is YouTube for children or something like that.

Again, so your first comparison is to the TV I grew up with and to all the regulations that broadcast television has to have for protection of kids. And the one that is in my head, aside from all the stuff about sex and violence, the obvious ones, there is one about imitable behaviour. I might be using the right... I might be using the wrong word there. Behaviour that could be imitated. Yeah. So the two videos I really want to compare, neither of which I endorse as a thing, just to be clear. There was a...

British YouTuber team about three years ago, I think now, who are doing big, just hurting themselves for views, which like, it's jackass. It's a genre. I have no problem with that. You grew up in that? Yeah. Yeah.

The title was Cementing My Head Inside a Microwave. Jesus. Now, it's not actually cement. It's, I think the US term is like spackle. It's the stuff you put on walls that hardens. It's like fixed drywall patches and stuff like that, yeah. I'm like, I'm not going to call these guys out because the first 15 seconds of that video is some of the best editing I've ever seen for a coming up. It's...

It's brilliantly done. But obviously, age-restricted, backlash, like, no adverts on it, absolutely. Like, YouTube still has that up, I think. But obviously, like, that was a news story because the fire brigade had to come and save his life because it went wrong. Yeah. It was a news story, public apology kind of thing. Like, no ads and anything like that. And that was in my head because I saw something on Trending a few months ago, which was, and again, I have to call out a specific video here. There's no...

I don't want to imply that this is a deliberate thing. This is... I would read it as folks who have no one in the loop who is saying, this is maybe not something we should do. So I'm not going to criticise overly. I'm criticising the idea, which was last to escape concrete wins. And you've got...

Three guys doing all the hyperactive cuts that has become common for YouTube. Pretending to be in setting concrete. And it's clearly not because, like, that's... A, alkali burns. Like, physical burns because it's an exothermic reaction. That is obviously not real. But they're playing it as real. And...

that's the sort of thing that would be completely, utterly blocked from broadcast, at least in any European country. I don't know how the First Amendment affects that in the US, but certainly for kids. Growing up, we had... The US term is public service announcements. We call them public information films about not playing on construction sites or with construction equipment. The idea that a show for...

kids, teenagers, anything like that would encourage something like that is just... No, absolutely not. You don't even... If there's a million kids watching that and one of them now thinks that it's safe to play in concrete...

then not only is that a bad thing, obviously, because the kid's going to get hurt, but also that's a lawsuit in enormous liability for them. Just from a purely selfish perspective for them, ignoring the welfare of kids, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. But YouTube will happily serve up adverts on that. That's suitable for everyone. That's suitable for all ages. And rather than the overt worry that this is clearly bad for kids, there is this subtle thing of...

This is... So that is... Sorry, that was a long diversion. But there is a lot of stuff out there that is not obviously unsafe for children.

but with a moment's thought that the algorithm doesn't have and that human reviewers generally don't have time to have. They'll be, all right, is this obviously a stunt? Is this, uh, it's someone messing about in some grey slime. Okay, right, we're fine. There was a lot of stuff that could cause immutable behaviour. I would love to make that video. I can see, like the copyright video, like the advertising video, I have the structure of that in my head. It's 30 to 40 minutes long. It's got a few jokes in there, a really nice conclusion, and nope.

I'm not going to call out specific people, despite what I just kind of did. But you know what I mean by that? I'm not going to put someone's face in the thumbnail. And I don't want to have to deal with a load of kids defending that crowd. All right, time for one more quick ad break. We'll take that and we'll be right back.

All right, next up we got everybody's favorite engineering educator, also fellow creator on YouTube, Mark Rober. Kind of feels like he's doing in engineering what we had the Bill Nyes and Neil deGrasse Titans of the world do for astrophysics. Just a lot of people following along. His videos are always incredible. So anyway, this is my chat with Mark Rober.

When I think about engineering and science in school, I wonder, you basically are an educator now, and more so than ever, because we'll talk about Crunch Labs in a second, but are there things that you wish were different about your education maybe? Maybe there's different types of learnings that would have helped you more, or do you find that the normal school path got you to know you enjoy math and engineering? Because when I see Crunch Labs, I'm like, oh, learning at home, physicality,

physical learnings, like visual learnings, things in your own hands. That's what I would have wanted. That's way more down my alley, but I wonder how you look at it.

Yeah, for sure. Like, I think to the degree that you can learn without realize you're learning, like realizing you're learning is like, that's, I mean, if I think about all the things I'm the most passionate about, and I'm like the best at like, I mean, take, I still edit all my own videos, right? And it's like, I feel like I'm pretty good at editing and writing and

and coming up with a good story and a way to communicate something at this point because I'm passionate about it and I love it. And I never took a class for that, right? No one's ever officially taught me. It's just something I'm so passionate about and I enjoy. And therefore, I know it better than I know almost anything else. And to the degree that you can just tap into that and...

And just tickle that part of someone. Like I, my favorite thing in life is that like aha moment where it's like,

you, a new principle becomes, or you see something in a different way. Like I'm addicted to that feeling. I love like reading books and challenge the way I think and get me to like, just, just, just like learning like that. That excitement of learning something new is like such an addictive feeling. And I love giving that aha moment to like other people. Like I know, and I'm going to drop a juicy nugget in a video. That's like, ah, I'm going to say this. And a lot of people don't realize this is true. Um,

And so if you can make learning about that feeling and just like the excitement – I did a TED talk about – a TEDx talk about what I call the Super Mario Effect, which is basically like when you're playing a video game, you're not afraid of failure. If you fall into a pit –

on level one of Mario, you're not like, you don't throw the controller down and be like, oh, that's so embarrassing. I can't believe I died. Like, I never want to play this game again. You're like, no, like, okay, there's a pit there. Okay, next time I got to remember, I got to kind of met with more speed. I'm going to try jumping a little earlier.

might take six or seven tries before you land that, right? Level 8-1, that little, you had to make that big jump and there's that tiny little block you had to land on and then do a quick jump. Like, got me every time, right? But I was, that meant I wanted to figure it out that much more. And like, as kids, as a result, we got really good at that game really fast. And we never went to school the next day and were like,

you know, talked about all the different ways we died. The question was like, did you beat the game last night? And it's like, you know, I said in the talk, like the most meaningful high fives of my adolescence was when it's like, yeah, dude, I beat it. I beat it.

And so it's like I try and approach in my own life like challenges that way. And so as a result, you're just way less focused on the failure and being embarrassed and looking dumb. And if you gamify the object of the thing you're trying to learn, you will just learn it so much faster. And it's a totally pleasant experience. And you love it just like we love playing video games.

And so that's a long way to answer your question. Like, heck yeah. Like the more you can make learning exciting and something that the kid, the students see the passion in the teacher, uh, because they're genuinely passionate about it. Like that's the secret sauce. And I had a couple of teachers like that. So what did you work on at Apple?

Is that a question I can ask? It's definitely a question you could ask. They are very clear when you leave about the large stack of things you signed that says you're not going to talk about this. Here's what I can say. I did product design in their special projects group, and there was a leak. It's kind of a funny story. I don't know that I've ever told this publicly, but they...

First of all, they approached me and wanted me to work for them. And then they told me when I came there, I can't make YouTube videos. And I'm like, and granted at that time I had like 250,000 subs. So I was pretty small, but I'm like, forget you guys. Like you came to me. Like I didn't like, then I'm not going to work with you. And I don't feel like you can even tell me I can't make videos anyways. Like, is that even legal? So eventually they backed off from that and they just said, fine, but wait at least three months.

till you make a video so you kind of get the culture here and you can't say in your videos you work for Apple. I'm like, fine. I'm like, I don't even have, like part of me convincing them was like, I don't even have that big of a channel anyways. It's not going to get that many views. So I come there and the very first video I upload after three months is how to skin a watermelon, which to this day is my most popular video ever with like 140 million views. It just had a really banger thumbnail.

At a time when thumbnails were like really important to the algorithm, it was just like weird timing. So I'm like, guys, don't worry. I don't need that many views anyways. I upload this and in like a week it has like 25 million views. It just like totally popped.

Yeah. So anyways, so I'm making videos. And then eventually, maybe a year later, Jimmy Kimmel asked me, you know, his folks are like, hey, do you want to come on the Kimmel show? And I was like, well, so I asked, I asked Apple that and it gets bumped all the way up to Dan Riccio, who is like one below Tim Cook.

And Dan Riccio's response was like, we should be focused on making great products. And so that comes down to, he didn't exactly say no, but it was like, and I, and then I honestly realized from that, like, Oh, they can't actually tell me no. If I'm not saying I work for Apple, like if I want to canoe after hours, you know, they can't tell me like, I can't canoe because we should be focused on making great products.

So I did Kimmel anyways, and that turned out to be, you know, a really good career decisions because him and I are like good friends now. I'm staying at his house next. I'm hosting his show next week and staying at his house and going on vacation with him, you know, the month after that.

So it's like, I'm glad I didn't listen to Dan Riccio there. That's for days. So I kind of kept it secret, you know, that I worked for Apple and then my channel got bigger and bigger. And their concern, like to their point is like,

there's nothing beneficial that there's no upside to them by having me be an Apple employee and having a large following. It's only downside. Cause if I now have a platform to talk about them, like they don't need me to get their story out. Right. So eventually there was, I get a call one day after working for Apple for four years and it's a reporter from variety, I think, or something. And it's like, can you comment on your work you do for Apple? And I'm like,

Uh, what are you talking about? And as I'm talking to him, I get a call from Apple HR, like pinging in on this. And, uh, so I go over and they're like, Hey, look, someone's going to leak this story that you work for us. Just be, you know, uh,

Don't say anything. Just keep it very surface level. Anyways, I did. It ended up being this big story that leaked and all my coworkers gave me a hard time about it or teasing me. After that, it was not a big deal. I still worked for them for another year. They loved me working for them and I loved working for them. The reason it leaked though, getting to everything, and this is the answer to your question, what did I do at Apple? I was lead author on a patent

And I can say this because it's like public domain about using virtual reality and self-driving cars. And like, what are all the implications of that? You know, and the main one being, again, because this is listed in the patent, like 40% of people suffer from motion sickness.

And wouldn't it be interesting if you could use virtual reality to solve that? Because motion sickness is when like basically your, your internal gyro doesn't match up with what your eye is seeing. So that's why if you're like in the backseat and you can't see forward, you get motion sick because you don't know what's happening. And so if you could really know exactly what the car is going to do and where it's going to turn and how it's turning and show that to you in virtual reality, you

then you could potentially not get motion sickness. Because when autonomous cars eventually come, well, I have all this free time, but if you get motion sick, there's nothing you can do with it. So the idea that you could strap on a virtual reality... And by the way, imagine virtual reality is like sunglasses, not these big bulky things now. But it's like a very lightweight thing you put on your head in the future. And now you can work on your laptop because...

essentially the screen is like way over on the horizon. You know, it would show you a fake horizon and the screen would be like in the sky basically. And so if, you know, no one gets motion sickness looking way over at the horizon. So now all of a sudden you can look down and see a virtual keyboard and you're typing or you can watch a movie. But then there's also tons of other implications that are listed in the patent of like,

what does that mean for entertainment? Because like a car in some ways is the best version of a motion simulator because, you know, if you go on Star Tours or motion simulator, they have to simulate gravity by tilting your seat back. And then your brain's like,

I'm not feeling like pressure on my butt as much. So something just feels off when you're supposedly accelerating. But in a car, you're you're you still keep your G's pointing down and you actually can accelerate and brake and turn and impart these G's to you in a way that could be pretty entertaining or relaxing or engaging, depending on what kind of version you feed into the or thrilling version.

into the VR. So, yeah, there's a lot there. I will say, again, because this is public record, Apple has continued to make updates to that patent. And it's, it feels like from my perspective there, it's an interesting one for them. So I don't know. It was really exciting to be. And that came about because Apple's like,

one of my managers at Apple was like, Hey dude, you're coming up with all these banger ideas on YouTube. Like come up with a banger idea for us. And so I started like thinking about it and then like I was in a meeting and I was just like, I started shaking cause I'm like, Oh my gosh, this would be so crazy. And so then like I started coming up with all these versions of it and to their credit management is very supportive there. When you have ideas, they let,

they let you run with stuff and they have the funds to invest in it. So they were very supportive of letting me just go crazy with this idea. And yeah, it's really fun, cool experience to be able to do that. Cause it's like, you know, there's one idea of, there's one thing of like, you know, we come up with ideas on our own, which is cool. You own the full idea and you can really, you could technically own it and run a cradle. Great. But it's like,

Working at the largest tech company in the world, the most valuable company in the world with so many resources, if you come up with an idea there, it's like you're going to really affect the world in what would be hopefully a very positive way. So that was kind of an exciting thing about working with Apple. It's just like if you do have an idea, the leverage that could come from that idea is so much more than if you just had it on your own.

Yeah. That sounds like the most fascinating, like conundrum of like being in a meeting, like, Oh, I have an idea, but is this better for apple or for a video later? Huh?

Which one, which do I do? I didn't give him the glitter bomb. I kept the glitter bomb to myself. Good call. I didn't give him all the glitter. Good call. That would be bad. I cannot imagine. I ask for Apple all the time to get into various things. Like, yeah, you guys should make a camera. That would be sick. There's, you guys should make a printer. Printers suck right now. I don't know. Glitter bomb.

Yeah, that's a YouTube video for sure. I don't like the idea of that being real. Okay, next up is a chat with a fellow YouTuber, a tech creator again this time. We do have a lot in common, but a very different approach to a lot of things. And it was fun talking about it. A chat with Zach from JRigEverything.

What's the story behind the name? I think you probably have the sort of like people don't know if your name is Jerry or not happening. I wonder where Jerry Rig Everything came from. It makes intuitive sense to me, but maybe you have like a story behind coming up with it. Yeah, so most of the time, like when someone recognizes me on the street, at a restaurant or at the store or something like that, they'll be like, hey, you're Jerry, right? And I'll just kind of roll with it. But my name is actually Zach.

The JerryRigEverything came from, I was, when I originally started YouTube, my channel name was GreenDewOcean because I really liked Mountain Dew at the time. But I realized as I had a couple thousand subscribers that YouTube could actually be a viable job and I would have to come up with a slightly more memorable and reputable name, I guess.

And so I was laying in bed one night at like 2 a.m. when most of my good ideas come. And I realized that, you know, my channel and kind of like the theme of what I do is, you know, jerry rigging stuff. And jerry rig is also the name of my grandpa, who is kind of like one of the people I really look up to.

When he first got married, he lived in the back of a gas station. And then when he died, he was a very, very successful businessman, had a bunch of houses. He was just a really cool – he's someone I look up to a lot. And so Jerry Rigg is both a combination of the phrase Jerry Rigg as well as kind of like a way to remember my grandpa, Jerry.

That is pretty cool. I know now, I think when I first was watching your videos, I was like, oh yeah, Jerry, I definitely thought that that was your name. So I'm glad that that's much more clear. Was that your current account though? You had that name for your current account that you changed to Jerry Everything?

So back then, so I think I've been doing YouTube for like nine or 10 years. Back then, you couldn't change your name. You had to just delete your account and start over. And so you'll notice if you go back to my first videos, there's like 40 of them that are kind of all uploaded on the same day or the same week. And that's because I deleted my old account and uploaded all the videos to a new account with the correct name. Now YouTube is way more, you know, you can change your name whenever you want.

Wow. So you had like a moment where you were like, oh, I'm going to be doing this YouTube thing to a degree where I want to be proud of the name of it. I think I should make that conscious decision. When in your life cycle of a YouTuber was that exactly? It was. So when I first started uploading videos, I kind of just wanted to do it online.

just kind of like a video journal of all my different projects. You know, I used YouTube, um, for a lot of things and I was kind of wanting to contribute back to that, um, that platform. Um,

And one of the ways I was using it is I was my Jeep at the time broke down and so I got on YouTube and I found someone with the exact same problem I had and instead of taking it to a shop to fix it for a thousand bucks This guy could fix it for 80 by himself And so I messaged him and I was like, you know Your video was so helpful to me and saved me so much money. Like why do you do this? And he said is because I want to decrease world suck and

help people out. And at the same time, you know, YouTube pays me a little bit of money. And so that was kind of like what got me going on the platform. And I kind of, you know, I filmed my, my automotive projects, motorcycle projects. And then I realized it was a conscious decision that if I wanted to grow my audience past, you know, the small circle of people interested in automotive repairs, I would have to expand the type of content I made into phone teardowns and then durability tests. And then,

into EVs and then building my own EV and then accessibility and just kind of grow it out from there. Each kind of chapter of my channel is a conscious growth decision, I guess. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the same stuff I've done where you have a core topic that you start off with, but you have more interests and you're able to sort of loop them in because they work with the theme and you're good at it, obviously. I watch you tear apart a phone sometimes and I just...

Sort of like mesmerized a little bit and like, oh, that's kind of awesome that you just sort of know right off the top of your head. Also, do you know right off the top of your head? Like you open a phone, you know where all the ribbon cables are supposed to be when you put it back together. You've done this many times. Does it ever go wrong? Like how long did it take you to get good at taking apart phones?

I would say most phones that I take apart, I have one or two screws left over afterwards. So I would not say I'm like the most professional at putting them back together again. Although, when does this podcast go up? Call it a week and a half. Week and a half. Okay, cool. So by the time this podcast goes up, I will have already done the Fold 4 teardown. Oh, the Flip 4 teardown. And I actually took that completely apart, screen off and everything, and put it back together.

So I'm very impressed with the build quality of that. I am also, I mean, that seems like probably one of the harder ones to take apart and put back together. I haven't actually taken apart. Well, okay. This is the question I was going to ask you. This is something that's been on my mind for a while.

When I get a review unit of a phone, there's a very specific set of things that you're allowed to do with it and not allowed to do with it. And at the top of the list every time is like you can't take it apart. You can't durability test it. You can't break it. You can't do any of the stuff that Zach does to the phone. So don't even think about it. So I see all that. I'm like, all right, Zach. So you spend the extra time. You probably buy it from the manufacturer. You do what you got to do.

But is there a difference in the way you work with some manufacturers? Are there some that are cool with sending you something knowing that you're going to take it apart?

Yeah, I mean, I've always been super, super upfront. Like, there's been several times where a company has reached out to me and been like, hey, you know, can we send you a review unit? And I'm like, do you know who I am and what I do to phones? And then they're like, oh, yeah, never mind. We're all out of review units. Dang. And so that's happened several times.

Wow. But I mean, there has been companies that have been okay with it. Like, you know, nothing sent me their phone knowing what I was going to do with OnePlus sent me their phone knowing what I was going to do with. And, you know, that's super. And like, I've been straight up front, like, you know, there's no special favors or anything like that. Even though I get the phone and, you know, that has kind of come back to buy OnePlus a little bit. But no, those are I was going to say those are literally the two companies I would have thought of of who would be cool with.

getting you a device, knowing what might happen, but being fine with it. Okay, have you been surprised by any durability test results? I mean, you squeeze an iPad, it breaks in half. That's kind of nuts. I'm imagining you're

Your face off camera is a little bit wide eyed when that happens. But have you been impressed by something passing or super shocked by a failure? I would say the one that comes to mind, first of all, is just the folding phones. Like I seriously thought that they would be able to be snapped in half. You know, every single time I grab one, I'm like, yeah, this can definitely break. But then it doesn't. Yeah. And so that's just nuts to me.

Yeah, bending it backwards seems like it should just snap right in half, but they do survive with impressive consistency. That's pretty sick. All right, next up is a segment that I did when Austin Evans, a good friend of mine, fellow YouTube creator and tech head, visited the studio. I would say take it away, but it was recorded already. So here's me and Austin. All right, welcome back to Waveforum for a new segment that we call...

Identify the phone behind your back and then try to remember everything you remember about it.

Flows right off the tongue. Yeah, with your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. Andrew's here. I'm Austin. Hello. Our friend Austin is here. And that's going to make it more fun because Austin and I don't know the phones that are in this box that Andrew has. Andrew's going to give us the phones one by one. We're going to try to identify it behind our back and I'll pass it to you and then you can ID it. And we can sort of take it from there. See if we can ID the phones and remember stuff about them. So we did this back in...

2015 for Team Crispy Live on stage. Low key, great format. It was a lot of fun. Great format. We've also tried it in like, you remember IGTV? Yeah. When IGTV was a thing where like we should shoot some stuff with phones in vertical and it was like a little segment we would do

and we would just hand people phones. And it's actually really fun. - I feel like it's probably gotten harder now though, right? I feel like a lot of phones are a little bit more similar in sort of build. Like I feel like back in the day there's a little bit more flexibility, like oh, that's an HTC or that's a Samsung S4 or whatever. - Yeah, yeah, there were metal phones, there were plastic phones, there were glass phones. Andrew, I have an idea. You hold the phone up to the cameras while our eyes are closed first so the audience knows, and then when you're ready,

put it in my hands, and then we'll open our eyes. Okay. Sounds good. Eyes closed? Yep. You have full control over everyone. I'm closing my eyes. We'll probably have a caption on the screen to ID the phone, and then we'll attempt it. My hands are open behind me.

Now this will be fun for audio listeners. Okay. This will be fun. I'm going to give it to you. Are you guys just keeping your eyes closed like the whole time? No, I'm going to open my eyes, but I'm going to not look at it. Okay. It's in my hands now. Marquez has the phone now. Okay. My eyes are closed. Talk it out. My hand is out. I'm going to try it first. Oh, you're fine. Okay. You can open your eyes. I'm just holding it now behind my eyes. So real quick, while you're doing this, are you going to guess right now or are you going to hand it to Austin and then you'll both guess at the same time? Internal guess. Oh. And then we'll guess at the same time. Got it. Makes sense. We're definitely not making this up on the spot. Okay.

Wait, I need to make sure. Okay. Okay. What are you looking for? Well, you're going to know as soon as you pick it up. Okay. Well, you'll hear something real quick. Oh! So you know what's happening. But I'm just trying to figure out generation. Okay. All right. Close your eyes. Okay. Yeah. Here it comes. All right. Okay. I've got it. There it is. Okay. Well, I knew it. But okay. I'll do it with my eyes closed. I'll trust you. Okay. So yeah. Certainly a little of...

Yep. That kind of action. Okay, so here's the thing, right? So I feel the camera, which is on the side. That's where I had to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also, let me feel the hinge because obviously I'm used to a particular kind of this phone, but now I'm like, that's not. There's no way. Oh, no, but I feel the little, uh-oh. Wait a minute. So there's only two little rubber stoppers instead of.

Oh, do you remember which one has two and which one has four? I had to go cameras and then power button. Can you feel the color? Yes, I can feel the color. You can hear it too in the podcast. I think I know which one this is. Okay. All right. So ready? Yeah. Count it down. Three, two, one. Z Flip 5.2.

Well, the same thing, right? Z Flip 2 is a 5G one. Yeah, that's the first 5G one. Yes? Wait, ooh. Actually, it's not. It's the first one, isn't it? It's the first one. You guys actually confused me with that because I forgot there was...

The 5G. I also didn't pick these phones. Well, the 5G is the same design as the first one. Yeah. Just added 5G. Yeah. But this is the first one with the tiny front screen and the dual cameras. I believe it's the first one just because we would have saved the first one. Okay. We got it. So wait. So do we get a point on that? Yeah. We both get a point. Right? Okay. We heard the little checkmark sound. Yes. This is a good one because we know Austin likes his Flip. Are you still... So what's your Flip situation now? Flip is... I keep seeing you tweet pictures of it. Flip 4 right now. I've got the baby blue one.

I do need to get a skim for the back because I was flying recently and it was sliding off the airline table because it's so slippery. But I'm on flip four now. The math finish. We saw one in the wild for the first time. Yeah, in San Francisco, yeah. I've never seen a flip in the wild. I actually see a lot of them these days. Really? Like I was at like a tea shop the other day and I pulled up my flip and the bracelet, she's like, oh, dope. And she pulled hers out. I was like, yeah, let's go. Weirdest bonding moment. Totally. That's incredible. Yeah. Do you remember the flip? Yeah.

and hands-on experience. Yeah. That was the worst. That was the one where we were all in the same room and everyone only got five minutes with it, right? Oh, yeah. And they had a limited amount of units. So everyone was like over each other's shoulders trying to... This is back when Samsung were really terrified after, you know, the Fold had fallen apart. So they didn't trust any of us. Did somebody break a Fold? What happened with the Fold? You know, I think there was some kind of drama with that. It was a while ago, though. Couldn't have been me. Anyway. All right. Let's check the next phone.

I also, like when I handed it to you, fully had my eyes open. Next time I'm going to, well, you put your hand, how do I pass it without looking at it? I have to see where his hand is. We have to hold hands. You hold your hand out. I'll look at where your hand is and I'll look away and then hand it to him. Audio listeners, we love you. I promise. It's way better in video form. All right. My eyes are closed. Same. Okay. I got the phone.

So, is there a skin on this? Oh, no, it's not. There's a logo there. Ooh, antenna bands. Skins do have logos. Okay, yeah, I know which one it is. Okay. You feel that confident that fast? Yep. Uh-oh, okay, okay, I'll close my eyes. I'm ready. Okay, ready? Hand is out. Yeah. Okay, got it. Pass successfully. Oh, yeah. Wait, is this a trick?

I don't know. I hope not. Maybe. Let me just feel really quick. Okay, I've got my guess. Already? Yes, I've got my guess as well. Okay, same. Both quick guesses. You guys sure? There's a couple of quick identifiers for this one that I think are pretty good giveaways. Okay. So, yeah. Ready? I'm going to go three, two, one. iPhone 6S Plus. 6S Plus.

Oh, you did 6S. Oh, I did 6. Oh, okay. That's actually a good one. How did you tell it's an S? I don't. That was just my guess based on how long we kept the phones. Also, the 6 Plus was silver, and I felt pink. Get out of here. You just feel pink. Yeah, I felt, yeah. I didn't.

I just, oh, but look, it is the S. There's a little badge. I got it right. I didn't even know I got it right. I had to look at it. I was like going for like camera bump and then immediately, okay, I've got that. Then the home button and then the headphone jack. I started with the logo, which is glossy. And I thought there was a skin on the phone because it was, and that's how I realized it was metallic on the outside. So it wasn't a seven. It was definitely a six or six S. And then antenna bands. I felt the size of the plus and the, yeah, it was easy. Dead giveaway. All right. Next, last but not least is a,

Segment from a two-hour podcast that we recently did with Hasan Minhaj, artist, creator, writer, comedian. He does a lot of stuff, obviously, but this is one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had, period, in my life. There's so much to pick from here. It's one of my favorite episodes ever, and it's a big reason we're going to keep doing podcasts like this. So, me and Hasan.

Can I ask you guys a question that I wrote down? Oh, you have... Is this what the post-its are here? Well, yeah. I'll let you... Yeah, go ahead. Go for it. Please, please do. I'm ready. Wait, Marques. Marques, are you... Flip the script on me. Yeah, go for it. Okay. So...

The reason why people might be like, you know, Hasan Minhaj, Marquez, this is the crossover I never knew. I can see the comments there. Yeah. So the reason why I actually took the time, I mean this sincerely, I'm genuinely a fan of what you guys do here. Thank you. And there is a level and the reason why I'm getting older and I only have so much time to do

media promotion interviews meetings etc but you guys what you guys have done here that I really admire is a level of discernment and reasoning and nobility to what is otherwise a very grift centric medium and one of the things that I felt with media and I'm saying this personally you know someone who came up in comedy on the Daily Show Patriot Act is news media is

quickly careened off of the highway very quickly. And it is metastasized so quickly from stage one to stage four, just awful cancer where it's like not a great ecosystem. Yeah, for sure. And the grifters that were, there was maybe one to three of them in the media ecosystem, almost like hydras where you chopped off those three heads and 12 have emerged. I feel like YouTube has also

had that as well. There was a cuteness and acquaintance that the YouTube that I came up on when I first started doing standup comedy in 2004 and 2010, there was a real authenticity to it. And now there's a bunch of just algorithm hackers that are kind of just manipulating you through emotion, insanity, and craziness. And I feel like you guys have somehow maintained this like

Core ethos through all of it and succeeded Succeeded and I was like I want to spend my time being around people like that rather than I appreciate that I think a key part of what you said was timing so 2004 yeah 2010 yeah, so

One of the crazy things that I've seen so often, how old is your kid, by the way? I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old. Okay. A lot of surveys I've seen of kids you ask today, what do you want to be when you grow up? Yeah. An alarming number of them say either a YouTuber or social media famous or something like that. Yeah. And I've seen a lot of people say,

I think it's kind of luck and timing that when I started doing this, which is 2008, 2009, the YouTube Partner Program didn't exist. And there were zero people doing this as a job. So if you wanted to manipulate YouTube or to game the algorithm or whatever, you were doing it for the views and for the fun of that, not for money. There was zero dollars involved. Okay.

And then, so that was fun. And that was a whole section of like how YouTube was built by creators who were like, I have something to share. Let me see how many people I can share this with. And that was like the beginnings of it. And that at some point we had, obviously the YouTube Partner Program, monetization happens, we get ads. Now there's this added element of, I would like to see how much money I can make from this. And that's like a real new thing that emerged from that. And so now you do see that...

this twist of like, yeah, I'm gonna game the algorithm so that I can maximize revenue. And that's a different version of gaming YouTube than I wanna just see how many views, I wanna see if I can get on trending, I wanna see if my idea is worthy of eyeballs.

And I think that slight difference is probably around the 2010 era that you're referencing, which is like I feel like that's when YouTube changed. And I'm lucky to have started in the pre-monetization era where my intentions are pure. I want to make the best videos I possibly can and make the channels that I want to subscribe to. And it happened to sort of grow in the background as I was making videos

I was also going to class and playing sports and other things like that. And so now it's like it happens to be a full time job, but we kind of treat it the same way as it started. Yeah. How did you not lose your head and lose your way as you look to your left and your right and say you put out a product review video and a competitor says,

is a little less nuanced and gentle than say you are. So their thumbnail is why the new Google Pixel 7 sucks, you know? And it's like, it's sensational or like why the new Apple Watch is garbage and it's all caps. And do you ever feel that thing where you're like, oh man, they're coming? Yeah, I do. And I feel that is a good, it's a good question because there's a lot of,

I do see comments for people are like I appreciate that you didn't oversimplify and I see those comments and I appreciate that and I know that there are people who do notice that but also it's like tech is is so good these days it's really genuinely hard to find an actually bad product and so I think what's happening is there are like you said there's gonna be a guy who's just like this product sucks and

By the way, I do disagree with your take there. Overall? Okay, we'll get to that. Yeah, we're going to get to that. We'll get to that. I guess my point is like, I think these are people trying to differentiate their videos rather than their takes on the product. So there's going to be a hundred videos on the Pixel. So if 80 of the first videos of the people who got it all have come to the same conclusion, which is like, I've used this phone.

It's a B plus. It's pretty good. And you arrive and you're like, I need to make a video that somehow gets views and stands out. If you just show up with the same, it's good. People aren't going to watch it and click it. So you need to find something that you can latch onto and pull that down and be like, I need to focus on this. This phone sucks and here's why. And people will click that video and they might not stay because you can't necessarily deliver on that. But people will click that video. And I think that's what people are drawn to. Also real quick.

Not necessarily that there are bad, there's plenty of bad tech products. There are so many. Thank you. Thank you. I didn't want to do, I was like, yeah, yeah. There are so many tech products. And since we're large enough that we generally can get our hands on them, like we're going to cover the things that we know look more interesting to us and like generally are going to be a more positive video because like we want to have fun making that video. We want to enjoy this piece of tech. We don't find the bad products as often because it's more like,

hey, here's this. We'd like to do a sponsored review with you. And we're like, that looks really boring. You don't want to do that. We're not going to go out and do some video on it or in general make super negative videos on that. I wanted to actually apply to be a correspondent for MKBHD. I had a sub show that I wanted to pitch you guys. Sure. And I thought it would be really great. And I think the audience would really appreciate it. It's called This Shit Doesn't Work with Hasan Minhaj.

And so it's just like a YouTube short show. So you throw it to me. Marquez is like, I want to throw it over to our senior tech correspondent, Hasan Minhaj. Take it away. And I go, hey, guys, it's Hasan Minhaj. I'm here for this shit doesn't work with Hasan Minhaj. Today I'm reviewing the Canon Inkjet 5870. As you say, it's just you look at the box, three steps, and it's ready to go. So you pull it out. You connect to Wi-Fi. And you just hit print. You just hit print. Like the box, you just hit print.

then I just take a sledgehammer and then it doesn't work with Hustle Manage. Endless supply of printers that would work for that. As someone who did end user work with printer stuff, I love this already. And every week we'd have, hey guys, Hustle Manage here with the Microsoft Surface. The Microsoft Surface says it's easy. You can pull out the tab, tablet, and you can game on the go. Here we go. And we just set it up and you just connect to Wi-Fi and you just pull out the tab. And then you can just, you write on it just as simple as, it's just as simple as,

It's really just simple. This is the beauty of it. Yeah. And then I just take a baseball bat and just... It's so funny. Okay. There are so many...

In tech, it's like, there are so many stories in tech where it's like, there will be pieces of tech that are awful. And then the rest of the tech around it is like pretty good. And I'm like trying to tell the story of the device and I'm like giving it. And the other thing is like, I know a lot of people who work for tech companies and they're trying really hard. They are. Sincerely. They want the things to work. But oftentimes, like an example that is perfect for this, which this segment would be perfect. The MetaQuest Pro.

Okay. This doesn't work. It's bad. Okay. The whole tablet is bad, but instead of approaching it as like- I appreciate the honesty. Thank you. Okay. It is. Thank you. It's 1500 bucks. It's bad. It doesn't work most of the time. Okay. But I thought a more interesting story would be we, like the company has changed their name to Meadow. Like we, there's more things to evaluate here than just the one bad product. Sure. So like I have info about the product in, in the episode, in the video, which is like, okay, this is,

It doesn't really work well, but the idea is in the future this gets better and this point we could evolve that into in the future could be cool. And so I'm trying to tell that story and evaluate how we got here and the trajectory towards the future. But along the way, we definitely need the short of Hasan slaps destroying the headset. This version you should not buy. It's bad. It doesn't work. - So my issue is, and again,

Comedy is an art form. We are the lowest form of entertainers. So there's probably like singers, actors, musicians. Comedians, we're down here. We're right above magicians and pretty far ahead of clowns. But we're slightly above magicians and clowns. So we are an art form of the people. Yeah.

And my problem is, is with technology, it's always sold as it's easy as one, two, three. Okay. So we wanted to do a segment that was called the commercial versus reality. Yes. Because so often- Can I be the correspondent to do this? Because I'm a man of the people. I'm holding you up on this. This is perfect. Yes. Because there's so many commercials that are just like-

"Look, here's an example of like, here's The Rock asking Siri for these seven things in a row and it just does them all." And you're like, "Yeah, maybe Siri's pretty good." And we just turn around and we take that exact thing he asked it to do and we try that exact task. - Thank you. - And it will not work the way it did in the commercial. - Thank you. - It just won't. - I've been vindicated. This is all I've been asking. - Yeah.

- People are always like, "Hasan, it doesn't work 'cause you're bad with technology." - No, it's just the tech is hard. Tech is hard. When it works, it's beautiful. Sometimes it does work. - Sure, sure. - And I love when tech works. And I think about tweeting this all the time. Tech is so great when it works.

The when it works part holds so much water there. Bingo. Because it just doesn't work all the time. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, that has been it for this episode of Waveform. A little bit of a throwback, but I think a really fun one, and I'm glad we did this. We should be back next week to your regularly scheduled programming, ideally, if all goes well. And also let me know what other guests you think would make good Waveform guests, specifically people you want to hear from, conversations with, things like that. Maybe people you just want to know if they type fast or not.

Also, I am wearing the super limited edition and could be HD holiday sweater. Get it while you can because supplies will not last very long. I can tell you that I've seen the numbers. You guys are picking them up quick shop.mcbhd.com. But either way, that's been it for this week. Thanks for watching and listening and subscribing and we'll catch you soon. Peace. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Rovin. We are a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music is by Vainsell.