Are We Optimistic About Tech with Hasan Minhaj
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Hey, what's up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And this is a special guest episode. I say special because the episode itself is really special and it's a lot of fun. This time we have Hasan Minhaj with us. Actor, writer, comedian, creator. I think we have a lot in common, but he's been prolific over the past few years. I'm a fan of his work. He reached out. He's been watching the podcast. So if you guys aren't subscribed on YouTube,

You're missing out on something. Hasna Minaj has been a giant. So, like, get subscribed already. But this is a good episode, a long conversation. We had a bunch of talks. We started about basketball and, like, the fact that we use, like, basketball analogies for, like, everything. I understood all of that conversation. It was a fun intro. But then we quickly jumped into creativity and writing. And I think one of the most interesting parts was, like,

Trying to stay optimistic on the future possibilities of technologies on the horizon like AI or Twitter. And privacy. Privacy. There's lots of question marks and just kind of how we think about those things. And you might be surprised at the depth of some of these conversations we have. It's a lot of fun. I also at some point had him flip the tables on me and just start asking me questions, which has never happened on Waveform before. But

I thought it was great. I enjoyed it. And this is an all time episode. It was so much fun. He was such a nice guy and he just like had a bunch of really, really fun questions that there's probably points in this episode where my face is totally blind because I'm just thinking about needing to go a little deeper. We're just immersed. It's one of those that just feels like a conversation and you happen to have microphones in front of you, which is a good time. Yeah. All right. Also, just make sure put your bets in on how fast you think he is at typing the alphabet.

Oh, yeah. For reference, he brought in sticky notes and a pen. So, yeah, this is whether that is an analog technology. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't let him write it. He still had to type it. But let's get into the actual conversation.

- Hassan, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Andrew's here. - Thanks for having me. Yeah, I really appreciate it. - We were looking forward to this and we were talking a little bit before the podcast about technology and about being a creator and there's all this stuff that we could talk about. I just wanna open with, 'cause people ask like, why do you have certain guests on the podcast? Or like, what's the choice process? I wanna read a bunch of things that we have in common.

Okay. I think there's a lot more that we have in common that people don't understand. Okay. Yeah. So we both are creators, I would say. Sure. We both have a YouTube channel, technically. Technically. We're both Hot Ones alum. Yes. One of my favorite shows. Yeah. Both sneakerheads. Oh, wow. Okay. And you were on Sneaker Shopping? Yes. So we've both done that. Okay.

Love that show also. We both like basketball a lot. Yeah. Talking about fantasy. Yeah. And we're both Wired Autocomplete alum, which basically just means we've done enough media things that it's like interesting to hear. That our Venn diagram overlaps just enough. The overlap is pretty solid. Yeah. Do you consider yourself a creator? Is that a bad question? I feel like you do. Yeah, for sure. But there's like a weird definition of a creator mixed with influencer, mixed with

Mixed with, I mean, actor, writer, all the other things. Yeah. I would say the part that makes me bristle is the content part where they go, you're a content creator. Okay. Whereas like, um, yeah,

It means that like the word content is kind of synonymous with I package things up and it's synonymous with the feeling I get from it is clickbait, clock in, clock out, new video. There's a heavy connotation. Tuesdays at 10. Yeah. A still image of me like this. With your mouth open. Yeah. That sort of thing of just there's something slightly kind of duplicitous and algorithmic.

I'm manipulating an algorithm versus like a creator is someone who could be a painter. It could be someone who does, you know, book reviews or tech reviews or you write movies or music. It just means I am trying to creatively express myself. Yeah. I want to loop you in with content creator because I struggle with this because there are so many things about.

You make content and then you have to, you almost feel obligated to package the content or promote the content in a certain way that works because you have to. And I try to avoid the like cringy, like mouth open thumbnail way of like just creating

pandering to that algorithm basically and doing what I feel like works, but I still feel like the the baseline of what we do is making things that people want to watch yeah, and That being the core of it and you kind of have to do the things that come with that to give you props though I actually don't think it's content. I think you are artistically expressing yourself by telling a story about

a piece of technology. That's what I try to do. That's what I try to do. It's hard sometimes because not all tech has that good of a story. Oh, really? It's funny. But that's the sort of a mission. And I appreciate that.

We're also just talking about this questionable trade I made in NBA fantasy. Yes. I'll run it by you and I'll just read the names. I'm in an NBA fantasy league right now. Yeah. And my trade was, the headliner was I just traded LeBron. Yes. And that was a little bit questionable, but here's the full trade. It was three for four. My team gave up LeBron James. Yeah. Lonnie Walker, also a Laker, and Carter. I don't even know his name, is the point guard for the Bucs. Okay.

While Drew Holiday is injured. I got Kevin Porter Jr., Kelly Oubre Jr., Mason Plumlee, and DeAndre Hunter.

not all a-lister names but i'm feeling like i won this trade only because lebron wasn't playing every night yeah lonnie walker is a pretty one-dimensional guy a lot of points not a lot of other things and in this category league getting mason plumbly is a lot of rebounds sure and getting kevin porter jr is a lot of play time on a bad team and he just puts up numbers and it's kind of just lebron numbers so for people that are listening that don't um

that are raising their children and not in fantasy or that are neglecting their children and do fantasy. Yeah. Um, fantasy from the times that I played it when I was younger, it, it is about, uh, the efficacy of the players vis-a-vis just stat stuffing versus the intangible things of like wins and losses, clutch factor. Can they play big in the fourth? All those, all those things that actually kind of matter towards winning, um,

Growing up as a Sacramento Kings fan, a lot of our... We were an amazing fantasy team. So, like, Chris Webber would have been a better fantasy player than Tim Duncan, who would have, like, 19, 8, and 5. Webber would have, like, 24, 12, and 6. But just Duncan, won more rings, you know, produced more in the postseason and went further. So, I've sometimes...

I've sometimes been like when people are like, look, it's so-and-so stat line. I'm like, you know what matters. I feel like sometimes that is beneficial for you can have your team that maybe is winning. Yeah. But then when they're losing, maybe your fantasy team is winning on the side. So you have like something you can be happy. Well, unless both lose. What tickles it? What do you like about it? Like what makes you continue to do it?

Is it the camaraderie of like doing it with your friends and the kind of like the betting of it? Yeah, it's off season. It's like basketball happens to be in the exact off season of the Frisbee season. So we play Frisbee in the summer and then we have a reason to keep talking. And also it gets us more invested in more games that we normally would not watch.

Cool. So, like, I'm not a Kings fan. I'll just say it. But I will watch a Kings Wednesday night game because, like, I want to make sure the guy I'm playing against doesn't have a huge night. I'm telling you, man. I mean, you really, you know, Marquez, the reason why I did this podcast, and it's so different than some of the other things I do, is that you're a very level-headed...

calm, erudite, thoughtful guy. And now you're just poking me with the Sacramento Kings slander. And it's really making me feel a certain way. And I mean that sincerely. We are a great team. Darren Fox is fantastic. Sabonis will surprise you. We got a squad. We got a squad. I had Sabonis earlier. Huge fantasy guy. Yeah. Huge fantasy guy. Yeah. I can appreciate Sabonis for sure. No, they're good. I watch games and I'm a basketball fan like you. I was going to ask about this too, because-

Sure. We have this sort of a dual, well, I'll say a dual life, but you've played basketball. Okay. I mean, you have the creative half of your brain. Yes. And then you have the competitive half of your brain. Do you get to exercise the competitive half with...

with the writing and the comedy? Or do you find like playing basketball or other things can emphasize the other half? - So what's funny about like writing comedy, specifically comedy and rhetoric and logic and ideas, it is like these little puzzles. And a great joke kind of tickles your brain in a new way. And when I see a comedian on stage,

unlocking something, the aha moment, because it's such a cerebral art form, the aha moment is, oh, I never thought of the world that way. Oh, I never saw it that way. I can't believe I've been living my life and that was the way to see it.

And then, you know, just to enter the 36 chambers, there's levels to it. There's also like the degree of difficulty of the joke, the subject matter of the joke. Are you able to do it while still being clean without being like blue or crass? Like there's all these sub difficulties. It's kind of like when you watch basketball and you see a guy like can double crossover, step back, hesitation, dribble, go four feet beyond the three point line, launch it with a hand in his face. Like it's,

That's how some jokes look to you. Yeah. Yeah. So if you saw that House of Highlights thing of John Morant jumping up, 360ing, like landing, and then he did like a hesitation and he was off to the races and then switched hands, a la Michael Jordan and against the Blazers. Sorry, against the Lakers. There's that thing where he switches hands right to left. I was telling Prashant, who I write a lot of stuff with and, you know, we were in the company together. I go, in the 90s, that was one move.

Now players have gotten so good that they're doing eight different moves all at once. So they're like, I'll switch hands in the air like MJ in 91. I'll also do a double cross like I'm Stefan Marbury and Iverson. And I'll do a James Harden step back and I'll hit it in your face like Reggie Miller. And they're doing it all at once. Similarly, art is going through that as well. Interesting. So if you see a film like Everything Everywhere all at once. So I'm going to PV about this and I go,

You used to do one type of film, which was like time travel. Or you would do one type of film, which is like a genre family film. Or you would do another film, which was just like, it could be like avant-garde and expressionist. If you look at that film, whether you like it or you don't like it,

It's doing the avant-garde of like, you know, they have the interstitials of the rocks talking to each other about like life and, you know, their existential crisis. Then they'll do a family story. The core story of the film is about a family that's about to get like kind of evicted and lose their business. That's like Minari, but-

That's just one of the plot lines. Then it's like a Kung Fu Michelle Yeoh just being a f***ing badass movie. All in one, yeah. And it's a time travel movie. That used to be just one type of movie. Hey, audience, we're going to take you on one plot line. This is the one big leap of faith you have to take.

We're in a world. There are people. There are wizards. Follow along. Simple. Yeah, but it's also not cutting to interstitials. It's not also doing kung fu. It's not also doing these things. Yeah. That's the Ja Morant of films. That is really interesting. They're doing 12 things at once and they're doing it incredibly well. Yeah. So when people...

asked me like a lot of times, I don't know if technology goes through this, but art goes through this. There's this kind of conservative opinion. Well, movies used to be ba-ba-ba and it used to be like da-da-da. Oh, and back in my day, ooh-wee, John Havlicek used to da-da-da-da. And there isn't this bold leap to the future. And I got to say, I'm pretty inspired right now with some of the artists at the Bleeding Cutting Edge.

that are pushing the genre and the medium forward of film, TV, comedy, art, all those things. They're doing it in a really profound, beautiful way. And I think we should celebrate that. - I agree. That is really interesting. - Sure. - I thought a lot about YouTube today is amazing 'cause it's obviously huge and the barrier for entry is lower than ever. So if somebody wants to make

videos about this feeling they have or this thing they want to share or a product that they use that they want to tell people about. It's never been easier. You can like point your phone at it and make a video in two minutes. But that also introduces this concept of like if you want people to watch your video, you've got to find something to do that is different or that hasn't already been done. So like the iPhone comes out, for example.

And, you know, it's September, 300 people, how many million people get their iPhones the same day and they can all make the same video on the same phone? Why would anyone watch any of the videos after they've seen the first two, right? So you need to find a reason to get people to watch videos

your video and not the others. And one of the things I showed you we have in the other room is it's a room that just has a robot in it with a camera attached to it. And we spent a lot of money and invested a lot of time into finding something that's difficult to replicate that is just sick, that we can have something that separates a tech video about the iPhone from every other tech video about the same iPhone. Do you find that

In comedy, whether it's in writing or in the storytelling or in the production itself, I mean, you were talking about the stage for the last special was like $1.4 million or something crazy like that. Yeah, it was worthy, unfortunately. Do you focus on things that you can do while on stage or in the writing process that are your differentiator? Or is it purely in the words that you're saying? For sure. So...

To be candid, it always has to start with the idea and your hand will be revealed if the writing is not great. So what I mean by that, and you can tell the most, the simplest analogy is when you watch a bad movie and the writing is bad. Let's just call it any of the Transformer movies after the first. Exactly. Where it's all Michael Bay like circling your head. Mm-hmm.

Buildings are being destroyed. Robots are fighting each other and you don't care about any of it at all. I call it the kind of CGI gonzo. But the reason why you would tap into great movies is because of the actual writing, the pathos, the emotion, the way they very intricately stack scenes and storylines.

brilliantly, right? So take a TV show right now like Severance or a show like The Bear. Those shows rise to the top because of it always starts with excellent writing or succession. The writing on that show is absolutely incredible. And then you can use lenses and cameras and lights and all that sort of stuff to heighten that, but it starts with that. For me, I...

Understand that comedy as an art form is a relatively small thing. You know, it really is like it started in the jazz nightclub in the West Village, much like jazz. It's an American art form, but it is a basement dwelling. People go downstairs, drink booze and listen to people tell jokes.

But I took a great deal of inspiration from Broadway and theater and all these other things. And what I was trying to do is open the aperture to the medium and make it

feel like if people are going to spend $80 or $100 or $120, I mean, these Live Nation, these Ticketmaster prices are insane. And that's in the news right now. But I am aware of that because I do remember when my dad would take me to a sports game or an event, like what that means for a working class, like middle class family. It's a lot. And I wanted it to feel like, hey, if you're going to go spend that to go see Wicked, I don't want to just do jokes for 80 minutes. No disrespect to anybody who wants to see that. But

Um, I wanted people to feel like, you know what, I'm not even really into comedy or I'm not really into like storytelling or politics per se, but man, that was an experience and it felt like it really was an experience. And I hope to have a long touring career because of that. Yeah.

I really think that like the visuals helped grasp you into some of these like super personal stories you're doing in a bunch of different ways. Emotionally, some of the stories are just super ridiculous. So it's like kind of bringing receipts and turning into this like, wow. By the way, that's a new thing that kind of comedy purists think is not great.

the, you don't have to show us the thing. I believe you. But there's part of me where I really do believe reality can be stranger than fiction. And I want to show a level of sincerity and authenticity of like, I'm telling you, this thing is really crazy. And then boom, receipts. And I do think we're part of a generation of

We want to see receipts because we've been duped and lied to so much by institutions. Candidly. Yeah. You know? Yeah. No, I like that. I think there's also probably like a generational gap of people who are like, that made the show better versus people who are like, oh, that was worse. Or the old shows wouldn't have done that. Yes. Which is really interesting. Yes. A lot of age gap stuff. We get that as well, though. A lot of times it's like,

I miss the days where Marques just rooted his Android and told me the super deep specs and now it's just like all he cares about are fancy cameras and rolling shots and stuff like that. And that's what we enjoy. That's what we like telling the story with. And like, we still think that

that our way of what we're talking about is what we think is the most important, but there's always going to be people out there like purists, I guess, who maybe, you know, have outgrown a little deeper into technology and they want just the super nitty gritty. And I think that's what's also great about YouTube is they can find 50 other channels that can do that. The medium, the medium evolves like old YouTube. Yeah.

was the channels that we have today that are amazing didn't exist and the baseline everything was that it's kind of like you're just saying like the entire artistry level was over here yeah and in the last 15 years it's moved up and the floor is now here and the ceiling is way higher yeah and it's kind of the same as like as like watching the shows now that have like all these layers and these different storytelling elements and visual elements and everything like the ceiling is higher yeah

But now the normal stuff that people were used to from 2004 isn't here anymore. And they're like, I miss that stuff. But it's like, the meat is up here. It's better. And it's still there. I think as long as you're still acknowledging those things, like...

What they're talking about are the core ideas good and is it more polish and panache and pizzazz than it is actual substance? But I feel like, you know, your guys' stuff still is like really medium, substantive, but you're right. Like I think art has to grow and evolve and change. And what's cool is

My friends will tell me, they're like, you always just have analogies with basketball or sport. That's always your go-to. But it's like when people are like, you know, when they do these comparisons of players from different eras. And I'm like, but the rules were different. The world was different. And what's cool is, and I am very bullish about this, like the best players right now have...

four to five different skill sets. Like Giannis is Kevin Garnett meets Duncan meets this meets. Meets Shaq. Meets Shaq meets Kevin Durant somehow all in one person. And because he's an immigrant, he also has the mentality of these like hard nose, rough neck nineties players as well. So you can't check him on either thing like heart or actual game skill set. Yeah. And so those are those things where I'm like, that's an exciting thing about, um, our

art and culture moving forward. And I want to keep like leaning into that, you know. We're going to take a quick break here. But when we come back, Austin flips the script on us a little bit and has some questions for Andrew and I. We'll be right back.

Support for Waveform comes from AT&T. What does it feel like to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with AT&T next up anytime? It's like when you first pick up those tongs and you know you're the one running the grill. It's indescribable. It's like something you've never felt before. All the mouthwatering anticipation of new possibilities, whether that's making the perfect cheeseburger or treating your family to a grilled baked potato, which you know will forever change the way they look at potatoes.

With AT&T NextUp Anytime, you can feel this way again and again. Learn how to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on them and the latest iPhone every year with AT&T NextUp Anytime. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Apple Intelligence coming fall 2024 with Siri and device language set to US English. Some features and languages will be coming over the next year. $0 offer may not be available on future iPhones. NextUp Anytime features may be discontinued at any time. Subject to change, additional fees, terms and restrictions apply. See att.com slash iPhone for details.

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The leadership team founded the company with a commitment to an ethical approach that puts humanity first. To learn more, visit anthropic.com slash Claude. That's anthropic.com slash Claude. Wait, 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, 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. I can see it, yeah. 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 to 2010. Yeah. So...

One of the crazy things that I've seen so... 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 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 $0 involved.

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-

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. 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 Techism 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 product 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'd 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 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. Let me 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 that.

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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. But oftentimes like an example that is perfect for this, which this segment would be perfect. The MetaQuest Pro.

Okay. This shit 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 $1,500. 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 the video, which is like, okay, this-

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, I'm like--

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 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, 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 because 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. And I love when tech works. And I think about tweeting this all the time. Tech is so great when it works. But the when it works part holds so much water there. Bingo. Because it just doesn't work all the time. I wish we had you. There was an LG phone that came out a while ago that had like...

palm vein scanning and like hand gestures to do things. And the whole, we went in for like a briefing. It was a hotel room with a bunch of reviewers. And the whole room was just people like this and the PR people going around like, oh, so you love it, right? And we're all just like, nothing is happening. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work. Oh no. Just toss them out the window. I try to be an optimist most of the time about like,

They tried. They really had meetings and there are real people who thought this is going to be a good idea and when this works, it's going to work. And it's going to change the future and it's going to be a good thing. I think they think about the products the same way I think about the videos. I think I want to make something that people will want to watch. I'm going to put effort in until I get to the end product and I'm like,

Yes, this is good. But I think in the tech world- I disagree, Marques. I think it's twisted by the fact that you're part of a public company and you don't get as much say in the final product or in the fact that things need to be done by a deadline. So I think their intentions are usually pretty positive and they just get twisted.

I strongly disagree, Marques. I think it's about meeting an earnings report every quarter and pumping out product to deliver higher earnings per quarter. Do you not think, though, there's... Because how? How have we not figured out just... I'm so sorry. How have we not figured out just a printer? Connect my laptop to a printer and to get it to print. Okay. Let's say a company came along and made a printer that worked. Wouldn't everyone buy it?

Wouldn't that work? Yes. Yes. So why doesn't somebody make all the money? I've been waiting for this. I don't understand. I've been waiting. Like Twitter, Elon's buying Twitter, all this sort of stuff. I was just like, can you get into the printer division? Please. I've argued that Apple makes products that work usually, like the HomePod excluded. I think they usually make products that work. And I think Apple should come along and make a camera and a printer.

Those are the two things I'd like them to make. Just for reference, we have a printer here and everyone has to send me a Slack message because I'm physically plugged into it because the Wi-Fi cuts out. We try to print something and then we go, and Andrew goes, are you trying to print something? And we go, yeah. And he's like, just send it to me and I'll print it because it won't work for your computer. It just doesn't work. I kind of negated my point, by the way. You are right. You're like, there's clearly a problem here and there's a lot of money to be made by solving this problem. That being said, the...

There is what I'm talking about is the fundamental division between neomania and Luddites, people that are obsessed with technology. We all have that friend that is the worst version of you, Marques. Gizmo heads. I love tech. Snob, tech snob. Tech snobs. And they will pull out every new smartwatch, every new Surface Pro, whatever, whatever, and everything.

marginally better. Not even. They're actually not even marginally better. They've actually just added more like chaos to your life than actually simplified anything. And

What they're not willing to admit is that I'm just like, you are just a bottom feeder to what- Whatever the company serves up. Whatever the company is serving up. And they're masquerading it around under the guise that this is going to make your life easier. When in reality, you just have Sega CD. Yeah.

There are a lot of versions. There are a lot of, you know what I mean, Sega CD, you know, mini disc player people walking around where they walk around like this changes everything. And it really doesn't. It's funny. So back in like 2009 on YouTube, there were like 12 tech channels on YouTube. And it was actually relatively easy to differentiate yourself because it was like,

Like, you know, Justine does Justine things and Lou does Lou things and Chris Perillo does his thing. John Four Lakers does his thing and I do my thing. And then, you know, the next year there's 150 and the next year there's 3000. And so instead of just being like one of them does the, you know, nice production quality and the other one does a vlog style. Now it became like, all right, I'm going to do the...

Apple videos, just the Apple videos. And like, hopefully those get the clicks. And now in five years later, it's like, okay, that's not differentiated enough. There's already that channel. I'm going to do the Apple messed up

I'm just going to do videos about when Apple messes up. That'll be my plug. Just like slip in there, differentiate myself a little bit with that. And then you just keep devolving more and more into getting these sub genres and sub genres to the point where it's like people genuinely will kind of trick themselves into thinking they're covering a company fairly when really the angle that they must approach everything with is like, where do they mess up? How can I say this sucks? Because that's my angle and that's the only thing I will get clicks on. How have you remained unbiased?

How have you been able to navigate that? I am luckily in a position where we've grown the channel to the point where it's sustainable, where I don't need to devolve to get clicks to make the thing we want to make. I think if I do devolve and become overly biased or overly positive or overly negative or overly clickbaity or whatever the things we're avoiding, I think that actually hurts the channel. And if a product comes out and it's bad and I don't say it's bad, that hurts the channel. I would rather be honest about everything.

You're about maintaining public trust, essentially. Exactly. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah. I think there is a little also, like, we're not completely unbiased. We're not, you know, we're unbiased in the sense of nobody else outside is affecting what we do at all. But, like, people know that Marques, his main driver is usually an Android. He knows he drives a Tesla. Like, there is a certain level of bias, and what we like to tell people is learn those biases through learning a channel and then use different channels to make sure, like,

I really want the pixel this year, but I know Marquez usually likes the pixel. So maybe I should also use his video with another video where they're a little more and calibrate yourselves to different channels, which is sometimes really hard to do also. Has this industry, this business been disillusioning for you at all or no? Has it maintained? Have you been able to maintain a pretty healthy relationship with it? I think it's been pretty healthy. I think my, the one thing that's probably changed from the beginning is the

Tech kind of seemed like magic at the beginning. And the more you do, the more the curtain gets pulled back and the more you get to see how it's made. So you get to see the prototype and you get to see the version that doesn't work on its way to the thing that comes out.

And I think that's good to see because for me, on one hand, I'm never surprised by anything anymore, which is like, oh, well. The thing gets showed on stage and no one's – there's a moment where some people are like, what? That's what they're making? I had no idea. Where it's like we follow not just the leaks but like we know the people who make the things and like the thing comes out and eventually it's like we saw this coming for years. So it's very rare to get surprised by something. But I think it helps to get that context and to know like –

Because then you now know the trajectory of if something is improving very slowly or very quickly. I think if you only paid attention to headlines, you might think,

wow, the metaverse is like around the corner. But if you pay attention to meta and the products they've been making and the trajectory over the past few years and the money they've been pouring in and the products they've been developing, and you've actually used the MetaQuest Pro and all this stuff, you will see that the trajectory is just barely ticking up a little bit. So I think having context helps as far as our ability to deliver a fair verdict on a product. MARK MANDEL: Got it. MARK MIRCHANDANI: Yeah, for sure.

I want to ask you something, though. I'm so sorry. I'm going to read you a quote. We just like went off. Yeah, we went back. We went we reversed it. But I have a quote from you. I'm going to read back to you. Oh, God. Yeah. This is always good when you hear a quote from yourself. This is from 2009. OK. In 2009, you said Facebook, Twitter and social media were arguably the best thing that's happened to the entertainment industry as a whole and especially in comedy. Do you still believe that?

Uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. From a, from a like macro overarching perspective. Sure. Yeah. Decentralized non gatekeeper, um, media. That was a, that is a great entry point in egalitarian opportunity for people to, to become artists and hopefully make a living. Yeah. And they can choose to be a part. They can opt in to be a part of, um, what's quote unquote legacy media, which is just, um,

Yeah. Media that essentially is, uh, backed by a private, uh, you know, multinational corporation or just scales up your vision, you know, beyond what DIY videos and art can be. Um, so yeah, I think ultimately it is, that still is true and a good thing, you know, it's, I agree with you. I think the, the one difference I have in the way I think about, uh, I think you said traditional is already used or legacy legacy. Yeah. Um,

I keep seeing it as the difference in the amount of time it takes to take your idea and get it out to the world. And I think in the media that I thrive in, idea published 24 hours, 48 hours, however long it takes you to make the thing. It's out there and you're getting feedback instantly. Whether it's a tweet, it takes you two seconds or a video might take us a week, whatever.

And it's just out. Yeah. And then I see, like, I imagine the Netflix special takes months, years, right? Yeah, two years, yeah. And you have this idea, this thing that you want to make. And obviously it's much bigger. It's an hour long. It's got all these different parts and it takes longer to put together. Yeah. But there's still this, like, process before it can...

be released to the world, this thought that you originated with two years ago. Is that challenging for you to overcome? Like, I feel like you probably have thoughts and creative things all the time happening in your head and you just don't get to do anything with them. Yeah, I think there's a, and it's interesting because as someone who came up on The Daily Show, there is something kind of beautiful about that. Every day. You know, every day you make these little sandcastles and you put them out and then Monday's work is done and you do it again Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. And there's something kind of beautiful in that.

The downside of that, everything has its pros and cons. The downside is nobody is rewatching an episode of The Daily Show from February 8th, 2012. Like it rots like bread. However, people will still go back and watch Get Out or people will still go back and watch The Godfather. There is this-

feeling of making something for posterity or for kind of a long period of time that feels like it's timeless in its nature. I don't know if people will still go back and watch, you know, the Marques Brownlee iPhone 6 review. If that, beyond like a nostalgic. Yeah, that's purely it. It's just, yeah. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. So that's the downside of that. The other downside potentially is if, say you have a

desire aspiration to really scale something you want a world build you want to You want to make something tell a story with dragons and castles and stuff like that from ideation to execution You cannot make House of Dragon without really working on it for almost half a decade It's just gonna take that amount of time. I think they both scratch different things and as an artist and creator you just have to become comfortable with

with the amount of time it takes to do said thing. That's it. You have to kind of understand what the deal is and then be okay with the terms of said deal. What are we doing here? We're making a $40 million movie. Got it. It's going to take a while versus like,

the risk and reward of a tweet. That's a different level of scale, different level of impact, different level of whatever. So I've- Different level of life. Yeah. Tweet is over in a day or two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and it just really just depends on what you're trying to do. And I'll be honest, there's times where I get the itch where I'm like, I want this out now. I want it now. But-

PV and the people around me have told me like, hey, you got to just understand what you're doing and just come to terms with it. Yeah. Better. But I see what you guys have done here. And even when I was at The Daily Show, there is something really beautiful for you personally that every day you just feel like you're building towards something and then you can quickly see what's

The results of it. Yeah. We kind of feel like we're maybe pulling a little bit from the legacy, not format, but like bigger production anyway. And bringing them into our fast paced, like deliver something quickly. Yeah. Get a thought out to the world version of what we're doing. Yeah. Do you ever think about like the catalog of work you have or no? Are you just like...

Like, hey, I'm looking forward. There is no look back on what my review was of the Pixel 4 or whatever. We're consciously trying to do more longer tail. I guess in the YouTube world, we look at how long the tail is. So an evergreen video is good for a long time because it's not necessarily focused on one piece of tech or one news story or one period of time. We're consciously trying to do more of that.

And that's actually fun because there's more stories there. Like product reviews are product reviews. They just come and go. New products show up. Is it good? Is it bad? Here it is. Show it with the world. All right, moving on. Like that is quick, but I think the stories happening in the tech world, like the metaverse question or like what does pro even mean and the word pro in product names, like that type of stuff is a little more

interesting and longer lasting. We're trying to do more of that. So as people that have like clearly put a lot of skin in the game, this is your day to day life and you've tried on these technologies. Are you optimistic about the future of technology?

I think, yeah, I think my default is very much optimistic, especially because, again, maybe I'm jaded and thinking like, oh, yeah, everyone wants to make good tech. Everyone seems to have the idea of like, if we make a better piece of tech, it'll speak for itself. The features will be easier to use. Everyone will want to use the newer, better thing. And that's the goal generally. So I think that's the way I see it. But I think it's healthy to have some amount of skepticism, especially in like,

some of the more looming future technologies what about you how do you feel kind of the same thing it's like optimistic about the things that i truly enjoy which are more gadget based and stuff like that but then you always have to be skeptical about now how much are those gadgets like getting into now your personal life what what are the yeah privacy becomes a huge thing just like we're putting more cameras and microphones on everything there's just

exactly what you said. There's a lot of companies out there where their main focus is profits. How much are we sacrificing our privacy for their profits? And I have to be skeptical about that. Yeah. It's hard to be super optimistic about that all the time. I just feel, and try to, can you just talk me down from this? I really want to be convinced otherwise, is that almost like Coca-Cola's goal is to get you to drink more Coke.

Their goal is to turn you into an end product and then scrape off data about what type of boxers Marquez wears and what type of aftershave you use and to sell that to advertisers so that they actually aren't – they've tricked you. They are not the tool. You are the actual tool and cudgel that they are then using to sell data on you. Yeah.

under the guise of we're going to make your life easier. And the thing that was really bothering me the other day is that I'm forced to opt in. So I went to this

I was in LA and I had to go meet someone for lunch and I go, "Can I get a menu please?" And they go, "No, you have to scan it with your QR code." And the problem is they were like, I go, "I just didn't bring my phone down. I actually wanted to like have lunch with a friend." The purpose of this was to have a meal with another human being, make eye contact and actually have like a human connection and not be a screen baby for once.

And they were like, no, it's, we're actually trying to save the trees. And I was like, come on, bro. Like, come on, recycled. You know better than this. We could use recycled paper. Give me a break. Like you could print it out once. We could reuse it. You can laminate. It's, don't do that. Don't masquerade this around under the guise of virtue. You're getting me to opt into this thing.

Now, in their defense, I get it. They can change the menu and they don't have to continue to print it out. That being said, it's that forced opt-in that I don't feel is fair to me or for my kids that my daughter, when she turns six or seven and she wants to go to the GAC store and I'm like, hey, don't worry. Like, don't worry. I don't want you to worry about Snapchat and Twitter and YouTube right now. I just want you to be present and enjoy the GAC or slime store.

But if they're like, well, to pull up the list of options of what's, you have to use the QR code. And that she has to become this, like, it's a force opt-in. That's the part of it that I'm not cool with. Yeah, it's funny. There's a lot of, there's a lot to that. There's some companies who,

are, yes, just using you for your data. It's just true. That's just a business model for a lot of companies. They're the biggest companies out there right now. And a lot of the biggest conglomerate of companies. Yeah, Marques, those are the companies. They're the biggest ones. And they do feel opt-in because they are so massive that the services, if you do choose to opt out of all of their services, you're like missing out on core life experiences. It's like, oh, if I don't have a phone, I can't use iMessage and my whole family FaceTimes every weekend. So what am I supposed to do? It's like you feel like you need to use the thing. Yes.

um i do or i couldn't even ask you do you want to just grab lunch and talk about these things i have to do i have to do the podcast yeah wait okay i think someone no i mean i mean this sincerely this is a perfect someone from chevy is calling me okay because do you want to take a quick break no i'm actually gonna okay hello hey okay stop from fmi hi all right we're actually going to take a quick break while i accept that real life phone call from chevy when we come back much more with hustle

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Cool. I knew that call was coming as we were talking about being attached to our phones. I know. My phone's ringing. That doesn't make you profoundly sad. That's the part that makes me profoundly sad. And like the dichotomy of it is 12 hours of screen time, 12 minutes of sunlight. And that...

the, the entropy of that, the rate at which how fast it's going. That's the part. I don't want to be grandpa. I swear to God, I'm 37 years old. I swear to God. Yeah. But that idea of just like, oh, wow. Like I got a free base, this information, 830 AM, just like, like into my dome. Yeah. Before I can even like take a drink of water, like,

Like get out of bed. Get out of bed. Like hug a loved one. Like a fellow human being. Like feel touch of a human being and kiss my children. Like I just have to be like –

He's been reinstated on Twitter. You know what I mean? And it's just right free based to my dome at 901. And it's, we are the speed at which it's happening. Yeah. Is a part where I couldn't even watch your, your meta video. What you and Mark Zuckerberg, I can't, I can't. Oh really? Because I was like,

this will put me down a spiral of existential angst and dread that I don't want to. Oh, I see. Yeah. The topic of being in the metaverse all day, every day. Yeah. Okay. Do you think, I wonder if this is like a generational thing too, because I have the same thoughts as you where I'm like, I, I feel kind of old saying this, but like,

ever just go somewhere for the experience and not to take pictures of it? Like I have that thought when I see everyone with their phones out and I'm like, maybe that's kind of a grandpa thing to think, but it's real. And then the younger you go, the more people are just like, no, I don't care at all about it. I don't care about experience. They don't care about, no, they don't care about like the fact that they are attached to their phones and the information coming out of the pixels all the time. They just live in that world and that's fine. So you don't, you, and I mean this like sincere, I'm not trying to- No, of course not.

I apologize if this comes off as like a tacky or whatever, sincerely. You also don't find it profoundly strange that anxiety, depression and all these things are just are way up. And I've heard the counter. Well, we were always anxious or we all we were always depressed. That feels a little murky. I'm talking about there is a feeling that I that I've seen younger people have that I have that.

as a quote unquote public figure where people feel crippled with anxiety. And I think that's a byproduct of the idea that, oh my God, if I text this person and ask them out, oh my God, if I say the wrong thing, God forbid on Slack, on iMessage, it is now etched in the, it's etched in stone. And there was something beautiful about human memory that trauma memories, good or bad, they kind of fade.

That like passive aggressive thing that someone said to me in eighth grade. To like warp a little bit. Yeah. I can feel almost like in Back to the Future, the photo is faded. Like I do remember getting made fun, but it's like, ah, it's not as palpable as it was. Whereas some of my worst moments and my cringiest takes can just be played on repeat. And I think what that does to the fabric of society is that it makes everybody feel

massively scared, which I think is part of just the boiling temperature, just general existential dread in the air of like, I don't know what to say, think, do or feel. I'll have it fed to me

And then I will assess and with the flow and I go, God, man, I signed up to be a public figure, like politician, celebrity, comedian. My heart breaks that everybody now is famous where everybody feels like, okay, I got to have my stump speech and my position and all that stuff framed and ready to go. That part, I did not see happening.

happening as quickly as it did. And that feels very profound and different from where we were from web 1.0, like basically 1996 to 2003, 4 to like 2.0 to where we are now. It is- And where it's going. It's where it's going. And you guys live in this and wait in this way more than me. So by all means, please like

push back, poke holes. Like I want, I want to be, I'm a generally optimistic person. Yeah, it does. I agree with you. I think a lot of it is, uh, it's pretty dramatic in how quickly it changes. And it's also, it's built on the backs of tech that has to be good to work. So if the tech is bad, uh,

then it doesn't catch on as quickly. That's like my basic assumption. And so the fact that it has caught on as quickly as it has and works as well as it does must mean that the tech behind it is actually sound and good, which is like, I guess that's a good thing, but it's also kind of scary that it's that good. It's like the TikTok algorithm that learns you better than you know yourself algorithm

And we'll start to like help you shape your feelings on the world. Yeah. And it's so good at that, that people are just willing to dive in and just let that run their media feed all the time. Yeah. Um,

I think there has to be a level of self, and this is with timing because we grew up before social media, but you kind of have to have a level of being able to detach and be able to remove yourself when you feel like you're too immersed or when you feel like it's too controlling or if it's causing depression or any of these things. You kind of have to be able to find a way to remove yourself when that's harder than ever, which is...

That's tough. It's really tough. I also think kind of the hardest part of why it's going to be hard for that to change is because...

Almost every single thing you've said has a positive aspect of it as well. Whereas we're now connected through way more people. There's way more people who can- We were able to meet. Yeah, because of that. There are people out there in places who maybe don't agree with a lot of things the way they are. And now they have an alleyway to find other people that they can connect with better. And that could help, but-

every single thing that you said then has the positive and all these companies are going to focus on the positive and and i'm not disagreeing with you at all i completely agree with you it's just hard to like there are the pros and the cons of it and the pros are going to be the better feel good stories that are going to make it feel like this is something that you need and that down dark side so mkbhd are you guys going to go let's just jump 50 years into the future are you going to be transhuman are you going to do it i

I won't be first in line. I will not be first in line. But you are going to upload your consciousness to the cloud and the whole thing? I would be interested. Interesting. I think this like connective tissue of like humanity and the internet is actually a net positive, obviously. But I do think that there is a... You really believe that?

Yeah, I think the internet, obviously the connecting. Your spirit is a beacon of light that is making me feel that way. Trying to be positive, yeah. I think generally humanity being more connected, that's my overall high-level view of it, is a net positive. I think there are people around the world who would never be...

who would never be interested in products that have seen product videos on YouTube from some kid in New Jersey and have decided, yeah, it actually turns out I'm interested in that. And it's like something they never would have found if there wasn't this connective tissue between us. So I think that's cool. Yeah. How would you describe what you've done? I wrote down what I think you represent to culture and media. How would I describe what I've done? I've just...

I decided to make videos I would want to watch and try to be entertaining and helpful along the way. And there's products in there. How would you describe what you asked that? And I was kind of like, I hope he doesn't ask me this. Cause I don't know if I've thought about, yeah. Um, I mean, I, I would like to think that we're generally, we're informing people on decisions that are sometimes harder to make and when money's involved in that and we're in a space, but

Where money is involved very much so. And we like to help people. As somebody who I cannot purchase something without spending days researching about it, it makes me feel a little better that somebody maybe has a little more confidence in taking that step. But again, this is ultra material based. This is like very, very...

I mean, we're focused on gadgets. We're focused on spending money. That's what it does boil down to. - You know what I wanna be? - What's that? - I wanna be the Neil deGrasse Tyson of gadgets, of tech. - Wow. - 'Cause you know what Neil does? He makes science and space, just scientific literacy fun. Like listening to him talk about the universe

And like reading his book on the universe, like I don't think I ever would have read a book on the universe. But reading his and like learning about the origins of these things and the scientific fundamentals behind how the earth got to be where it is and how the stars in the sky are the way they are and what's happening to them and all this stuff. And the way he makes that entertaining is just like that's I'm glad it feels like it's for a greater good, which is scientific literacy. But he's really good at the storytelling and the entertainment with science.

profound scientific fundamentals that make it all work. And I want to be that for technology. I was going to say what I wrote down about you is you're the Mr. Rogers meets LeVar Burton of technology. Mr. Rogers, yeah. Mr. Rogers meets LeVar. And I don't mean that as an insult. I mean, that actually is a big compliment. Fred Rogers and LeVar Burton have done so much for education and humanity and children. And they're like a warm blanket in a cold, cold world. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a Neil deGrasse Tyson in there. I think I'm right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like,

Like I can see that. And one of the things that I hope that my concern with technology, but my hope ultimately is, is how do we bring big Wikipedia energy to the internet and the tech world? Big Wiki energy. Because Wikipedia is this, okay. So social media is Mad Max Fury Road. It's just filled with insane actors. And then Wikipedia is just this very, just like,

- Calm, cool, collected, non-toxic, safe place. - That's how it looks from the outside. I wonder, is it really that all the time? You know what's funny about Wikipedia? So for a while, before I hit 10 million subscribers, I didn't tell anyone my middle name, right? And it became this like working mystery in the background. And the fact is, it was kind of out there already, but people would be guessing what they thought it was, and they would change my Wikipedia to what they thought it was. And if they changed it too many times, Wikipedia would lock it for vandalism.

But when they locked it, it would lock on one of the wrong answers. So anytime anyone went to Wikipedia, it would be the wrong answer. Anytime anyone asked Google, it would repeat the Wikipedia wrong answer. And it became this thing where it was just like there was this war behind the Wikipedia misinformation. And I wonder, like I do see Wikipedia from the outside as like this, like here's the sources. Here's the information. Here's the new thing. Here it is.

Yeah. And I wonder if it's always like that. Well, I'll just do this from personal experience. Type in the word Muslim into Google and Twitter and it's pretty ugly. Just type in Muslim into Wikipedia. Hey, this is Islam. This is just, you know, blah, blah, blah, two billion people. It's a very, do you know what I mean? Cut to any sort of, again, like contentious third rail issue. It is like,

broadcast of of that content yeah again not perfect it is it can be imperfect but what I mean by that is just the boiling temperature is way down and it's

stays pretty calm and collected. I wonder maybe your guys' algorithm is way different than mine. Maybe mine's is insane and yours is just much calmer. So you have like a more Twitter maybe or Twitter and probably YouTube maybe because I have to, I have to wait in like culture and politics and all these things. My, my YouTube recommendations are so many it's, it's products. It's like tutorials, how to use. Okay, great. Pretty tame.

Okay, got it. Got it, got it, got it. I think my Twitter is closer to you. My YouTube is a little more tame because it's like video games and tech and hockey. That's about it. Oh, great. But Twitter, yeah. Okay. I see what you mean. It's the ultra polarizing versus the middle of the road. And like you would prefer to just be the middle of the road, easier going. Maybe I'm not... A sane version. Sane. Sane, yeah. Yeah, just sane, you know? And it's not...

It is not incentivized to trigger me or to get me to feel an extreme emotion. Kind of you're tricking me. You're tricking me into being either upset. You're just manipulating my emotions, getting me to be really upset or crying or sad about this particular thing, you know.

There's a lot of times where you close Twitter because you can't deal with that anymore. And there's not a lot of times you close Wikipedia because it's making you feel uncertain. I can't deal with all these sources. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just can't deal with this like nuance and depth and all this information that's coming to me. Yeah. You probably have some questions. I had a few more questions for you. Is that okay? Go for it. Yeah. Yeah.

How do you feel about AI? Are you optimistic about it and DALI and all this stuff that's happening? I was going to ask you. Where did I see DALI right there in my notes? I was going to talk about DALI. Did you write this out or you typed it? I typed this. I mean, I can, you know, yes. I have a lot of thoughts about AI. I was going to ask you about DALI. I am optimistic and I know that there is a heavy dose of skepticism on the edges that I have to have.

But I think something like DALI is a great, interesting example because it lets just project out and gets better over time. Right now, DALI can generate photorealistic thousand by thousand pixel images with a text prompt.

Is that art? That's like kind of the question right now, whatever. But let's say, let's fast forward. Let's say now sometime in the future, it can give us like a 30 second clip, like a video clip, moving clip. Then you fast forward to the future. It gives us like a nine minute YouTube video. Keep fast forwarding. It's giving us the Patriot Act. It's giving us shows. It's giving us a comedy special. Is that watchable? Is that art? Is that creative? What is that? So my opinion is that,

When it is more robot than human to me I define art as a human expression of emotion that helps me understand the world and what it means to be human loss pain jealousy and anger envy love those are the things of what it means to be a human being a sentient being on planet Earth and

And sure, AI could maybe like masquerade as that. It draws from all previous human expressions. Yeah. And does that matter? Yeah. To me, the thing about a movie or a poem or a song that moves you to tears is the fact that those words were belted from a human being. They're expressing the pathos and the emotion of what it means to be human. That's why people are crying at Adele concerts and stuff. Like they can tell that Adele is singing from a place of pain and it's not –

Dolly that is like, you know, programming and, you know, I'll toss this at you. There are entire. Do you care? I mean, do you, it seems like you're just more stoic about it. You're saying, I don't care. I, I'm a, I know that I'm a less sentimental person. I don't think I'm fully on cold robot side, but I am, I am, I am,

shifting that side of the spectrum, I can tell. There are entire YouTube channels like VTubers where it's not a real person. It's an animated person with scripts written by AI that just self-generates new videos and people subscribe to it. Not all of them are. But these exist. Some of these exist and people subscribe to them and become fans of them and get invested and watch them and care about them. They're not people.

How? How is that real? And you're right. And maybe it's like, hey, Mario and Luigi aren't real. They are just video game characters. Pikachu is not a real thing. That is like a cartoon. Human creation. Human creation, yeah. I think what we're talking about, though, is the fact that Mario and Luigi were real.

with the human touch. And there was that kind of feeling. And this goes back to like ancient tradition where there is this, I think somehow inherent belief in us as human beings that we are the creation of God and we are a representation of that. And when we create worlds, it's that.

But you seem like, do you feel like you'd be like, yeah, that's fine. I would subscribe to an AI generated channel if it was good enough. I do think I would not subscribe to it. And I prefer the human version, the human generated version. I just can't articulate why.

And I can't figure out why. It's kind of like the VR question of like, if VR becomes so immersive, I think Neil deGrasse Tyson asked me the same question. If VR becomes so immersive that it completely covers a field of view that perfectly matches your vision, you have headphones on and you can't feel, you hear everything perfectly, it immerses all seven of your senses, you think you're in a new world, it is perfectly realistic, will you still...

feel the need to like like if you observe the Grand Canyon through this VR and then you take the headset off will you still feel like you've seen the Grand Canyon knowing that it's VR even though it's a perfect representation through VR yeah

I still feel like I want to see the actual Grand Canyon because look at the thing. Like that is, you get to visualize the river carving out the canyon and the whole thing, but like I've seen it already. I don't know why, but I still want to see the real thing. I can't figure out like how to articulate why. That's my problem. So I like the real thing. I just- Do you want to know why I think it is? I would love that.

So the internet and technology created an idea of infinity. And the reason why life is beautiful is because it is fundamentally limited. This may be like the last interaction we have and there's something beautiful in that. Or like when you say you love someone and they say they love you back, there is that inherent risk. There is that skin in the game of like, I don't know if they are or they're not. And the fact that our memory and our existence is finite makes it beautiful.

Whereas if you can play the Legend of Zelda and just hit restart, it doesn't have that feeling. And that is the only hope that I have going forward. The feeling that like,

technology and the companies have tried to mimic the beauty of humanity as best as they could, but pornography will never feel as good as the touch of a person that you love. It just won't. And no matter like how many tabs of, sorry to get crass, of it you want to open, it just won't. Like I still will be sitting in my boxers ashamed. You cannot make it more meaningful than the real thing. Yeah. That, that's,

It hasn't happened yet. And I and I think they're just trying to make the they're just turning up the realism knobs on everything They're just trying to make the soda the Facebook fentanyl the social media meth there the Heisenberg blue stronger But at the end of the day, you're still snorting Heisenberg blue. That's the thing you can't get around That is the only like sense of you know, I want you to be right. I

I so want to be rich. Because there's a lot of younger people whose lines are blurred way more than ours. Yeah. And I can't wait to watch the MKBHD video where they, where like the younger people that you work with tie you to the

To the chair? Plug me in. And they just plug you in. It might happen someday, but I'm holding on to the... What did you mean by I'm a less sentimental person? What does that mean? I just, I am, I think in the general like sense of it, like I don't hold on to old things as much. Oh, really? I'm like, I'm very pragmatic about like things I need and things I get rid of. So I don't really hold on to...

like tangible objects as if they have, I think a lot of people connect them to a memory. They don't want to get rid of it. I'm just, I don't need it anymore. Really? Yeah, that's me. Wow. Okay. Can I ask you guys this? I can tell you, I can tell by your body language, you need to leave. No, no. Oh, sincerely. You don't, you don't have to go. No, we got all day. Okay. So we got, I have two worlds that I want to touch with you, touch on with you guys. Um, and then, and then you tell them, tell me how you want to approach it. Um, I want to talk about, uh, I would love your perspective about this.

Coming from the world that I've come from, my world majority being like political comedy and satire, the kind of – the apex of what I've done is sat down with heads of state and get to interview them. But fundamentally politics is about messaging and technology is about product itself.

What's interesting is now tech and public policy, these things are overlapping in a really interesting, fascinating way. So what I wanted to ask you about was what you think is happening right now with Twitter. You spent a lot of time with Elon Musk. And what you feel like your responsibility has been now as a person who's been able to sit down with some of the most powerful people in the world. And I would argue they're bigger than autocrats and politicians in their impact on the world. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really... It's three parts, but I loved it. I like... So with Twitter, it's like...

Really hard to answer because that will only come from the mind of Elon probably as far as like there's a lot of theories about what people think he's trying to do versus what's happening versus what is about to happen. All I know is I know people who've worked at Twitter for a long time who are just like, yeah, I'm leaving. There's no clear vision here. No one's communicated to us what we're supposed to be doing here, which is perfectly reasonable reason to leave. But it does feel like

The other companies that Elon's built were very much engineering problems.

That he solved. Yeah, and that was I mean the team the teams involved are amazing obviously launching rockets and landing them electric cars the whole thing is is incredible Twitter is a People problem it feels like like a social problem and it's a very different problem to solve So I think he's going about it trying to fix the company And I don't know how connected that will be to like Twitter itself Twitter is all about the people who are on Twitter and

And I think when you lose that, you don't really get it back. But I'm kind of just watching what he does with the company itself. I think he's just kind of like hitting the reset button on the entire company. Oh, people who work here have this history and this expectation of what working for Twitter will be like. Take this, throw it out, put in new people who are kind of like people who work for Tesla or SpaceX, who are like just willing to do what I say about my vision here for Tesla or for Twitter.

That's one thing. I don't really know how to feel about that. That's just like what he's doing with the company. He's run companies before. Cool. But I really like Twitter, like using Twitter. Really? Like I tweet all the time. I get instant feedback on my thoughts from fans. Like I interact with people. I was just... You're one of the few... I have... I love Twitter. I have like moved away from... You've distanced yourself? Well, because I think...

The types of ideas that comedy politics you're wading into, it's not a healthy place. I see. I think. Yeah. Can tech review be an unhealthy place? Are people generally good faith actors? I think people are generally –

Yeah, generally. I can tell from your... There are very vocal edges, I will say that. I would also say tech Twitter seems to be, like on the optimistic side, tech Twitter seems to be very tight-knit and generally an equal mindset where like ultimately the things we're arguing about are like,

products and stuff where it's less along the lines i mean you do say like you said it's getting closer and closer to those people being the most powerful over potentially politicians for sure for sure so like we'll see in a few years where that gets to but yeah tech twitter versus political twitter might be a little just more like i love twitter as well i i'm very worried about something happening to it because it feels like it's going down a bad path right now yeah um but

There are sides of tech Twitter that are insanely toxic, that are just very... And I find it interesting to even go back to kind of a point you made before of just like, these companies are making things for profits, but they have found ways to make people their absolute diehard loyal fans. And like they can do no wrong despite...

Those companies probably do not care about these people. They care about their wallet. They do not care about them at all, whether they're having a good experience, whether their printer is working or not. And those people will fight to the death for them. And then that can create problems.

- Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. And before I lose this thought, can we hit pause on this? There's two fundamental things that I wanted to add as a pitch for your dear Twitter thing, but we just didn't know each other at the time. But we could talk about this later. I can do punch up for free. - No, yeah, that's perfect. - Well, there's actually two things that I actually think are a big part of the problem and something that's worth considering. I think the quote tweet function fundamentally incentivizes bad faith actors and bad behavior.

And because the quote tweet function socializes posting. So you have a video and you're like strongly disagree. And I can get clout by posting or dunking on someone else's idea. Prime example of that was the cottage industry of Trump tweeting and outrage to Trump or the other side of it. Somebody on the left tweeting and then outrage to said thing. But

the move was exactly the same. Look at person below. Aren't they stupid? And so the things that are necessary, I think for like a functioning, robust society, which is like,

conversation, dialogue, understanding, like coming together. Sorry, I'm being sentimental here. No, I agree. But like all of these things, like even simple things of like, I bump into you on the subway, my bad. That is not an incentivized behavior on Twitter. And that was really bad. Incentive, yes. Second thing. So you've incentivized bad faith actors and bad behavior. You can quickly rise the ranks through that. And we are just...

incentive machines. Like human beings, we are designed that way. Hey, why are you studying this in college? Why did you choose this as a career path? Because of certain social and economic incentives. Number two, the pipeline from Twitter to media to Google News, that one, two, three was a quick like tornado of absolute insanity.

absolute, absolute insanity. And the fact that blue check journalist Twitters, Twitter, like I call it journal Twitter from tech Twitter to New York Times, Twitter to it all exists on Twitter can make something that is of small size and of minimal scale, the biggest story in the world.

And can tear apart the fundamental fabric of society. And we've seen that manifest itself from, you know, political insurrections in our own country to what's happening in Myanmar, India, like everywhere.

Just mobs of people causing actual violence in the streets. That to me is like, oh, this did not exist in 1999. This did not happen in 2003 this way. And it all starts with Twitter. PV was going to write a whole Patriot Act episode on this. Like, just like me to camera being like, here's the breakdown of like how it is.

fundamentally affected society in a profoundly negative way. And it's quickly through this quote tweet to news, to Google news, and now it's officially a real thing. So you can make the nothing something. God help us all. I mean, that is like the devil as a thing. Yeah. I kind of wonder, because I see this as well, and I also think like, first of all, the quote tweet thing

As far as the way it was designed, it was probably designed with the positive version of it in mind where it's like I can reply to someone, but then people might not see who follow me. So maybe someone has this bit of information. I want to add some information. So I'm going to quote tweet. Here's also my perspective. Boom. That's like I've seen lots of positive quote tweets. But then which version is incentivized is the question. And I think that's not guided by Twitter guidelines as much as it's guided by human behavior and

And then the version of like. But wait, can we, let's, let's, let's interrogate that more. Yeah. It's tapped into the worst of human behavior. Yeah. To go back to what we started with, the reason why I'm here is actually some of the stuff that exists in the DNA of your work represents, I believe, the best of human behavior. Noble, honest, sincere, straightforward. Like these are the best things about human beings. Yeah.

They are difficult to achieve. They are like they are not as incentivized as salaciousness, lewdness, crudeness,

insults, ad hominem attacks. Those are the worst of like schoolyard bullying. By the way, I'm a comic. We can do that. You want my tongue to be a razor blade? I can play that game. We will all feel icky in society. We will ultimately be worse for it, but we can do that. It is in our DNA as well. And I think what it did is it incentivized that part of it because it is more profitable.

I got to get you to feel an extreme emotion, extreme anger. Yeah. Extreme. And it's easier to hit like rage than it is to hit extreme happiness or because we've seen like occasional things.

positive stories. Yes. But the viral negative story is way more common. Yeah. Fully agreed. Yeah. Yeah. It does take it takes a bit of effort to work against or to work towards something that is not incentivized. And I think I guess I get a little bit of I

energy from the fact that people do occasionally notice and appreciate when something that you're doing that isn't incentivized is positive. Yeah. And trust me, I've had videos and things go viral because it's like there is something true in it that really resonates deeply. Yeah. But there is a difference between a tool which is designed to help humans and a weapon which is designed to hurt human beings.

And I think that the percentage right now, in my opinion, and again, I'm open to being convinced, is that it's 80% weapon, 20% tool. I would be curious about that because you remember when YouTube got rid of, what did they do? The dislike button. They got rid of the dislike button and their public reasoning for that was this is being used as a tool to harm people.

Meaning like a dislike brigade on a video for a creator that's like having a personal story or like sharing something vulnerable and then a dislike brigade coming from some other outside site. And it's like, we just got rid of the button across the whole site. And that made me think immediately, like, how frequent was that? Was it 10% of videos? Was it 1% of videos? But at the end of the day, it didn't really matter because the couple of times that did happen was enough for them to go, yeah, we just don't want this to happen anymore. And.

And I wonder the same thing about Twitter, which is like, I know what's visible to me, which is Twitter's kind of what I make of it. It's who I follow. I see a lot of positive things, but there's the trending stuff. There's the negative stuff. How much of this usage of this tool is actually negative? And is it skewed enough for Twitter to do anything about it like YouTube did?

I can't really tell. I don't have the numbers. I can just tell what I observe based on my timeline. You've curated a pretty healthy experience. I think the, yeah, I think my Twitter experience is pretty close to what I've designed, which is a lot of,

You've created like a digital utopia. I've made a nice little echo chamber of positive thoughts, which is nice. Yeah. Which is cool. I think that the dislike comparison is a little tough though, because as somebody who goes and dislikes a video, I gain nothing out of that. Whereas someone who goes and quote tweets a tweet with a, a,

take on it, I can gain off of that because that can then be promoted in the algorithm. That can make it to other people's timelines. People can see that that's doing that and then they can be incentivized to now do that as well. So like the extra, what you're gaining out of that and what Twitter's algorithm is potentially pushing that forward is when it makes it so much more dangerous and so much more common, I think, than just

Thumbs down on a YouTube video that no one sees you do it's yeah people seeing you do it and then those people also wanting to do it feels so much worse I will say that humans always will find a way to to create the most negative version of a feature Do you remember video responses on YouTube like they eventually got rid of it because it was abused I loved the idea which is you make a video and

and someone has a response for you in video form. Instead of a comment, they can make a video response. They click a video response button, they record it to their webcam, and it shows up underneath the video. In the comments. Right above the comments is the video responses. It's like, wow, I just finished this video from Hank Green about why this new thing is the future, but oh, there's a video response from a scientist. Let me watch that. And it was a great...

tool, but it was obviously going to be gamed by the worst possible actors. Sure enough, there's like people, you know, thumbnail abusing, idea abusing the whole thing. They knew the feature. Yeah. And I just think like, you're probably right about quote tweets. Let's say they get rid of it. Yeah. They're onto the next one. They're going to find the next possible way to be the bad actor, even just because they're incentivized in that way.

to get the most attention from rage from this one feature. - I just don't think, I don't think there's money in goodness. That's the problem. And like, that's the thing I'm trying to, again, I respect, and I sincerely like pray and hope for the best for you guys because of that. And I try to like live my life that way, just as a personal life decision. That being said,

One of the, I'll give you, I'll actually, I'll give you one because I'm sure there's waveform listeners that are like, I love technology. So I'll give you an example of a community that I love, but it couldn't scale. So when I first moved to New York, I got hired at the Daily Show. I didn't own a suit. I needed to, I needed to understand where to go. And for guys, there's just not a healthy place to go to be like, hey man, where do I buy a suit? And you're not going to make fun of me because that's the problem. It's like, hey dude, I actually need to go do this and I can't be clowned right now. Let's get roasted, yeah.

"Yeah, we just don't have time for that right now." There's a group on Reddit called reddit.com/rmalefashionadvice and it's a bunch of dudes and you're nodding your head. You know what I'm talking about, right? You're just like, "Hey, no ego. Hey man, where do I buy chinos?"

And like, and the moderators are really cool. They're like, yo, we are trying to help people here. So like no roasting, no snaps, no blah, blah, blah, blah. Like just try to, you know, big up people or help them out. And what was really cool about the community is

And certain urban cities where guys, you know, like 25 year old guys or whatever, were going out for their first job. They'd all help one another. Hey man, I have this jacket. I gained a little bit of weight. It doesn't fit me anymore. Why don't you take it? And people were helping each other out. Funny enough, that community helped me when I first moved there. And I used, you know, like my government name and people were actually like really like kind and sincere. And the mods were like,

Hey, be positive, be proactive and exhibit skin in the game. And if you are a bad faith poster, we're booting you out. The problem is, is that like that group only hovers at a certain number, unfortunately. Right. You know, and it doesn't scale or bring more people in because there's no car crash to watch. Right. There is no like Andrew Tate fight. Right.

where people are kickboxing and, you know, like spitting on each other and calling each other names or whatever. There is no spectacle, unfortunately. Do you think that's also partially because there's no one jostling to be the top dog when communities are smaller like that and then therefore creates just a more intimate, because like, I love Reddit. Reddit is,

When you were- There's probably sub pockets that aren't good. Yeah, there are terrible Reddits for sure. There are big Reddits that aren't as fun because it's not a community, but I've seen Reddit. And in some cases there's like Discord communities that are also very active. And generally it's because it's appointed moderators that have a general goal and then you can create a good atmosphere there. Yeah, so I thought about this. So this is, and I would love to know what you think about this. The problem with-

I would just say social media platforms or media platforms is they have removed skin in the game. So what I mean by that is that they have removed the say that shit to my face factor. Oh, yeah. There was a level of like whether it's ultimate or basketball, like if people talk shit, you are going to pay a price. And if you really believe it.

Sometimes a fight would break out at 24 Hour Fitness. That being said, there was – there's a great book called Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb. It was one of my favorite authors. But there is actually an honor in that because –

There would be a scuffle and all parties involved at the 24 Hour Fitness would go, this is mutually assured destruction. We cannot just fist fight at 24 Hour Fitness. Break it up. And for the rest of the night, there's actually no more fights or those two people that fight get booted from the gym and then like calmness is gone.

Because we know those, those guys' government names. Don't let John and Brad back into the gym. They're bad faith. They're just bad dudes. Don't, don't let them back in here. But if Baldrape79 and AfghanKiller917, these guys at scale can then just create havoc. There is no skin in the game. And that there's part of me that that's what I want to be. That was a pitch that I had potentially for Twitter, um,

I need your government name because if you don't have anything to lose, you can just create havoc. I want your fucking LinkedIn profile here. So, hey, you want to cause havoc? You might lose your job at FedEx. Like I need to know it's for real, for real, because everything that I do, I'm 10 toes down on.

If I'm a bad comment, I'm going to lose my living. My kids won't get braces. Like we won't, I won't be able to provide for my mom and dad and all that stuff. So at least you can disagree with me, but you know that I'm being sincere and authentic and Twitter doesn't have that. Now I will provide a caveat. I understand there are whistleblowers and there are people that live in autocratic regimes that need a safe way to express themselves. Mm-hmm.

I think those the platform should provide that anonymity. But I think you have there has to be some backdoor verification like whistleblower or like, you know, protected rights kind of program there for that for that. But the stuff I'm seeing on YouTube and Twitter, that's amateur hour. These are not like activists in Iran that are like trying to be protected and not be persecuted by the state.

Yeah. These are people that are just trying to post your hot ones video. In the comment section. Yeah. You know what I mean? And I think that like nature in society and human beings living amongst each other, we are sitting on millions of years of just like data that has provided this like kind of beautiful system. Yeah. You know? And the algorithm is trying to catch up to that or it's like a couple engineers in San Bruno that are trying to create

Yeah, I also think about how real are the consequences of the...

chaos, like the anonymous fights? Like, you know, give the example of like two people come into a gym, they fight, they leave, they're real people. Two anonymous characters arrive in a comment section on Reddit, they fight, they leave. How damaging was that fight to the subreddit around them? Much less than the gym? No, no. This is the problem is our fundamental reliance on technology means, potentially, say, um,

Four people on Twitter say Marques Brownlee is a racist. I already have a filter for this. Hypothetically, right? Yeah. Then NBC News uses those as primary source reports. This is the problem without like actual documents and evidence that is tied to, again, a government name. Mm-hmm.

Trust me. I mean, this is like the Patriot Act. I'm all about, hey, whistleblowers, people that are trying to like through evidence, you know, provide, you know, stuff to protect themselves. I totally get that. And I'm for that. Those persons that people say that about Marquez, NBC News picks it up. And because Twitter is now an aggregator.

It's through that same pipeline for people. Anonymous people tweeted this about Marques Brownlee at NBC News decides to pick it up because of that at CBS News picks up the reporting of NBC News at Huffington Post picks it up. Then that's pipelined into Google News, which Google now, you know, they said the New York Times is all the news that's fit to print or it's the it's the paper of record.

That gets the pass. Google News is the paper of record. That's your reality. And if I'm Marquez's mom and I'm just like, I type in Marquez Rowley and I go, Marquez, I didn't know you were a racist. I didn't know this about you. This is a surprise. Do you see the level of chaos four people have caused? We have now careened into this fucking tornado of insanity.

That has not been corroborated in actual like capital T truth. That's my problem. That a small, like a small group of people can create absolute chaos and it has just been amplified by technology. It's been worsened. So I disagree with you. Those two people fist fighting,

We can identify the problem. We all know who these people are. We know their driver's license. We know like their name. We know that they're booted out of 24 Hour Fitness. We're never gonna have to deal with them again. And it is not, it is not like, it is not metastasized and just-

become a wildfire right yeah i'll be honest man the people that like have said mean things to me are like on the internet i go i'd rather have you just punch me in the face can you punch me in the face then actually your name is attached to it yeah because we're actually done with this yeah it is not etched in amber of the internet yeah please please actually you know when they're just like words or violence i actually prefer please be violent

I actually want you to hurt me. For the record, don't come punch me in the face. But I do feel that way. I was just like, let's just be done with this. Whenever I start to see the random, I think there's a lot of incentive for people to say the craziest possible thing for attention. And so kind of the way I've behaved online as a whole in general is I try to reward the behaviors that I like.

right so if there are people who are leaving constructive criticism i actually respond and will say thanks for the feedback and we'll implement the feedback and if i have people going hey this video was great or just like blank empty feedback i don't respond to them and if there are people who are just giving blank empty criticism this video sucked i don't respond to them and so i think

people who are after attention over time start to notice what you're rewarding and will sort of bend to what you're incentivizing. And this is just me online. So I noticed that when people try to get my attention, they will start with crazy, crass things. They'll start with what those four people said and tweet at me and try to get my attention that way. And I just ignore it completely.

And they'll slowly realize that the way to get attention is to be reasonable and constructive. And then they'll actually be rewarded in that way, just with like a reply or if attention is all they want, then they got a reply. And so I think a lot about like, how do we build larger incentives around us online and

to make sure the things that we want to happen are actually happening and rewarded and the things that we don't want to happen, which is lots of examples we can give, are completely unrewarded. It's harder when it's anonymous, for sure. It's a thousand percent harder because people don't walk up to you in the street and start with the crazy, crass thing. They kind of have a narrower window of what they start with because it's in real life.

But I do think that at least the way I try to behave online is like rewarding. I feel like you should run some of these tech companies then. This kind of like big NPR high school librarian energy of just like, hey, I'm here for curiosity, like well-constructed debate. Yeah.

I would be, I would build, I would be building in rules into the platforms that incentivize that. Yeah. Kind of like Wikipedia. There's probably like a system. That's what I'm saying. Wikipedia editors for good edits. Yeah. These are, they're super wiki users. Yeah. Isn't there, aren't there like super wiki people? Sorry, my mic isn't plugged in. As far as I know. Yeah. Um,

It's like totally on our system. There's negative consequences if you're making edits to articles that are constantly being re-edited, then you will get privileges revoked. That's great. But I don't think there's any sort of like karma. Yeah, that's the best part of the internet.

I mean, those people are just the true heroes, right? Do you donate to Wikipedia? I don't, but I know. How dare you, Marques? Do you? Of course. Of course you do. Of course you do. I should. Isn't it? This is why, Marques. Marques, this is why we deserve nothing. We'll do this on air. Humanity deserves nothing. As I'm recording. Every like two months, Wikipedia goes panhandling. Like, please give us $4. And you're like, shut the fuck up.

of Wikipedia. What have I ever gotten from it other than my college education? I have to renew Peacock right now for $9 a month. They have given us so much. It's true. That's what I mean by that. I'm like, that Wikipedia thing is just a macro... That is a macro representation of what is wrong with humanity. Yes. If Wikipedia went behind a paywall right now,

How would would they go under or would people pay for Wikipedia? They're so useful. I would pay for sure. I would pay. I think a lot of reasonable people would pay, but a lot of people would get mad. We have gone down a little little bit of a side tangent. What do you you know, we didn't get to the other two questions, but what do you feel about do you hope Twitter is going to work? And do you ultimately think it's going to work?

Yeah, I, so there's the business behind the scenes half of Twitter and then there's a public facing version of Twitter. I like Twitter and I hope Twitter works. I hope Twitter continues to exist. And if there are changes made to Twitter, I do hope that they're somewhat in the vein of incentivizing positive behavior. I think that's a good goal to have for Twitter. But I like just to be, because it's for me, it's the creative part of my brain, just like vomiting out thoughts into the world and getting instant feedback on them. Like that's fun. I just like that. It's just like, and I-

I live in that world all the time. I mean, you have been able to curate like a really amazing experience because there's so many ideas that I have that I will work out privately. I'm like, there's no way I'm going to open this up to the masses. I have to, I want to talk this out.

But you've somehow been able to be like, here's my unadulterated thoughts. Let me just straight up put it out there. Here's a poll, A, B, or C. Here's a question. What do you guys want to know? Maybe it's also the fundamental, like the world you are trafficking in is, again, as objective as it could be in a subjective world.

Do you prefer, you know, phone A, B or C? Yeah. Are you excited about the new Apple? Yeah, it removes nuance for sure. I'm not getting nuance feedback on Twitter. I'm getting like the like I wish I could A, B test versions of thumbnails on YouTube, but I can't. So let me just tweet both images and ask what Twitter thinks. And I'll get I'll get a pretty broad brush version of. Yeah, I can work with that. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's why I like Twitter because I wouldn't do that on Instagram. I wouldn't do that on LinkedIn. I wouldn't do that on Facebook. I wouldn't do that anywhere else. So that's, I like Twitter. I like having Twitter for that little blurbs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if Twitter created subcategories so you were on a specific timeline similar to a subreddit? Oh, that's cool. Like Google+. Now you're like, I just want to watch my technology timeline right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were working on that feature. I know they have the like,

what are you interested in? Click this. But then it just shows you people from those. And like, and then you're following that. Now your timeline is still this mess of stuff. Yeah. Cause I forgot. I mean, Marquez isn't like gun rights, your thoughts, like you're not, you're not open. They were working on a feature. I don't think it was called circles. I think it was called communities or groups or something like that. But you could tweet to a group.

- Okay. - A certain group, and you could label a group and section off a certain amount of people and only people in the group could see the tweet. - Yeah. - And so then you're curating your engagement based on people who you want to see a thing. That removes like the public facing, I was just talking to YouTube about this last week, like when you say something publicly, you make a YouTube video public, it's the equivalent of getting on a stage, saying something into the microphone, and the doors of the theater are open. You don't know how many people will come in. You could get three views. You could get three million views. - Yeah. - But it's public.

So should you have a place to share something privately or with a smaller group where you can really curate that feedback and not risk the public overreaction or the blowing up, suddenly NBC picks it up, that whole ladder, and you can just share with a private group and a smaller group? YouTube is genuinely curious about that, and I think that there is a big difference between putting it on the stage and risking three versus three million

Or just guaranteeing these 200 people can and can't. I call that, you know, what you're talking about circles, rough draft versus final draft. And there is something really beautiful. If you wanted to go to, you know, New York tonight and see me on stage, we'd go to the West Village, you'd go to a basement. And there's part of the social contract of I'm f***ed.

around. I'm just reading my rough draft. Yeah. Please do not use this as an indictment of who I am as a human being. I'm I am still in V1.6. It won't even be ready until V3. That's the difference between us is I don't get the rough draft of the product review video.

So there is no like medium in between the idea and hitting publish. So there's a lot of weight on that publish button because that's the final draft and that's when everyone sees it right there. You might see the beginnings of the thoughts of it developing on Twitter or maybe I had an Instagram story and I pulled somebody or I asked a few things or you saw it developing. But the final draft just drops and it's just like –

I hope like all the pressure is on that, but I hope I did a good job there. And there it is. Can I ask you a question? If you were to, you've now been, you know, one of the people on YouTube that has been here for quite a long time and you've stayed on the platform. Yeah. If you had to start all over again, could you do it? Today? Yeah. In today's environment? I could, but it would be a very different path. You'd have to work. You'd have to, it's a different set of skills that you have to learn in a different order.

So when I started in 2009, it was like, I just wanted to make better videos, better videos, better videos, had no thoughts about SEO, packaging, thumbnails, titles, tags, descriptions, copywriting, advertising. Didn't think about that for five plus years. If you wanted to start over today, that would be near the top of your list of things. Otherwise your videos,

will never grow or take off or be viewed in a way that you're probably, if you're intending to get to where we are today, you'd never get there. So it's a different set of skills learned in a different order. And I see that all the time in like people starting new channels in 2022 and immediately they're diving headfirst into like,

First, I think of a title, then a thumbnail, then a video idea to satisfy the title and thumbnail, then the actual video production behind it. Oh, boy. That's like how videos you've seen the crazy thumbnails and everything like that. That's totally how those get made. Totally. Which is the exact backwards way of how I was making videos for eight, nine years, which was idea. I have an idea from the idea. I've made it. And as it's uploading, I go, what do I title this?

I don't think I have a thumbnail for this. I'll just toss one out. Like the packaging was the last, it was the afterthought. So yes, you can start today, but it will look very different. It will literally look very different from how it started. But if you're starting from like a marketing slash sensational spectacle aspect, that is not incentivizing good ideas.

First, it's incentivizing extreme ideas. It's incentivizing extreme packaging. Yeah. I think you can do. I think there's a lot of good examples of extreme packaging with good ideas behind them. A lot of my friends, they constantly have to justify it to their audience who is like, why are you doing these cringy things?

mouth open neon thumbnails. I hate these. It's like, it's like an insult to my intelligence that I have to click these. I don't even know what the video is about. It just says like this thing sucks and I don't know what, it's a blurred product. I don't know what this is. It's extreme packaging and then you click the video and it's a 12 minute well thought out in-depth analysis of a topic that I would love to have clicked on if it had better packaging. Yeah.

And so I think, yeah, you do incentivize crazy packaging for sure in this day and age if you start. Yeah. And what you hope for, I mean, the downside, the tail risk of that is if you're incentivizing insane packaging –

The idea itself could match the thumbnail. Yeah, you try to match the thumbnail. Yeah, which is because, again, because you don't want to seem duplicitous. So it's like how I lost a million dollars buying da-da-da. And you're like, I guess I got to do this insane thing. I may not believe in it. You've spent a lot of time with Elon Musk. And I've noticed that the media covers him very differently than the way people who are fans of him cover him.

What is something that the media or the general public doesn't understand about him that you feel needs to be thought about?

I don't know if it's a lack of understanding as much as it's, um, I think we've only, we've only done, we did two videos with him, which was, uh, an interview and then a factory tour. And the factory tour was fun. Just like walking around pointing at stuff, just being a nerd for 45 minutes in a factory making cars. Yeah. Um, and I think a lot of the stuff that's not necessarily not understood, but just like boring and not fun to cover or not as salacious is just like,

a nerd, just like a guy who's just like in the trenches of engineering and is like obsessively micromanaging an engineering company, which is like, I say this all the time. Some of my favorite executives to talk to are like the product people. And a lot of companies are, they have product people and those people don't get camera time. And it's the marketing people that get the, that get pushed to the front. You get to talk to them and that's no fun. You're speaking my language and I just want to do this in advance. I want to apologize to you.

All the engineers out there, all the people that code and design and are behind the scenes. Tyler, I want to apologize. No, because what's beautiful about engineering and science, it's kind of crazy that I'm saying this as a comedian and I'm actually proving my father right. I should have studied medicine. But what's cool about science and engineering is that you have to humble yourself to something beyond your own opinion. Mm-hmm.

You can have ideas about how something should be, but it's, it doesn't matter. Yeah. It's up to physics. You are fighting physics, which is like, whatever you want to call it, physics, God, the universe, you must submit to something bigger than yourself. Yep. And Twitter, get back to it, and social media, everyone's God is their opinion. And what a horrifying place to be.

If you've ever been at like Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving dinner and like all your families are on the table and you're just hearing everyone's opinion. Yeah, I just scaled it up to 8 billion people. What a nightmare. Yeah. But somehow Marquez, you don't feel like it is a nightmare. Yeah.

I guess it's about what I've curated. Yeah, I guess it's about your experience. I've curated it, yeah. So there's that. Last question for you. Do you have any questions? No, you went through everything. Let me check. I might have one. Actually, I do have one. I have one. Oh, yeah? Okay. So I'm going to end with this. This is really fun. Okay, yeah.

You got to do something that I've always wanted to do. I got to go sit down with heads of state. Oh, wait, no, no, no. Let's finish this. Do you feel a level of responsibility that you're interviewing some of the most powerful people in the world? And as much as you're like, I'm just the gizmo gadget guy. These are people that like,

The engineers in San Bruno actually shape society, I would argue, even more than the politician and diplomat in D.C. Fully agreed. So this is completely unintentional. I do feel that I bear that responsibility now. But the way this started with these interviews, my first ever interview as like a

quivering high school child was Kobe Bryant during his farewell tour at the Staples Center. Oh, this is the sneaker one. I was going to ask you about this. That was my first on-camera interview with anyone ever. Wow. This is for the Kobe 9, right? Yeah. And so I was like, okay.

let's talk about tech with Kobe. No one ever asked Kobe about tech. Like I, if I could ask, obviously I'm a tech nerd. If I could ask Kobe anything, yeah. Basketball is cool, but people will be able to get into more nuance. Let me hear what Kobe has to say about tech. And I got real honest answers about like what he cares about, what he chooses not to listen to. Cause he can only care about certain things. I love this video by the way. This is a great video. It's one of my favorite things I've ever done. Yeah. And it should be in the library of Congress. It's one of my favorite videos. It was, it was, Kobe was very good at being interviewed and he made that a great experience for me. Okay. Um,

And so but the idea behind that was, OK, if I ever do another one of these, let me interview someone else with a unique perspective on tech. Nobody ever asked these people just about like what phone is in your pocket right now? What what what are we talking about? Like tech? Like, do you listen to music before you play a game? Like, let's get those questions out of people. Real tech questions. Yeah. And then I made the mistake of doing one or two interviews with tech.

tech executives. And what happened was those got so visible and blew up so much that every other tech company went, ah,

We can just put our executive in front of Marques and he'll talk to them and it'll be, he'll think of some nice questions. It'll be a good YouTube video and that'll be that. And suddenly it's six CEOs in a row and I'm stuck in this. And Marques is interviewing the CEO of Halliburton about their new drone. And I'm like, wait a second. I was trying to get to like interesting people and their feelings on tech. And that's something I'm actively trying to jump back

into because I think it's been like six in a row and like Elon was somewhere in that six in a row and there's, there's a CEO of Google and of Microsoft and we've done this, we've danced now. I get that they're not going to answer questions about what phone is in their pocket. Like I, I now have done that interview enough times. Yeah. Um, I,

I mean more specifically though about the potential nefarious tail end risks of the things that they're making. Yeah. So now that I've done those interviews and I've gone in front of those people and asked those relatively harmless questions, all of the comments are like, why didn't you ask those questions? Yeah. And I'm like, that's a really good point. I think,

that interview with those people should have been a little bit more on the critical of what they're building, on the questions of the future of what they have planned for these companies. So when I was asking about what Phelan was in your pocket, what I was trying to ask Kobe years ago

It turned out that wasn't a very constructive or useful question. And so now I just have all these interviews of like kind of fun humanizing versions of these like corporate leaders where I'd rather have asked them those questions. So I would go back. I appreciate you wanting to do that, man. I would go back. Because you have access in a way that like us at The Daily Show or even Patriot Act, they know don't even take it because –

We want a softball interview. Right. So don't have, don't sit down with Trevor or Jon Stewart or Hasan. They're going to grill you. Don't do this. Yeah. But I do feel like

media and tech really shape the narrative and they shape reality. I'll give you a funny example. I was doing, I went on CNBC Squawk Box and I remember this and the running gag that I did is I showed up and you know, like the full turtleneck and I kind of did this whole piece of like every great American grifter shows up on Squawk Box, like shilling some product in it. Whether it's Elizabeth Holmes or Steve Jobs, I have come, I have come full circle. But the joke, the real truth of the joke that I was trying to land is I

I remember during the pandemic, these shows created such great financial FOMO in the middle class for the retail investor that you guys really gave these people FOMO. And we all wanted to, you know, pocket gamble. And retail can never compete with institutional investors. And here we are two years later. I could feel my Spidey sense going off. And you have all these people left holding the bag.

And the people that aren't holding the bag are the people that run those same companies and banks. They are not left holding the bag. And all of them get golden parachutes on their way out.

you'll see these C-suite executives literally jump out of a burning building with a $28 million package. They'll never lose their homes. They'll never lose their retirement and their kids' future will never be on the line. So the point of me going there was to land that point. So I actually did talk about how like, hey, I was watching you guys during the pandemic and I bought Bitcoin at 50,000 and I lost my money. And they were laughing at me, but I go, understand the real point I'm getting at is that

You guys have this incredible apparatus to create financial FOMO and nobody's saying this to you. Nobody's like telling you like there are profound tail risks. It's not just the hedge fund manager in Connecticut that's watching you. That's at the same income class you're at. There's a bunch of people that are working class that are just getting hosed right now because of it. So-

I appreciate you taking that note because they don't get asked those tough questions a lot. And they're really smart. They're going to avoid it, Marques, at all costs. But the problem is, is that I think the size, the tail end size of their impact is becoming bigger and bigger as we become more reliant on technology. Yeah. Yeah. They'll be the most influential people of the generation, clearly. They already are. Yeah. And it is a...

- It's not even about, I mean obviously I would like to ask them lots of these questions, but I think it's about incentivizing them to make the right choices as far as the future of these policies that these companies have because they have more of an impact on humanity than a lot of the other policies that we drafted. - Totally. How do you feel about some of the stuff that they try when they build things, what is it, break things?

move fast and break things move fast and break things when we are the collateral damage of that how do you feel about that I don't like it I like when they do that with technologies

Because that does happen sometimes. And I think that we kind of see that with the headsets. A renewable rocket. Sure. Yeah. Move fast, break things, make new things. That's great. But you're right. A lot of the companies that are the most visible have us as the product. And when they move fast, break things, it's more than just breaking code. It's like breaking behavior and incentivizing bad behavior. It's like all sorts of weird things that you're also breaking in the meantime, which is a consequence of lots of people using your product, which is

It's going to happen. Yeah. Not a fan of that particular social networking mindset, but it is a mindset a lot of them take. Yeah. Do you remain optimistic despite that? I do. At the end of the day, if I zoom all the way out, like really far out top level, I think you succeed if you make a good thing.

I hope, right? And I think if you make a bad thing, eventually it fails because people stop using it or stop wanting it or stop enjoying it. That's true of like regular basic products, obviously already, but of like social media products, social connection tools. A lot of times they're only good within a certain ecosystem, but they'll be good enough here that they'll survive. But I think just generally I'm optimistic because the good stuff keeps working.

And it either gets stale or it gets bad and it dies. Got it. And that's, you know, we remember MySpace. It's not like MySpace turned to a pile of garbage, but it just got stale and it was over. And I think that that's the way I think about generally the products and technologies that we've seen in our generation. Favorite Kobe? 11s.

You're talking about the high top? The high top. The wrestling shoe. I wore it for an entire off season of frisbee practice in a little winter gym at Stevens Tech, and I love those things. You know, I never wore the 11s, but I will say, I mean, I've worn a lot of the Kobe's. Yeah.

That is also my dream job if I were to wear test shoes. But to me, the all-time, the best Kobe I think that perfected the technology was the Kobe 6. Kobe 6 Pro Troll. Kobe 5 and Kobe 6. A low-cut shoe with a wide toe base. That way you don't twist your ankle. You can train in them, run in them, but also play ball in them. Best shoe. Kobe Special. Yeah. What do you play in Ultimate? We have soccer cleats, so it's also a low-cut shoe.

A lot of people use lacrosse or football or whatever. I like the lightweight shoe. It depends on how you play. I was using football cleats because they had a toe spike where soccer cleats don't have a toe spike because it interferes. But getting the little extra pump off your toe is beneficial. It's just about how you run, the way you connect to the ground. When you're training or weightlifting, do you have a particular type of shoe that you like? I am barefoot.

No shit? Socks. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. I keep getting advice on how my feet are supposed to be flat. And anytime I try a shoe, they're like, don't have an arch in your shoe. And I just went to like, I'm just wearing socks. So. You're like dead lifting that much? Basement gym. Oh, wow. I don't have to, yeah, I don't have to worry. I'm not like in like a 24 hour fitness barefoot. I am at home in my basement with socks on. Okay. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. One more question for you. Yeah, please. How fast can you type the alphabet A through Z?

- Oh wow, this is like a Mavis Beacon question. - Yeah, just like A through Z, A, B, C, D, just straight home row. Do you type fast? - I'm okay, I mean, I'm good. I got my home row skills. - Home row and everything? Could you type it blind, you think? Don't even worry about blind. We've got a keyboard for you.

Oh, wow. Is this a thing? Do you watch Top Gear at all? I've seen Top Gear, yeah. So like the celebrity and the reasonably priced car. You want me to type the alphabet right now? Yeah. And I guess we have this test and we have a leaderboard as well. Okay, got it. Yep. Got it. We have a choice of keyboards if you prefer. So the MacBook Pro keyboard is not too great. Let me do that one. You're going mechanical? Yeah. Oh, I like this. Yeah, I like a clickety-click. It sounds way better. I think we might need a USB...

Am I allowed to look or do I have to look up? No, you can look. The fastest way possible. The way we do it is we give everyone three shots. And the way you'll notice as you start typing, if you miss a letter, it won't continue until you hit that letter. So you must hit every letter A through Z.

That's the only rule. When you get to the end, don't press enter. It'll just tell you what your time was after you hit Z. Is there a time? Who's the leader right now? Do you want to know times right now or do you want to wait to see where you are? Let's not worry about it right now. I have it all up for you. Is that screen recordings? Yeah, it's screen recordings. Okay, cool. All right. Perfect.

See a timer? That's intimidating, right? Everybody has a late night game, like Jimmy Fallon will put you in a dunk tank. This is you guys are making me get on a QWERTY keyboard. Well, I got to get, dude, I got to get like, I got to get situated. No one's requested doing this on a phone yet. That day will come, I feel like, where someone's more comfortable typing on a phone. You already started the timer. Reset. Come on, dude. Don't do that. It should start. Tell me one. Tell me one. Okay, it's at all zeros. The second you hit A, it starts. The second you hit Z, it stops. Okay, here we go. Yep.

Oh, shit. Okay. So you now know how hard it is. You now know how hard it is. That's tough. It's not something you're used to. That's not easy. I was like, yo, I was on cue and I'm at I? Like, what are we doing? There's a lot of glancing you have to do just to make sure you didn't miss one. Yeah. That's one of my tips. Yeah. First number? 21. 21. 21. Everyone gets better as they go. Everyone, yeah.

So I get a second chance. You get three chances. Oh, that's great. Yeah, you get plenty of chances. See, you guys are good faith actors. First chance is usually the tough one for everybody. You're trying to create a median and a mean. Great. I love it. Start again? Do I hit reset? Yeah, you hit reset. And same exact idea. Okay, here we go. Three. Woo! Sounded much, much faster. Single digits, baby. I'm going to go, what was that, eight? Nine, eight. Okay. Nine, eight. That's about as fast as Usain Bolt could run 100 meters. Are you serious? Yep.

This is the nerdiest thing. You didn't know that? You just compared V to Usain Bolt on that. That's amazing. He had the starting line at A. Him chest over the line as you hit Z. Great. That's pretty good. I think you'll beat that though. Great. I think you'll get better. Here we go. Yeah. There you go. 8-7. That's pretty good. I know, but there was like a big gap. And it tells you where the gap is too. If you scroll, it says your gap was at...

Yeah, LM, yeah, yeah. It took you 0.4 seconds to find him. Damn. That's all good. You want to see the leaderboard? This is the leaderboard right here. You fell. Wow, there's someone with a four. So you're right between David Blaine and Tim, our graphic designer. Amazing. Well played. That's not bad. Hassan, that's good, man. Single digits. You started at 21. Thank you. That's a 100% improvement. That's good. And by the way, like...

we got to the third, I was like running back again. You're just, you're tapping into something. You'll be trying again. Yeah, for sure. This is a moment. That was great. That was so fun. I'm going to hit stop recording. Hey, man. This is fun, man. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, obviously. Pleasure, man. Sincerely. I think this will be a fun one for the people. Thanksgiving break, this is when this comes out. Yeah, sorry for being, I know I kind of put you on the spot and I disagreed with you, but I was trying to be sincere. Like, yeah. Yeah.

Cool. We'll publish this in a couple days. Yeah, it would be great. You want to come do some shorts of bad tech? We will take you up on the shorts. I mean this sincerely. Yes. Yeah. Product versus the ad.

I also want to do that. Let's do that. That's for sure a shorts idea. I think he should announce the bust of the year for smartphone awards. We used to give a trophy that was a toilet bowl. I thought you guys weren't the clickbait cruel people. No, we do that sometimes. The shitty phone of the year. I mean, it's not on the thumbnail, but you got to give the worst phone of the year award. It happens. Okay, great. Low blow sometimes. Yeah, let's do how it is and how it really works. Let's do it. Done. Perfect. I'm there. All right. Thanks for watching, y'all. Catch you in the next one.

Peace. Peace. Thank you so much again, Hasan. Hopefully have you back on sometime in the future. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We are partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by Vane Sill.

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