Does Marques Hate OnePlus?

9:36Marques Brownlee:story around this is that Google is making lyrics a premium feature where you have to pay for YouTube premium they're really well if you have to pay for Google YouTube music premium but they're really trying to get people they're really just trying to onboard people to YouTube premium because YouTube premium is barely more expensive than the YouTube music subscription anyway users who don't pay will get five free lyrics before they're asked to subscribe and it's not like per month. Songs. Words. Song. Words. Five words. Can I get the second word? Oh, nice. I wish you would step. I'd like to buy a vowel.

10:12Marques Brownlee:Yeah, so they will get five free lyrics and then it'll be like, lyrics are premium. And it's not per month. It is at all. Oh. Yeah.

10:20Shen:Not to side with YouTube here, but if in a month you are looking up the lyrics more than five times, it's probably worth paying for the lyrics. I just can't imagine. I have not looked up lyrics five times.

10:32Marques Brownlee:I guess there's more of the passive discovery of the lyrics. Because if I ever want the lyrics, I can just look up a lyric video on YouTube. But if I'm in the song and I just happen to scroll back and be like, what did he actually say? And the lyrics are just right there. That's the convenience that you're paying for. But, you know, Google made more money this quarter than they ever have. So I don't think it's a good excuse.

10:52Shen:What if Spotify started doing this, but like for hearing? like you paid for Spotify and you got all the like instrumentals of all the music but then if you wanted to hear the lyrics you had to pay an extra fee on top premium a cart

11:08Marques Brownlee:that's what's next I'm telling you well then everything would just be a karaoke app for the free users

11:13Shen:well now you have to pay for the lyrics though which makes it way harder no no it'd be a karaoke oh my god that's the only reason I assume people want lyrics is because they want a karaoke with the phone in their hand

11:24Marques Brownlee:or they just want to know the music.

11:25Shen:I like the Spotify. I like the lyrics because I sometimes like to jump to specific points in a song and I like being able to know like, oh, if I click this word,

11:36Marques Brownlee:it'll take me to, like it's a transport feature. Take me. It's kind of nice. Interesting. The segue I was thinking of was like, that's why a lot of weather apps are paid is because the data you have to pay for. So a lot of people want like a free weather app, obviously, but if you have a bunch of sources and a lot of them are paid, you need to charge like a subscription to pay the subscription yeah but anyway yeah it's weather again sorry so anyway i don't i i was surprised by these results i really just i didn't think this many people would be willing to pay for lyrics but apparently they are so um you know google's gonna make even more money i guess speaking of google speaking of youtube youtube swing of U2 getting put on everybody's iPods.

12:20Marques Brownlee:There's now officially a YouTube app for Apple Vision Pro. It wasn't there at launch. There are dozens of them. Honestly, brave. Yeah, it was brave. It almost felt like they were withholding it on purpose. You had to go to the browser which wasn't the end of the world. You just have a browser tab open but you had to go to the browser to watch YouTube videos and you have to deal with all the stuff there if you don't have premium blah blah now you just have an app all the discovery all the doom scrolling native well didn't Apple also make some workarounds like in the Safari app for Vision Pro they would full screen video yeah yeah they would make it so it basically just felt like YouTube yes yeah but now it's yeah you can have environments you can have all the other fun stuff just just YouTube RIP to Christian Selleck's Juno was it called Juno yeah yeah they killed it oh yeah um if it It was not called Juno.

13:14Marques Brownlee:I apologize, Christian. Well, that's exciting for the 12 people that use Vision Pro. And speaking of, I guess we're done with that. Pretty quick segment. I guess we'll try it and we'll get back to it next week.

13:29Shen:Yeah, I mean, maybe.

13:29Marques Brownlee:We definitely will not try it by next week. Maybe it's amazing. I'll try it. I'll watch the YouTube. Maybe it's amazing. You know? What if it's amazing? It's just. I'll try it. I don't. Okay. What if. What could they possibly have added that will make it. Vises, Gemini. If the Vision Pro is the ideal flight movie watcher, then the YouTube app with Vision Pro with premium with a bunch of downloaded videos is the ultimate flight theater experience. I have always wanted to watch Scott the Waz 30 feet tall. Okay, let me have this. There's good videos on YouTube. You might want to watch you. You might have an hour and a half video on a studio channel and you want to watch it on a flight and you have this big screen in front of you and it's fun.

14:08Marques Brownlee:It'd be very funny if, you know how Google last week they released that world model where you can feed an image and it creates a video game basically project genie project genie be very funny if they just had the feature in youtube where you could just be in the video but nobody used the app because nobody uses the vision pros and nobody knew damn that'd be funny i guess we'll find out i guess i guess we'll find it it's probably fine yeah anyway we're gonna find out

14:36Shen:about?

14:38Marques Brownlee:The ads in ChatGPT. The ads in ChatGPT. Okay. So, Anthropic, if you didn't know, big competitor to OpenAI, recently released a bunch of Super Bowl ads. They released them before the Super Bowl, and they actually did tweak them slightly when they actually put them in the Super Bowl. The copy was worse in the official release, but I think that they probably just, I don't know, ran through their legal team, and they were just concerned or something. Anyway, they ran four different ads. It was very funny. The ads were about OpenAI putting ads in chat GPT. And this is something that OpenAI is now having to do.

15:15Marques Brownlee:Sam Altman did eventually say it would be a last resort. So that's also funny. But Anthropic put these four different ads out that basically emulated what it is like to talk to an AI model. And it did it very well. So I'm going to give you an example. There was this ad where this guy is talking to a therapist and he says, I need help learning how to communicate better with my mom. And then the therapist is just kind of like this creepy smiling like woman and she pauses for like three seconds before she answers him. It's all very like you can tell that they're trying to emulate that. And she she says like, that's a great thing to do.

15:53Marques Brownlee:You should maybe go on a nature walk with her or talk about things that you have in common. Or, if you can't mend the relationship, go to Golden Encounters, where cougars are matched with young cubs.

16:05Shen:Where you can spend quality time with other older women.

16:08Marques Brownlee:With other older women on Golden Encounters. And all of the ads just kind of devolve into this, and then the person that's talking to that model is like, what? Very funny, very good ads. This elicited an extremely funny reaction from Sam Altman on Twitter. he decided to write an essay in a tweet which is never a good idea but the first thing that he said was first the good part of the anthropic ads they are funny I laughed very human thing to say and then he wrote 11 paragraphs yeah

16:45Shen:wrote is like an overstatement like this is poop you don't write poop you poop poop and that's what he did he pooped 11 paragraphs of poop Do you think he did it for ChachiBT did it? That's what I was going to say. I assume everything he writes now is for ChachiBT. I had not seen these ads. Actually, I think you posted it, and your main thing was, why does this seem like it didn't get de-squeezed properly for one of them? The one online before the Super Bowl? The only reason I watch these ads is because I saw Sam Altman crashing out on Twitter. And I was like, these must be pretty good.

17:17Marques Brownlee:Yeah, the first ad, there was one ad where a kid was trying to get jacked.

17:21Shen:It was like, how do I get abs as fast as possible?

17:23Marques Brownlee:Yeah, and I just noticed it seemed like they used a 1.5x anamorphic lens, but they de-squeezed it to 1.8. Oh, no. That's all I know. That was the first thing I know. Sorry, that's the first thing I know. That would bother me a lot. Yeah, it was weird. Anyway, yeah, he crashed out with 11 paragraphs saying basically it was not what was going to happen and that it was, what was the word? He was saying that it was kind of misrepresenting the way the ads were going to be shown. but Ellis is about to chime in.

17:55Shen:Can I say one thing real quick? I miss I like when companies use commercials to take shots at each other. It's so much more fun. I liked the Samsung notch forehead stuff like that. It's fun and it's fun because they're in jest but man it makes some people so mad and that's hilarious. Yeah it's funny. anthropic typically does have really good ads too like they've been leaning into like the film look and the film aesthetic and everything like a little grain and everything like it looks like

18:27Marques Brownlee:they hire people that knew what they were doing for i mean every company on twitter now basically is just making commercials yeah that's like their whole thing they have shifted away from just releasing products and now everything has to be a little like movie trailer product launch yeah

18:43Shen:I think also doing the film look feels more natural and human. And when you're creating a product that's as unnatural and unhuman as AI, you want to be as opposite as possible. They thought about this.

18:55Marques Brownlee:Anthropic has a great color grader, by the way. It's all the same color and it's very good.

19:00Shen:It's AI.

19:04Marques Brownlee:I don't know if AI would mess up the 1.5x anamorphic squeeze. I think that's exactly what it would mess up. Yeah, that's probably true. All right. All right, Ellis, I'm ready for your crash out.

19:13Shen:Before I crash out publicly about this, I do want to say, yeah, long time listeners of the show will know we have in the past done anthropic ads. We have read ads that they have done. This has nothing to do with why we're reporting on this. Also, in case anyone was even wondering, none of us have any AI investments. OK, we're not invested in these private companies. I don't use that shit at all. Yeah. So this is not like about this is about. Oh, my God, dude, that stupid 11. Okay, first of all, when Sam Allman in that 11 paragraphs greed said, God, there was so much. When he called Claude or Anthropic an authoritarian company, I was like, brother, you need to look at who's on the OpenAI team right now.

19:58Marques Brownlee:You also said Anthropic makes software for rich people when they're the same price.

20:01Shen:They're the same price. Expensive software for rich people. It's like, dude, you both offer a free tier. The difference in the pricing is that and maybe like when you're using it at a developer level that the tokens are like cheaper. Yeah. Or whatever. But it's like you both offer a free and a twenty dollar tier. So don't don't go calling your competitor an expensive product for rich people. Don't go calling a company an authoritarian company when like all of the techno fascists are aligned with you, bro. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's like he keeps going on and on about how like, you know, these ads are not going to appear in chat.

20:34Shen:They're not going to like like companies are not going to have access to your chat like all this stuff. The truth is we don't know how these ads are going to appear.

20:42Marques Brownlee:They started rolling out yesterday, by the way.

20:44Shen:I haven't seen them. I haven't seen any. I keep looking for people reporting on how they're rolling out. I can't find them. Yeah, I can provide to you the press releases of the companies who are buying these ads. Yeah. All right. Target. This is an exact quote. I'm just going to read you the whole thing so that you can't be like Ellis, you're picking and choosing your words, man. You're an anti-AI Luddite. But quote from Target, ads are served based on keywords in a guest's chat GPT prompt, ensuring they're relevant to the conversation. For example, a guest asking, what are some countertop cooking appliances that make everyday meals more convenient may see an ad for an air fryer.

21:20Shen:Here's one from William Sonoma. As an early participant, Williams Sonoma Inc. will explore how advertising and ChatGPT can reach customers at the decision-making moments, helping surface relevant, high-quality products while preserving trusted and transparent user experiences. I don't want to be devil's advocate because I... You are a devil's advocate. They're like your favorite team. They are. That's true. I hate them. I hate them this season. By the way, go USA Hockey. We destroyed Canada Women's the other day.

21:51Marques Brownlee:Are they in that new TV show about hockey?

21:53Shen:Yeah, it's called The Olympics.

21:57Marques Brownlee:I was thinking that other one.

21:58Shen:I don't... Yeah. In terms of the way these are written, it does... None of this is saying that it will affect the responses. It's saying that it will show an ad that's potentially based on the responses. Sure, but also... I'm just throwing that out there. In his thing, like in the past, OpenAI and Tim Allman have said, when we run these ads, these companies will not have access to your chats. Oh, okay, yeah. And the companies are saying, we're not only going to know what you want, we're going to know when you're in the decision-making process.

22:30Marques Brownlee:That's not exactly what it says. And I think there's a firewall between, so that's the specific verbiage, is the companies don't get that data. They get to buy access to the people who are searching certain ways. They don't get to know what you're searching. ChatGPT, OpenAI, they know all the stuff. Right. But similar to the way you would buy Google AdWords, you'd buy ads for people who are Googling certain things. Those ads will show up for those people. I never get to connect to those people directly or know who searched what. The same way Target's going to pay ChatGPT or OpenAI for a bunch of ads for whatever air fryers, or whatever their products are.

23:05Marques Brownlee:And any time those get served, that connection will be made. I don't get to know any of that as Target. I don't.

23:11Shen:I could be wrong, but I don't believe that's how Google AdSense works. I think there is a profile based on your credit cards and your IP address and all the other profiles or data points that data brokers pick up on you, and they know exactly what you, Marques Brownlee,

23:25Marques Brownlee:have been searching for and buying and are interested in. That may be fair, but I don't see that language in either of these responses from, we're going to use ChatGPT ads.

23:35Shen:Which is like, let's also just be real. This is total legalese, and we don't know what they actually want to do on the background of anything, and I don't trust them. And yeah, and furthermore, The guy who is trying to convince us of all this is like, and this takes a lot of skill, man, because between like Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen, like we have some prolific liars among us these days, like people who can just, again, poop out non-truths. And Sam Altman is somehow the biggest liar of all of them. Like the list of lies that this guy has told over the course of his career are so huge and so crazy.

24:15Shen:And he still is just like, bro, just give me like all of the power in America, all the water in America. Give me literally all of your most inside thoughts and feelings. And I'll just like fix everything, bro, because I'm Sam motherfucking Altman. Go get another job. I don't know. I don't want this guy doing this job. And I get that I don't have a say in that or whatever, but the guy whose job is to take everything from everyone, I would like to be a truthful guy. That's my crash out, okay? I'm sorry.

24:45Marques Brownlee:It's also just funny to me that every tech CEO decided that they have to have a personality on Twitter. I mean, Elon kind of started this. CEOs used to be pretty quiet. They would maybe split. I'm sure there's some. There's a lot that don't say anything on Twitter. yeah but I like them a lot of the I didn't get like corporate savings from Sundar ever he never says anything he sometimes does that stuff I mean it's not like this it's not like this it's not like this but pretty much every AI company CEO has like a very loud voice on Twitter and is very annoying and just like probably because that's where all of their customers are like as far as how competitive this environment is and how much of a connection you want to have to your potential customers, how else are you going to talk to them?

25:31It's kind of like when how YouTube had that sort of, what is it called, adpocalypse, where

25:36Marques Brownlee:it's like all the advertisers left YouTube and they realized that the only way to reach these people is to be advertising on YouTube. If you're an AI company CEO, how are you going to reach the most aggressively enthusiastic AI people on the internet? Probably by tweeting a lot at them and having them read what you're saying and not looking at the other things other people are saying. So I get why they're so loud on Twitter. but if you're annoyed by that I don't think it's going to make him I keep trying to reach those people I mean this kind of reaction though is very funny because I mean they just went and said like we have more users in Texas than you have users total and it's kind of like I think the best thing to say was nothing or you could have just said that was funny and moved on I'm going to dub this the Strysam effect because

26:27Shen:I was wondering why he typed it like that I totally missed that

26:31Marques Brownlee:because he just kind of drew more attention to the fact that he was crashing out about it and then there were multiple articles written out about who he was crashing out about it

26:38Shen:if I made a joke about one of you guys and you tweeted that long about it I'd be like damn I got him Andrew said something about me that was clearly dishonest Anthropic is so happy right now that this guy

26:50Marques Brownlee:is freaking out the amount of people that didn't even know Anthropic's name that knew chat GPT and then saw a bunch of Google, like Google words articles on the side of their home feed being like, Sam Altman crashes out of Anthropic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, it's a, I mean, the amount of marketing spend that they put into this was more than free real estate. The Super Bowl. Yeah. Free real estate. Free real estate. I will say Twitter, Twitter is a very specific audience and a lot of them are the, like silence is complicit type. So if Sam Altman didn't say anything about those ads, it would also be really, it'll be fodder for them to be like, I don't know, see, they got them.

27:23Marques Brownlee:So no matter what you do, you lose. But he chose this path. So that's his choice. I guess so.

27:31Shen:Screw you, Ellis, for making it seem like I was kind of defending it. I promise that's not how I felt. I know, I know, I know. Andrew loves Open Air. It just feels to me like the entire premise of this company is like dog water. Like, seriously, like what? Like you've made a trillion dollars in spending commitments. and you genuinely are like, no, no, no. In the next 10 years, we're going to 100X our revenue. Despite the fact that we won't tell anyone how we make any money right now. Despite the fact that we literally do not have electricity in the world to do what we're going to do.

28:08Marques Brownlee:It's all the trust me bro economy. It's like, yeah.

28:11Shen:Data centers in space? Oh yeah, data centers in space. That's killer.

28:16Marques Brownlee:Have you noticed Jensen Wong just like doing all these interviews on the streets of Taiwan? Yeah. I don't know why that keeps happening.

28:22Shen:I don't know why that keeps happening either.

28:24Marques Brownlee:He's just walking down the street in Taiwan, and then suddenly there's eight mics in his face. He's doing a press conference. That's what happens. And if you don't say no to it, it's going to keep happening. Why does he keep saying yes to it? Well, it's not even saying yes to it. It's someone sprints up to you with a microphone and asks you a critical question about your company. And no matter what you say, it will be published. So do you A, ignore them and get in the car, to which it looks like, ooh, he's avoiding it. He knows the answer's bad. or B do you like try to answer because you think you have a good answer and then suddenly seven more people with microphones I think ignoring it you cannot win by CEO of NVIDIA people are going to sprint up to you like my life savings are in this tell me why you're going to win well it is funny though because he has been slowly walking back their commitments to open AI like at first it was like NVIDIA is investing a hundred billion dollars in open AI and then throughout these on the street in Taiwan interviews it's been like we never actually signed a piece of paper.

29:21Marques Brownlee:We just said that, you know, over a number of years, we might invest up to$100 billion. Guys, money isn't real. I mean, the money in my bank account is real, of course, but like your money isn't real. And then randomly, Oracle put out a tweet that was like, we are committed to our investments and it was like, nobody

29:36Shen:asked you!

29:37Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Another authoritarian news. Yeah, that's right. Ring, company owned by Amazon. This is funny. Okay, there's a couple.

29:50Shen:Yeah, can you explain everything because I did not watch the Super Bowl which you all will find out from my crash out later Why I didn't but wow, okay Yes, I some of these are Super Bowl things I've kind of seen people talk about online, but I would like the full explanation

30:02Marques Brownlee:Okay, I only watch as you can imagine during the Super Bowl of 2026 people are all wondering which companies are gonna make a splash Make a big statement. Are there gonna be any crypto ads? Are they gonna be any AI ads like this? It's like CES is the same way. Or like who's going to have a, what's the theme? Wait, the Super Bowl basically is CES. Yes, yes, exactly. That's crazy. Exactly. So 2026 Super Bowl ads, there's a couple AI ads sprinkled in there and people are analyzing them. Oh, this is their big moment. Okay. So each one of these companies challenge is to speak to the normies who don't pay attention to AI and paint a picture for them of why their AI is good.

30:38Marques Brownlee:and it'll either hit your ear as a normie or it'll hit your ear as a critic who's been looking at this stuff for a long time. So Amazon Ring decides, okay, we've got an idea. We're gonna show this really cool feature, this really cool thing that we've been doing where if you lose your pet, then there's this neighborhood watch feature where you can go through everyone's feeds and it will recognize all of the Ring neighborhoods in your neighborhood. Sorry, all the Ring cameras in your neighborhood, you'll be able to find your pet through them and you'll get reunited with your pet. Isn't that sick?

31:09Marques Brownlee:A neighborhood watch feature from your ring camera? Isn't that great? Isn't that great? On by default. Isn't that great? It's on by default. It's on by default. You have to turn it off. And I think for some people, it probably hit their ears like, wow, I've lost a pet. Wow, I have a pet. I hope I don't lose them. But if I do, this feature would really help. But for all of us, we're like, wait, if you can watch the pets through this feature. And by the way, they're working with Flock, which is the company that makes those security cameras that are just placed everywhere and sold to government agencies and law enforcement.

31:37Marques Brownlee:Yeah, and we would know that. People aren't going to know that. Yeah. If you can watch pets, what else can you find through this?

31:44Shen:Is the thing you like search for, like you say I'm missing this dog, and then if it sees that dog you see it, there's no way you can just go to our view.

31:53Marques Brownlee:I'm going to try to rewatch the ad because I don't really know why. It's not like I can comb through my fingers or ring feet or whatever. But the idea is all of them are connected through this sort of database that lets you find it even though it's not on your camera. Yeah. Which means that there are other ways probably for other potentially authoritarian figures to pop in there and find things on people's room cameras.

32:13Shen:Yeah. Or like the big flock scandal that just happened recently where it turned out that none of them were not none of them. But a lot of them were not even password protected. And you could just go and look at any camera. Yeah. One funny part I heard about, or not funny, but it was like, didn't they say like one million dogs are lost a year? And then it said like, we found one dog every day over the year. and it's like, the percentage on that is terrible. 365 million.

32:40Marques Brownlee:I mean, it's irrational. This is a missing pet. This is a pet. No, it's true.

32:43Shen:Listen, I'm all for 300 more dogs being found than something bad happening to them. Yeah, listen, this isn't about the dogs. The ratios there are not. Now, to be clear, Ring - A million dogs? I forget what Ring said. That's crazy. One in 300 people in America lose a dog a year? That can't be right. I'll find that.

33:01Marques Brownlee:So Ring does deny that the search party feature is even able to track human faces and biometrics. And they say it is separate from the familiar faces, facial recognition feature that they have on their... That's amazing. Which is a made-up fact that a PR person would say. That they don't have access to the facial recognition thing. They have to know that people just don't trust this stuff. No, of course. Ring is the company that has given this data to law enforcement before.

33:31Shen:I think people do trust this stuff. I think that's that's like like I know so many people with ring cameras. No, I mean, I'd say the company is going to do what's in their best. No, I think. And when I talk to people about the ring cameras and I'm like, for example, like my neighbors had a ring camera and I've made me really uncomfortable because it was pointed right at my door. And I didn't like the idea that I was on camera every single time I was coming and going for my apartment. And I talked to them about it and they were just sort of like, what do you think is going to happen? like like the footage is just it's just footage and i was like where do you think that footage goes and they literally like i've never thought about it i i really i don't think the average person like really understands like i think it's maybe trust isn't the right word because i think a lot of people in general know like most of these companies don't give a damn about me and like they don't trust them but i think it's less of like the the benefits for me are something that can make me not really think about the other things that could potentially well and it's amazon which makes these

34:30Marques Brownlee:products as cheap as possible so that people just like buy them and make a bunch of you know put them on their house because they're so ridiculously cheap i've got a bunch of cameras at my house

34:39Shen:mine's a little different because i'm not pointing it directly at like someone else's door and i live in a new york city apartment right so it's like it would be impossible yeah yeah i don't know

34:48Marques Brownlee:yeah i just want to remind people like this is this is amazon same company that uh made the melania movie which had a total budget of 70 71 75 million dollars they didn't make it they well They donated 35 million dollars or whatever it was. Yeah 75 million dollar budget 40 million dollar acquisition fee paid by Amazon to Melania Trump's production company and then 28 million went directly to her for licensing. I Think that it's pretty obvious like where a lot of this money is going and I just I would not trust a company that has security cameras all over the country.

35:26Shen:The security camera company just gave a giant donation to the... Yeah. Anyway.

35:32Marques Brownlee:Marquez said this was the Crash Out podcast. I just re-watched the ad.

35:36Shen:You watched the Melania movie? I re-watched 25x

35:40Marques Brownlee:speed right now. Oh, nothing happened. Nothing happened. No, I watched the ad. There's not a lot of official UI. There's just kind of like a portal in the Ring app to be like, Here's the pet's name, here's a picture, here's a description, and then the pet shows up at their door. So it's not like we know how this works at all, but I imagine from the advertising perspective, they're like, look, it's a great feature. It doesn't matter how it works. It's going to get you your pet back if you're ever losing your neighborhood. And then if anyone asks any questions, we just deny, deny, deny. Can I throw something out there?

36:13Shen:This happens. If you're just in the Facebook group for your town or what's the website? Nextdoor or something like that? Oh, God. There's so many things like that. People will just be like, hey, I lost my cat. Here's a picture of them. And someone will post and they're like, oh, I looked on my security. Like people care about each other enough to just say like, hey, I saw them out there. Or like, here's my security camera that saw what looks like your cat at blah, blah, blah. I'm over here. This happens without one company needing to own all of it.

36:42Marques Brownlee:Most of these technology products are just like, don't talk to people. Just let the technology do it for you.

36:47Shen:I saw something amazing on Twitter, which was a test to determine if a new technology is good or bad. And the test is, if it would make the plot of a Seinfeld episode not work at all, it's a good piece of tech. Like smartphones, Google Maps, things that would cause the central issue of a Seinfeld episode to fall apart because the tech just solves the problem.

37:13Marques Brownlee:So it fits.

37:14Shen:Yeah. This is a good feature. tech that would create the plot of a Seinfeld episode is bad tech think like polymarket or like or flock cameras or like i would say that they could easily i've never seen Seinfeld so i

37:29Marques Brownlee:apologize no it's like the greatest show but i could imagine a show like that having an episode about losing their dog and taking a whole episode to find it is that crazy like the Seinfeld episode would be like yeah yeah that could totally work yeah and then this just ruins that because you Oh, I got a notification. It's three doors down or whatever. Like the band? The cool thing about Seinfeld... All right, Pete. Sorry, I'm sorry. Okay, a little rant. The best thing about Seinfeld is that there's like three interlaced storylines that seem totally separate and then they randomly come in contact with each other like through the episode and they just sort of dance.

38:00Shen:No, the best thing about it is the sneakers he wears on every episode.

38:03Marques Brownlee:Straight heat. Jerry Seinfeld's on it. What are they? Because he's a sneakerhead. Wait, really? Yeah. Has he been on the sneaker shopping show? I actually don't know. Maybe. I would assume so. I feel like someone is known for that. Yeah. Interesting. It might be. All right. That will be my introduction to Seinfeld. I'll look up his sneaker shopping apps. Dude, that show is so good. Please watch it.

38:20Shen:You know what else is going to scan your face, but this time be truthful about it?

38:23Marques Brownlee:Yeah. One more surveillance story, and then we're done. I promise.

38:27Shen:You know what's going to scan your child's face?

38:30Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Discord this week announced that they are going to be requiring face scanning or ID uploading for people that they think are probably children. So they are going... What a way to phrase that. Okay, basically they're trying to age gate. They're trying to get kids off of the not safe for work Discord communities. The goal? Yeah, it's this weird back and forth thing where clearly there have been many, many problems with like there are many bad things about the internet that kids just have access to and that's sort of always been the case And so there are bad things that occur there, obviously.

39:13Marques Brownlee:And so there's sort of this weird tension between like, how do we stop kids from accessing that without creating a surveillance state?

39:19Shen:I think the other thing is also people accessing kids. Like that in the same space is what's really bad.

39:26Marques Brownlee:Yeah, for sure. Age gating. The Roblox effect. Yeah, it's like a solution to this problem, but that is very difficult to implement without getting accused of. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Famously, people that use Discord, gamers, you know, people that are very online, not happy about having to scan their faces, which I'm not either. I don't think I would never give. Anyway, here's what they say. They say that for most adults, age verification won't be required as they're using account information like the games that you play when you're online, all of these random. Account tenure, too. So if you've had a Discord account for like 16 years.

40:06Marques Brownlee:I don't know how long. Which I have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so they're using a bunch of different metrics to determine whether or not they think you're an adult. And if they think you're an adult, you won't have to do any of these things. If you have your Discord hooked up to Steam and you play Roblox all the time, they probably are going to make you, you know.

40:24Shen:Joke's on you, David.

40:24Marques Brownlee:I don't think Roblox is on Steam. Oh, damn. I don't know, though. It might be. I don't know. Is Minecraft like the most popular game on Steam? It's going to be a lot of people getting there. I don't think Minecraft is on Steam either. It's not. It's called on the Windows Store. What is on Steam? Everything else.

40:37Shen:Everything else, literally every other game you didn't just mention.

40:41Marques Brownlee:Fortnite is not on Steam.

40:42Shen:Fortnite is also not on Steam. I'm trying, guys. I feel like if the game is big enough to have its own following where it doesn't need to be on Steam, then it's not on Steam. Unless it's every other game. Unless it's Half-Life.

40:52Marques Brownlee:Unless it's owned by Valve. Yeah, unless it's owned by Valve. Like Counter-Strike and Dota, yeah. Got it. Just got to mention Dota 2 again. So, anyway. Marquez. Users who are not verified as adults will not have access to age-restricted servers, channels and they won't be able to speak in Discord stages. They will see content filters from friend requests and DMs from unknown sources will be filtered into another inbox. Discord says that the face scan uses an on-device AI model to analyze and predict your age and never leaves the device. So that is something, if that is true, I think that we need security experts to actually try that out and dig into that.

41:31Marques Brownlee:There was a lot of backlash to this, and so TeamSpeak, if you know that word, you will not get age verified on Discord. Yeah. If you don't know that word, you probably will.

41:42Shen:I'm saying, what's the meme of like, if you recognize Ricky Martin at the halftime show, like it's probably time to get your prostate checked. Like if you know TeamSpeak. That was Ricky Martin. Yeah.

41:54Marques Brownlee:Oh my God, that was Ricky Martin. I just, wow. You're good, youngin. Yeah. Whoa. Jit. TeamSpeak is like one of the OG voice chat gaming apps. I used to use it when we played StarCraft in high school. And it's basically not been updated in the last 15 years. It looks way different. Kind of sick. I mean, the website. Yeah, it looks a little bit more like Discord. The problem with Discord now is that it's trying to become the everything app. Every app, including Netflix, every app is trying to become the everything app. Because in order to scale infinitely, you have to just adopt every possible market.

42:29Marques Brownlee:Yeah. That's why Netflix is becoming a podcast app and a games app now, because they kind of saturated the watching content app. They're going to drop the flicks. Yeah, they're just going to be net. It's going to be the internet. Welcome to net. So yeah, people are very angry about this. Discord knew that people were going to be very angry, and they anticipated to lose some users and say that they are going to have to use other tactics to get users to come back. whether or not this ends up being a mass exodus and people actually move over permanently or just flow back which is what usually happens with these social

43:03Shen:graph effects not sure so can I just this is I just think funny it doesn't take away from any of the worries people has in here but there's something so funny about discord being for gamers and them not wanting their face but then they'll go start a new character in a game and spend like six hours making it look exactly like them. That is very funny. Yeah. There's going to be a really sad future where we look back on this era and be like, damn, like Discord and like Sam Altman with WorldCoin, like they were so nice. Like they let us scan our own faces instead of just like walking into Baskin Robbins and getting our face scanned without our consent for our ice cream ID.

43:45Marques Brownlee:All the flock cameras are already, they already know where you are at all times anyway. Anyway, I did see a very funny thing. Do you guys know what Gary's mod is? This is another one of those things where if you do know what that is, you won't have to do the thing. But I saw some people who were using Gary's Mod characters to fool the face scanning technology. And it actually worked. Does that have depth? That's crazy. Well, it does. And that's the thing. Because they were like streaming the screen. I mean, depth in terms of like the character looks three-dimensional and it was turning.

44:18Shen:Yeah, because it's not using like an IR sensor on your regular webcam. Cameras are all 2D.

44:22Marques Brownlee:You know, they just like. Yeah, but like, well, I didn't realize, I thought when I was doing, I don't remember what I was doing a face certification for, but I had to scan my ID and then do the thing where I look left and right. Yeah. I think that's using the iPhone's, well, maybe it doesn't. The iPhone's IR, right?

44:35Shen:It might be iPhone's IR, but it might also not be, but Discord is presumably probably using it from a webcam. Or I guess there is a mobile app, so maybe it could. Probably a webcam. I doubt Discord.

44:45Marques Brownlee:They're not going to force you to use your phones. I guess that's just why I figured they would have to use real depth instead of just an image that rotates. Well, they can't really. I mean, the iPhone. There's some phones that have IR. Yeah.

44:58Shen:Look, there's also a non-zero chance that this face scanning stuff literally does nothing. And Discord just needed to do something to make themselves not legally accountable for exposing minors. I'm not saying it does. But we're at the point now where like, who's to say everyone isn't lying all the time? I've been lying this whole podcast. I'm not even Alex. Audio listeners would be shocked to find out. I am like a seven foot lizard sitting at the mic and have been this whole time. I'm 12. But you know what demands truth and nothing but the truth? What is that? Waveform trivia. That's facts.

45:36Marques Brownlee:Well, good thing we all get the truth wrong.

45:37Shen:I was going to say when the correction comes next week, that segue is going to hit. Oh, yeah, baby. Our scores. Yeah. No, that is... Look, man, I strive for perfection. I know it's been a weird episode, but... It's only going to get weirder, baby. It's only getting weirder. It's only February. Guys, you want to guess what this trivia question is about? Deal. It's about Sam Allman. It's about Sam Allman, baby. Sam Allman has said in the past, specifically on his blog and several interviews, that with 10 gigawatts of compute, we would most likely have to choose between curing cancer or tutoring every child in America.

46:15Shen:We couldn't have both for 10 gigawatts of compute. The largest power plant by total possible capacity, again, this power plant only runs at 30 % capacity, according to my limited understanding of industrial scale power and this Wikipedia page. Best part of a trivia question? Limited understanding? At full hypothetical capacity, how many gigawatts can the largest power plant in America produce? What gigawatt have to do with education? He's saying that the compute required... The compute required to train the model that could do either of those things required 10 gigawatts.

46:51Marques Brownlee:I don't understand why these people ever make those. Sometimes you see people ask Elon, like, well, what do you think it would... You know, solving world hunger? And he'll go, hmm. And he'll try to answer. Like, why would you try to answer that? Don't say, don't make a promise that you could solve cancer with enough power. That's an insane thing to say out loud.

47:10Shen:Yeah.

47:11Marques Brownlee:But. Yeah.

47:13Shen:And you know, the thing is, is like I've never been an evil villain, like a supervillain. So I can't truly put myself. What about when you were the Hamburglar for Halloween? That's true. I was a supervillain. Is the Hamburglar really a supervillain? I've always thought of him as more of like a Robin Hood, Man of the People type figure. No. That's if. Okay. Is Ronald McDonald like big brother or something? No. The Hamburglar's foil is Mayor McCheese, obviously. I'm so hungry. Okay. I thought they were wrapped in paper. Oh, that's good. Anyway, what's the question? I think... I literally don't know.

47:46Shen:How many gigawatts? The hardiest, most powerful power plant in America. How many gigawatts does it produce? In America. While it's running at 30 % capacity. I'm specifically referring to the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. How many gigawatts did the car in Back to the Future need? Flux capacitor. Seven parsecs. No.

48:11Marques Brownlee:100 gigawatts. I have no idea. I don't remember. Gigawatts is 1 ,000. How many? A gigawatt is 1 ,000 megawatts. Okay, and a megawatt. Is 1 ,000.

48:19Shen:1.21.

48:20Marques Brownlee:1 ,000 watts. 1 ,000. 1 ,000. 1 ,000 watts? A megawatt is 1 ,000 watts. No, a million watts. It's a million watts. A million watts? Yeah. Oh, okay. 1.21 gigawatts.

48:29Shen:So a gigawatt is a billion watts. The flux capacitor needed 1.21 gigawatts? Yeah. Damn, he could have cured cancer instead.

48:37Marques Brownlee:Dude. Yeah. Are you saying that that dam would let us travel back to the future?

48:41Shen:I'm saying that - Like seven times. I'm saying that musical comedian Reggie is one watt. Damn it. Reggie Watts.

48:49Marques Brownlee:That's good. We should probably take a break.

48:51Shen:Yeah. We're going insane. I think our audience needs a break more than we do. Weird episode. I'm sorry, guys. All right.

48:57Marques Brownlee:Well, we'll think about it. Answers will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

49:26Shen:We'll see you next time.

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51:20Shen:All right, welcome back, Marquez. Yeah. We've talked about a lot of deep stuff here, but I think I have potentially the biggest question possible for you. Sure. Why do you hate OnePlus so much?

51:32Marques Brownlee:It's a very valid question. You mean my daily driver that I've been... Yeah, yeah. This has been a question I've seen. Keep your enemies closer, Marquez. No, we did a video on silicon carbon batteries, and this video got a mixed reception, and obviously I have thoughts on it, but I'll have all the details here. Basically, it's a story of like corporate risk assessment, which is not the most interesting thing, but it's very connected to technology because there are companies out there using silicon carbon batteries. There are lots of companies out there not using silicon carbon batteries in smartphones specifically.

52:07Marques Brownlee:And we talk a lot about smartphones. So after the year and a half of me making lots of videos on smartphones that have silicon carbon batteries and me raving about them and being like, why aren't these other guys doing that? decided to dig a little bit more into why those other guys aren't doing that. And also have been getting lots of emails, as you can imagine, from people going, hey, we're not idiots. We have thought a lot about this. And there's a certain risk tolerance that this company has and a couple concerns that these companies have about potentially using silicon carbon batteries.

52:39Shen:I'd say it got to the point where over the past year you would mention it and we would have comments that are like, hey, moron, they're not doing it because of blah, blah, blah.

52:47Marques Brownlee:It's come up a few times even on this podcast. we've mentioned like oh the i think you mentioned it too yeah the google engineer at google io last year pulled me aside and was like you guys keep asking why we're not using it and here are the reasons we're not using it so i just was like i just mentioned that he mentioned that to me yeah that's all i said yeah and also i had a bunch of versions of that over the last couple years so i'm like all right let me let me just put all this together into one video because i imagine not everyone knows this stuff not everyone gets pulled aside by a google engineer at io to hear about this stuff so um so essentially put together a video on what some of those companies are thinking about silicon carbon and why they're not using it so that we can have the whole picture i'm still gonna love silicon carbon batteries and praise them and that's why i'm using this phone and phones like it with incredible battery life uh but there were a couple of things people didn't like about the video probably two main things one was the thumbnail totally valid it was like a little bit spicy and i think this is an interesting enough topic without the debate about clickbait so i just changed the thumbnail but then two was that you know i didn't name drop the exact people who had been emailing me over the years or which companies who had pulled me aside and said these things.

53:48Marques Brownlee:And it kind of felt like, oh, I'm like a mouthpiece for them. Like I'm protecting them and justifying them. I'm actually like a secret silicon carbon hater or something like that. I think a lot of people didn't make it all the way through the video and just left with that impression. So I figured it was valid to sort of explain it all with someone who's actually willing to join the podcast and put their expertise in front of everyone and explain. so we have Shen joining us from HTC we've he's I don't know if he's been on the podcast he's been on the podcast once before okay because we've we've talked to him I think twice and so HTC obviously does lots of different devices now at this point in XR and obviously have done smartphones in the past RIP but they obviously work with batteries a lot so he works with batteries and the corporate risk assessment profile of a company who has to decide what types of batteries to use so I figured this would be informative and interesting you don't have to hear it from me but you get all the information at a deeper level.

54:41Marques Brownlee:So let's play that quick interview for you now, and then we'll come back right after. So, okay, Shen, thank you for doing this. I appreciate the time. I think we should just start off with what are your, what's your position, what are your credentials? Because people want to know how you know this stuff first. So who are you? What do you do?

55:00Shen:Okay, I'm Shen. I look after global product management at HTC. um i've been here for almost 11 years now um but i've been running product for the past five and a half years um here at our headquarters um so i look after product from conception to all the way to you know end of life when we do you know we when we so i don't work on phones anymore but i work on a lot of things where things like batteries are important so like xr headsets right um generally what you'll find in the market is about two hours and i would say also with things like smart glasses that we just launched um the compactness of them is also really important and then one last thing is considering that they're right on your head.

55:57Shen:We are actually generally more safety conscious than others when it comes to

56:02Marques Brownlee:the battery safety itself. That's a really good jumping off point because obviously we talked about, you know, silicon carbon batteries, regular lithium ion batteries we've seen for years. And I mostly was, you know, talking about them in the context of smartphones, but paint me a picture of what this landscape is like. We've had these batteries for a long time. There's been tons of advancements. And I've started talking about silicon carbon batteries for like the last year to in smartphones as a really big deal, like a pretty big leap. But obviously there's some risk assessment there. So when you look at just batteries in general, silicon carbon versus the typical battery, what are you seeing?

56:37Shen:So I'm still a massive smartphone fan. So things like silicon carbon batteries do get me excited, especially at the idea of capacity increasing so much. But when it comes to the industry itself, I think because batteries are such a high energy density item, everyone is usually a lot more wary of it. The way a battery can usually go wrong is when it expands, it swells, thermal runaway, usually maybe it's shorts inside. And some of them don't even have to come from any structural like dropping your phone. batteries that charge below freezing can sometimes have an issue where the lithium deposits itself as a metal and that's pretty much an irreversible process it can cause gas expansion and it can cause shorts itself so loads of these different things we have to consider when looking at new chemistries and um so it depends on the kind of company you are right so i i did see the video and i i do agree with you um when you are kind of in the top two or three in terms of market share um it's kind of your race to lose right so you're more wary about a mistake happening especially when you sell tens of millions, hundreds of millions of phones a year.

58:14Shen:So you're going to be a lot more strict when it comes to safety standards. And sometimes it might just be the thing that you don't want to really risk. And I'll also say, you know, when we look at something like silicon carbon or even newer technologies like silicon anode itself, it... And while it helps with things like capacity, in terms of battery chemistry, you're pulling a lot of other levers instead. So as you go with more and more silicon, you're actually reducing the charge rate as well. So that is another thing you have to balance. And of course, things like longevity. you mentioned in your video and it's quite accurate when when silicon absorbs lithium ions as it charges it swells up right and there are loads of ways you know people there's like nanolithography ways of making sure those particles are swell up as much but at the end of the day it's still swelling and that will cause you know companies to have certain concerns and they'll want to test these for longer periods of time.

59:25Shen:So I expect it to be slower adoption there as well. And I would say, you know, a lot of different companies take things like battery longevity differently. Some will make this their number one thing. And you'll realize that they're the ones that don't really increase charge speed that much, don't really experiment with new types of chemistry. And that's usually because they actually care about longevity a lot more than others.

59:57Marques Brownlee:I know you won't say it, but I'll say that that's the thing we've seen from Apple for years. But what is funny about batteries is like smartphones, I talk about smartphones so much, like we get very few really exciting new things with smartphones at this stage. Like they're such a mature category. So when we do get something interesting, like, oh, way bigger smartphone sensor, or, oh, this really big processor node shift or, ooh, a huge increase in battery capacity. That's interesting. So we pay more attention to it and we'd like all of our favorite brands and our favorite phone models we're considering buying to be at the forefront of that.

1:00:33Marques Brownlee:But it's not always as simple as just switching to the new thing. I think one thing that was also mentioned in the video that was, you know, it's obviously very complex and I did a lot of simplification, but it's the testing process. and I'm assuming this is obviously very important to you because you're putting batteries on people's heads. Like what is the process of testing, you know, charge cycles and for longevity? What is the process like at a big company when trying to assess if a new battery technology is potentially worth it?

1:01:02Shen:So usually when it comes to safety, we work with the battery vendor themselves to come out with safety guidelines. And actually most companies have roughly the same kind of guidelines, the same kind of tests. some may just pull the criteria a little bit higher um you'll usually see battery specs for example like um it'll retain 80 of its charge after 800 to a thousand charge cycles yeah we see that things like that yeah um so but one other thing is when you have a new product the way it fits in also makes a difference in terms of how you should test it um i'll give you an example when it comes to battery tech when it comes to fitting a battery itself your manufacturers will always leave kind of an expansion space between the battery and the actual housing because batteries will expand they'll expand with temperature they'll expand over over time right there's always going to be a little bit of off-gassing potentially that can happen and um a lot of the time that's within a acceptable range and that's why you leave that expansion space it's mostly when that expansion goes beyond what that expansion space allows that you'll see your phone kind of splitting apart so we'll test for a lot of different things we'll test for you know um different temperatures um even during shipping we have a thing called thermal shock where you know something might go from minus something degrees to something that's really hot and really humid so those are things that you kind of have to test for for all kinds of products but i'll still say there are a lot of things that is really hard to test for you know there are you know 20 30 different combinations that are going to happen but how do you test those over a long period of time right if you're testing it through for you can accelerate certain tests but at the end of the day you always realize you have a certain blind spot when it comes to real world usage um so that comes back to what i mentioned it's all about how do you want to

1:03:13Marques Brownlee:play that risk yeah i mean like i said there's there's a lot of variables and maybe if it's in something that's in used it's used in less environments or less situations and maybe you don't have to test for as many variables but a smartphone is like it's with you everywhere like There's a trillion different things that can happen to it from temperature to pressure and environments and stuff. So it does seem – I don't envy the task. It seems like a very detailed, complicated one. My last question for you is just what else do you think people should know about batteries in general? It's a complex thing.

1:03:44Marques Brownlee:There's chemistry. There's physics. There's a lot involved. Is there anything that maybe is commonly looked over by people buying smartphones, maybe just when comparing one smartphone to the other? what do you think people should know about batteries that they probably don't already

1:03:59Shen:i will say one thing about kind of i'll say one that's kind of more supply chain oriented first um and that's specifically usually with new tech you have this one issue where not many people are making it if um you know from hdc's past we have rules in place um where we are required to kind of second source everything. And that's for a few reasons. Sometimes, you know, you don't want one vendor for a really cheap component to go out of business or to have an issue and then impact your entire business. Sure. Sometimes it's that, but sometimes it's also more malicious. You have competitors in the space that will attack your supply chain to try and stop you from going to market.

1:04:51Shen:That happens more than than you'd expect. That is great. Yeah, so as a big company, whenever you look at new tech, you're going to want to try and second source everything. I mean, in HTC, the only exception by default is the CPU, right, because mostly in a phone, you're not going to find a second source for a Qualcomm chipset. Sure. But you can second source most things. And then if we have to waive it, anything for any reason, you know that usually has to go um go through an approval process so that is one thing to consider which is at the scale of certain companies they're going to be required to second source those because they don't want their sales to tank because one supplier couldn't make batteries anymore for them yeah or any other component yeah that is really interesting you bring that up

1:05:45Marques Brownlee:because that's been a story sometimes every once in a while in the past there'll be a big enough noticeable difference between maybe a single component from two different suppliers. And that'll make a headline like, oh, I got the iPhone with the LG display, or I got the iPhone with the Samsung display. And you can actually measure a difference. And it's kind of rare that that happens. But usually, you know, people are pretty good about matching the things together. But that is a fascinating story, too.

1:06:08Shen:Yeah, I would say most manufacturers will have the same specs for those different companies to try and make sure that it isn't noticeable. But every now and then, you will somewhat notice it. So that's kind of the supply chain side. And then, yeah, I think the one thing about batteries is coming back to there are so many different levers, right? And you might want capacity, but the next person is going to want charging speed, right? You might be able to have both, but there's a trade-off somewhere. That trade-off could be longevity. you know i don't think any any battery manufacturer will make something that is below what industry safety regulations are but what i will say is those tolerances will sometimes change how they fit in a product also impacts how it's tested and yeah different companies will just have their different priorities and at the end of the day that is going to be one of the key reasons why they choose a specific battery over another and sometimes could even just be cost right um memory is going up crazy right yeah um we've been having meetings about memory for all of our products like almost any product with a process is going to have some sort of memory in there and we're trying to to figure out, OK, what else could we do without having to increase prices for certain things?

1:07:41Shen:And sometimes, and I'm sure someone in 2026 will end up making a decision that they're not going to invest as much into the newest technologies because they don't want their retail price to go up.

1:07:56Marques Brownlee:Yeah, like I try to – this has come up now that we've like started to make our own products where we realize how many decisions go into these products and every lever is just a tradeoff with something else. I am rooting for silicon carbon batteries to be – like we haven't had thankfully any issues with them. Longevity seems to be totally fine so far. But batteries, even just within batteries themselves, have different levers. it feels like an oversimplification but a lot of things come down to just like capacity charge rate and longevity pick two you know that's and there's that's not even with price and like all the other things like there are tons of different levers that will flip based on what your priorities are as a company but yeah i'm hoping for good things you might not know what

1:08:41Shen:that level will look like if you pull the other two you don't know what that longevity level is going to look like until you've seen that thing run through its entire life cycle. So I would say like those that aren't using silicon carbon batteries, I wouldn't say any of them are rooting against it at all. As long as nothing happens to it in whatever their, you know, time frame they're observing it, like I'm sure it's going to be within those discussions. I'm Sure, it's in their discussions now, but at the end of the day, when they make that decision of which one they use, they're choosing the levers that makes the most sense for them.

1:09:23Marques Brownlee:Awesome. Well, this has been super helpful and insightful. And I'm sure we'll have you back on the podcast at some point, maybe even back in the studio, but we appreciate the insight. So thanks as always. Thank you. All right, so that was it. Thank you again to Shen for spending the time. Obviously, he's a very busy person and being in charge of a big company like that. There are tons of things to consider all the time. It was cool having the facts from him and the expertise. And again, the risk that we're talking about is not just like the specific safety risk of one technology, but it's like a corporate risk.

1:09:55Marques Brownlee:It's a financial risk. It's a longevity risk. It's all sorts of things that come with the choices, the levers you pull to use different technologies. So I thought that was interesting to hear.

1:10:04Shen:Yeah, I think one of the, a pretty common comment was along the lines of like, well, Apple and Samsung aren't gonna risk spending more money on it. It's like, yeah, that's part of the risk assessment thing is like it costs more money, potentially has way more money. You think about Note 7. I mean, how much money Samsung probably lost about this. Like, yeah, all these companies care way more about bottom line and money than they do any of us and getting the best features. So yeah, I thought that was pretty obvious.

1:10:32Marques Brownlee:I am reminded that the guy at I.O. that told me the reason Google didn't use them at the time. Again, this was a year ago. Things might have changed since then.

1:10:40Shen:It was two years ago. Maybe it might have been two years ago.

1:10:43Marques Brownlee:It might have been two years ago. It might have been two IO, IO, IO. To Google IO we go. What?

1:10:50Shen:Old McDonald, bro. That's what he said. Yeah, yeah.

1:10:52Marques Brownlee:The Hamburglar, yeah. Anyway, so he, at the time, he wasn't saying that they're more likely to explode necessarily. What he had told me was that their longevity, they started to lose their total ability to charge to 100%. much quicker. And after two-ish years, the degradation was a lot higher. I am aware, like, from two years from then, they've actually made the technology quite a bit better. They've made the chemistry a lot better so that it, you know, maintains a lot of charge cycles. I think OnePlus has put out a lot of kind of, like, technical stuff about this and how they're able to actually maintain, like, a thousand charge cycles for silicon carbon, which is a lot better than some people.

1:11:35Marques Brownlee:Yeah. So that's really important. Stuff changes. Yeah. This, like, assessment of the technology will be constantly changing. And then the way that these companies decide whether to use any of this stuff or not is also constantly changing. So as it gets better, like, okay, one of the big points in the comments was, well, we haven't had any issues so far with silicon carbon batteries, which is great. That's really good news for potentially getting them sooner in everyone else's phones. But yeah, this stuff is constantly evolving. And it's newish to the point where like, it's only been out for like two years.

1:12:03Marques Brownlee:Exactly. So like, yeah, we're not going to see if there are any problems. We're not going to start seeing it until like a year from now or so.

1:12:10Shen:And the variable of humankind is so much more insane than anything you can test in a lab. I mean, we've seen how many folds have been folded 100 ,000 times in a lab and people are breaking them. Broken within a week. Two weeks. Yeah, we peeled the screen protector off of the first fold immediately. Like us as humans destroy things. and when it's something that has a little bit of a more dangerous potential it's just like even if that's so small the news cycle of when if that potentially happens is so big and we talk about

1:12:43Marques Brownlee:we talk about how like you know when youtube makes a change and it's like oh we're only testing this on one percent of customers but then you realize what one percent is for youtube yeah now that's like a lot of people it's the same with like samsung sells an insane amount of phones right so So if 1 % of their phones have battery issues, that's a way bigger story than 1 % of the amount of phones that Google sells having battery issues. Yeah, that's exactly. And what Shin was talking about, if you're pretty confident that the issues with your phones are one in a million and you only sell half a million phones, you feel pretty good about that.

1:13:15Marques Brownlee:But if you're Samsung and you sell tens of millions of phones, the risk profile is different.

1:13:20Shen:And are also like, yeah, you're just leading everything already. Like, why change anything? I'm already making plenty of money and people aren't switching off me so why would I give them anything else until I need to? Are you just talking about the S26 now? I think that's

1:13:34Marques Brownlee:I think Yeah, literally That was maybe the most like impactful line that he said to me which is like it's your race to lose Yeah In all these other competitive markets where there is no true like number one runaway with a high market share they're all very competitive and that's way more exciting you get way more advanced product really quickly and then like I said in that video here in the US where market share is kind of stacked for a couple companies. They are, I mean, we see it. They are so passive about a lot of stuff. So that's their risk assessment profile. The S23 is the S24 is the S25 is probably going to be the S26.

1:14:09Shen:The S23++++. New boxes.

1:14:11Marques Brownlee:Yeah, Note 3++++.

1:14:12Shen:My thing too is I feel like if there's one thing I can trust and believe in, it's that these companies want to make more money. That's a really good question. If there's an opportunity for them to grow this new battery tech,

1:14:24Marques Brownlee:they're gonna do it as soon as possible. If they think it'll drive them market share. I mean, the whole reason that Samsung is making a foldable, allegedly, making a foldable to compete with the iPhone foldable form factor is because they know it will make them money. Because people are like, oh, I love that shape, but I want to be on Android. Also, Samsung has some pretty bad PTSD with the Note 7 explosion. I was just thinking about that. That was 2016, right? I think it was 2017. 2016, 2017, so almost a decade ago. I always find myself saying like, hey, and you know what happened to Samsung.

1:14:55Marques Brownlee:But for some 15-year-olds watching this, they actually don't know what happened to Samsung. Oh, yeah. A lot of people might not even know what the Galaxy Note was. Exactly.

1:15:10Marques Brownlee:Part of the age verification is what happened to Samsung.

1:15:13Shen:There was a time where you had to choose between having an Android phone that came with a stylus or air travel.

1:15:20Marques Brownlee:That's true. Yeah. Yeah, because you could not bring a Galaxy Note 7 on a plane. For those that don't know, the Galaxy Note 7, notably... Appreciate it. Started exploding a lot.

1:15:34Shen:Even that is... There's 96 cases total, I think. That's a lot, bro. It is a lot. It's a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not really that much. I only exploded 96 times. It's not that big a deal.

1:15:47Marques Brownlee:That's the thing. Especially knowing that while you're sleeping, your phone could randomly explode like that. I would not. Yeah. So they recalled it and then they just didn't end up replacing it, which was very funny. They did later release the Note 7 Fan Edition. For those who don't know. That was really long on a Note 7. Really long on a Note 7. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, lithium-ion batteries aren't perfect either. No. It's just they have some level of risk all the way across the board.

1:16:13Shen:Can I throw something out there also just about the video? just as an explanation the reason we showed the jerry rig everything fold uh like smoking in the video is because when we were looking over the script someone at the studio was like oh i don't know what the term thermal runaway means so rather than just putting this big explanation there we just i mean i guess it's not a big explanation but we're like we'll show footage of what a thermal runaway is we don't have that silicon carbon i totally get why people think that felt uh yeah targeted, but that was not the purpose of it.

1:16:46Marques Brownlee:I think it all came, the mentality that a lot of comments that we're seeing and some reaction videos people made, a lot of it came from the original thumbnail, which was people going, oh, this is a hit piece against silicon carbon, which if you ignore every other video I've ever made is a reasonable take. But now that the thumbnail has changed, the packaging makes a lot more sense. We are explaining the risk assessment, not going, hey, silicon carbon bad, lithium ion good. So if that was your thought, now you know. And the risk of salmon, again, is mostly about pricing and longevity and less about exploding.

1:17:16Marques Brownlee:Exactly. Which a lot of people thought it was about exploding, but it's not. So, there we go.

1:17:20Shen:Can I say a random thing that Shen pointed out that I thought was interesting? Yeah. Was the more he was talking about it, I kind of like in my head tried to visualize what these levers are that he was talking about. They have to like pull and push or whatever. And it just reminded me kind of like an exposure triangle, like with cameras. Like the more of one thing you do, the less of the other. Changes. cycles or capacity and it's like right eventually we'll have Sony's that can just see in the dark but yeah but it was also a good point because it's like an exposure triangle where you have to take 10 ,000 pictures before you can see the light meter you know what I mean because like he made that really good point that it's like you can play with the longevity lever or the charge speed lever but you don't know what that third lever is gonna be like until you've had

1:18:04Marques Brownlee:these batteries used for a while three years yeah anyway thank you all in the name of Shading Light on Things. Thank you again to Shen for helping us out with that. And I think it's time for a second trivia. More trivia. Trivia, dude. So, this is a YouTube question. Let's see who gets it. You too? I should get this. Like YouTube being... Cayman's pre-installed on which iPod...

1:18:27Shen:No. Triggered. I knew that one. Not including music videos. The top most YouTube video is a GTA 6 trailer, of course. but one company accidentally broke that record in 2024 do you remember what company that was most viewed youtube video that's not in 24 hours in 24 hours that is not a music video that is not

1:18:48Marques Brownlee:a music accidentally one company accidentally broke that record yep because oh it wasn't was it or was it really was it i think i know you think well i'm trying to put the pieces together It was a very well-worded question. Thank you.

1:19:08Shen:People go back 20 minutes and just look at me at the desk like this. And that was me trying to think about how to phrase this question.

1:19:15Marques Brownlee:Well done. Accidentally. Okay. We'll think about that. It was intentional. Answers at the end like usual. We'll be right back.

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1:21:31Marques Brownlee:Drills and patio sets with low prices guaranteed during Spring Black Friday, only at the Home Depot. Now through April 22nd, while supplies last. Exclusion supplies to homedepot.com slash price match for details. All right, welcome back to Waveform, the Waveform podcast, as you know it, where we talk about EVs. Two EVs to talk about this week. The cheap one or the expensive one? Expensive. The expensive one or the cheap one?

1:21:53Shen:Cheap is relative to the expensive one.

1:21:55Marques Brownlee:Of course. Yeah, let's do the cheap one. Okay. All right. Rivian R2 reviews dropped this week. Sort of reviews, right? Including ours. Yeah. First drive. Reviews, first drive. First impressions. Final prototype evaluation. We don't have full pricing of all the trims yet, but our video went up. CarWild video went up. J-Rig Everything video went up. Doug DeMuro video. A bunch of us got to actually hang out and drive these cars. R2, as many of you know, is the slightly smaller and roughly half the price Rivian R1. It's the second generation product. It's their 2-0 SUV. It's their Model Y fighter.

1:22:31Marques Brownlee:It's their mass market competitor to put them on the map and save them, blah, blah, blah. All these expectations for R2. I thought it was really, really good. I thought it was really impressive. The software was good. The steering wheel haptics were like PS5 controllers with the spring weight. Relax. It was really relaxed. I'm just saying. It looks like an R1. It's just smaller. It's nimble. It's 2 ,000 pounds lighter. It's simpler. um it also was the highest end trim version of it so it's obviously not going to be the base 45 000 one but it was a dual motor all-wheel drive 600 something horsepower zero to 16 3.5 seconds very very capable machine we off-rooted in it we drove it on streets got roughly 300 miles of range lots of good things to say about it uh but we don't know the price of the one that i tested that won't come out for another month or so which everyone is now you know doing their theorizing about how much they think it will cost but i'm curious if you guys are thinking good things about r2 well with the ram shortage you know it's going to be way more expensive i'm kidding every car has i mean yeah i mean there's a little bit of yeah there's a little

1:23:36Shen:bit of memory yeah i'm curious do you know which trim you drove like did they tell you yes so i am

1:23:43Marques Brownlee:not allowed to weigh in on the prices yeah but yes i drove the highest end trim that they plan on shipping in 2026.

1:23:50Shen:And when they announced it however many years ago, what was the price for the people that put it in the pre-order? Andrew, I believe you did that, right? The pre-order, though, was... It was like$100. But for which trim, do you know? No, no, you didn't pick a trim. Oh, you didn't get to pick? I thought the whole thing was under 60. That was what I was trying to ask. What was the number you said back in the day? I thought back in the day there was an under 60.

1:24:16Marques Brownlee:What I mostly see is 45 000 this this whole this whole promise of like this is their 45 000 competitor if i remember

1:24:22Shen:correctly and i could be totally wrong is everyone was saying under 60 a few years ago which makes most people assume that higher trim would be 59 but that was like you know the like 59.95 or whatever that is under 60 um i don't know that was two years ago a lot of stuff has changed

1:24:38Marques Brownlee:these things never come out the price and to be clear the r2 is only coming in the r1s trim where it's smaller i mean it's a smaller suv it's a small two or suv correct there's no pickup truck right okay uh which yeah this this is like the common uh shape of vehicle that especially america just buys a lot of in general and model y is the most popular vehicle on earth for a reason like there's a shape and a two-row suv higher off the ground type of thing that people like and this is competing directly with that so that's out that's you know not too many hot takes about it I'm just more excited for the R3.

1:25:14Marques Brownlee:Dude, I want the R3. This is cute.

1:25:17Shen:This is cool. Thank you.

1:25:18Marques Brownlee:Now do R3. The R3 is like a foot and a half to two feet shorter than the Model 3. It'll be even easier to park in Brooklyn.

1:25:26Shen:You mean lengthwise, right? Lengthwise. Yeah, front to back. And heightwise. You got to really get down to get into that thing. My thing about the R2 was they had like the decals on it as like the like... R2-D2. Well, the like camouflage, quote unquote. like it didn't cover any lines it just still looked exactly the same it just looked like it

1:25:46Marques Brownlee:had like a silly paint job yeah we all know i mean they showed me in that studio like two years ago whatever what the r2 was supposed to look like so this is now technically an updated final version but it's like we already we can see it it's like it has a couple stripes on it okay whatever but we know what the r2 is gonna look like so yeah r2 they got very clever with it i will say they had some nice easter eggs you can see some of them in doug de miro's video some of them in zach's video. The charge flap, which is the back left corner, has a maze in it. People did screenshot the video and fill out the maze.

1:26:18Marques Brownlee:Doesn't seem to mean anything. It just seems like a long way.

1:26:21Shen:Top post on our subreddit just says, this maze fucking sucks.

1:26:26Marques Brownlee:Because I remember when I was there, and I'm sure someone from Ruby was watching this, I was like, please show me all the Easter eggs. And they're like, we can't. All I can tell you is there's a bunch and I can't explain any of them or show you where they are. And we were like, all right, well, I found the maze. So can you at least tell me what the maze means when people fill it out? And they were like, it's just a maze. It's just a maze. I was like, what do you mean it's just a maze? You spent all this effort like building and designing your own maze and the molding to like hide in the charge port.

1:26:53Marques Brownlee:What is it? They wouldn't tell me. So now that people have filled it out, it seems like it actually is just a maze and nothing special having to do with, unless it's like a - It's just for the whimsy. Topographical map or something. I don't know. There ain't nothing wrong with something that doesn't mean anything. That's fair enough. Well, here's some things that did mean something. In the window lining of the windshield, there's a little smiley face that looks like a little Yeti smiley face. In the back windows in the window lining, there's a little climber. Do they mean anything? Well, it's an adventure vehicle.

1:27:23Marques Brownlee:Then why are people so mad at the mace? Just a mace. Well, it's not really adventure themed until it means something. uh underneath the lining of the center storage there's a little diagram of like things that could fit there like a water bottle and a little camera and a knife which is kind of cool is there a speaker they replaced sorry i didn't watch the video yet they moved the speakers up until like under that front dash they took them out of the doors actually there's still a flashlight in the door you know they know what we want the most important part well that was the thing about the The R2 is how do you take half the price off and still keep all of the character of the Rivian R1 stuff?

1:28:03Marques Brownlee:And I thought the flagship was obviously gonna go and it stayed. So that was actually kind of impressive. They also announced an Apple Watch app that you can use to unlock the doors now.

1:28:11Shen:Oh, let's drive.

1:28:13Marques Brownlee:As if they, I mean, they need better key fobs because that's like my number one complaint. Yeah, that is, yeah. Two other Easter eggs, The molding underneath the windshield wiper fluid canister in the car is a small skunk slash frog hybrid animal. Because that's a frog skunk, which is a frunk. It's a frunk frunk. That means something. You should also know that that spot right underneath the front of the windshield where the windshield wipers are is called the cowl or cowling. and if you peek in there, there's also an outline of a cow owl. Okay, that's pretty sweet.

1:28:56Shen:I didn't know David started working at Rivian with all these puns.

1:28:59Marques Brownlee:That joke's got to know this car. I love it. They know their audience. They wouldn't show me or tell me about any of the rest of them, but that's as many as I was able to find.

1:29:07Shen:Wow. Okay, wait, this is, just to be clear, this is going to be on all R2s, not just these models you reviewed.

1:29:12Marques Brownlee:These Easter eggs? Yeah, these Easter eggs. I believe this should be on all of them. Okay, that makes me very happy. Yes, yes. Are you getting an R2, Adam? Hell no, I'm getting the R3X. Me too, baby. Let's go. Let's go. You're buckled up for that six-year wait? I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm still paying off my current car, so by then I'll be ready. As long as you know. As long as you know. I paid mine off yesterday. Well, there's another EV I do want to bring up to you guys because there's so many weird, interesting things about it that are connected to waveform. Number one, it's a Ferrari EV. We don't know what the outside looks like, but it's called the Luce.

1:29:41Marques Brownlee:Luce, I think. Luce. Do you have to say it like that? I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce it. It's always something Italian with that. Luce. Number two, this interior was the first with assistance from Love From, which is Johnny Ive's firm. So this is potentially the first car interior that Johnny Ive has gotten his hands on. And it's always funny listening to old, I think, I think Neely has brought this up on Olds Vergecast, which is like all the Apple executives drive Ferraris and all they really want is them to have CarPlay. Now they've finally gotten to work with Ferraris. so this is the first time they've had a direct hand in this.

1:30:17Marques Brownlee:But there are some videos out there, this like big teaser video, or really not a teaser. They show the whole interior of the car. And okay. Okay, okay, okay. So many thoughts. Each individual switch and display and UI element is actually beautiful, right? But then when you - In isolation. In isolation, like each button, each switch, really clean, really nicely done. But then you zoom out to the whole interior, and it looks bad. I think pretty bad. It has this retro look to it, which is really nice from my take last week that nostalgia is ruining everyone's taste. They went a little bit confused with the nostalgia, I think.

1:31:10Shen:It's hard to call it nostalgia when it's like, hey, the steering wheel looks kind of old, but also here's an Apple Watch Ultra right next to it.

1:31:18Marques Brownlee:Yeah, yeah, yeah. The tablet looks like an Apple Watch, a giant Apple Watch Ultra. Yeah, but how long ago did the first Apple Watch come out? We're on like the three now, so probably four years. No, he's talking about the original one. No, not the Ultra, the original Apple Watch. The first Apple Watch? The 25th. Right? It's been like a decade. Yeah. So this could still be reminiscent of older times. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a weird, I am guessing this is not gonna be a cheap car. This is gonna be a car that people, it's a Ferrari, like people with a lot of money are - I mean, it's a Ferrari. And I just don't know what type of person wants this.

1:31:54Marques Brownlee:And I say that knowing that a lot of people do actually want retro future. They just want an electric version of an old car. A lot of people say this a lot, and I'm not sure how many would actually buy it if it's like small phones where we all say we want it, but we don't buy it. but like the old remember the buick commercial where they show the gnx over and over and over again which is like super sick and everyone's like we just want that but electric and then you show the new buick and it's like i don't want that so the old volkswagen bus everyone loves that and everyone wishes there was just an electric version of that but then they had to go modernize a whole bunch of design elements and people want it less i think that's still true like people seem to really like the idea of an old design that's just electrified 100 but this is yeah it's I really want to know what the outside of the car looks like I mean that's kind of why Hyundai is making the that car that it uses IONIQ 5?

1:32:49Marques Brownlee:No What is it called?

1:32:52Shen:Oh the N74

1:32:54Marques Brownlee:which they did say is going to be a production car but then they aren't doing it aren't they? They keep saying they will but they haven't That was the hydrogen

1:33:04Shen:hydrogen fuel cells or whatever.

1:33:06Marques Brownlee:That was years ago. I've been talking about that. I mean, that car was sick. At first they were like, it's a concept. And then they were like, maybe we might do it. And they're like, but we probably won't. And then they were like, it's going to go into production. And then we just haven't heard anything. I just think it would be such a huge PR win if a company would actually do what everyone says we want. I just, there's probably some amount of surveys that they've run or people who just say they would buy it but wouldn't actually buy it. Yeah.

1:33:31Shen:You know what's the best thing about this interior that I'm seeing? is just that there's buttons and knobs. Yeah. Agreed.

1:33:38Marques Brownlee:Turns out if it's just not an iPad, people get excited, which is hilarious from Johnny Ive. I will say the giant Apple Watch iPad thing kind of just looks like a knockoff iPad. I don't know. All of this, and I'm not a designer, obviously, but a lot of this to me is very ugly. Each individual piece is sick. The dynamic clock, dude. Nice. Or all clocks dynamic. the torque meter that

1:34:07Shen:aren't all buildings outside David

1:34:10Marques Brownlee:the torque meter that changes based on what mode you're in is sick

1:34:13Shen:I will say if I was able to just like buy this tablet and stick it into my car I would 100 % do it it's so ugly oh my god this is like so on the line of like good and bad that I feel like if I have any response to it it'll either be like you don't like it because you can't afford it

1:34:32Marques Brownlee:or you don't know anything

1:34:34Shen:thing about Ferraris. Yeah, like what? I lose saying anything about this car. The launch mode. Did you see the thing about the launch mode where you like, you pull the handle in from the top? Hold on, do you put... And then everything like turns orange.

1:34:46Marques Brownlee:It looks sick in isolation. It looks awesome. This is the key, I think. Yeah, the key is a little

1:34:52Shen:mini like juice box. It fits in like the little piece. Like this is the key because later down here it shows the key.

1:34:58Marques Brownlee:That's pretty cool.

1:34:59Shen:There's a lot of scrolling on this website.

1:35:01Marques Brownlee:Yeah, something that I did think was cool is that they made like a book series about the development of this car that's like four books that like Johnny Ive like developed with his team and apparently they do that on every project and I think that's very cool and you know I'm happy for them. Remember when they announced

1:35:18Shen:CarPlay Ultra and all the things popped up in the ad and they were like oh this is so cool it looks so pretty and then all the car makers were like no we're not doing that we don't know where we got that from does this actually exist or are these just a bunch of pretty renders that they did and put on a website?

1:35:33Marques Brownlee:This is the interior reveal of Ferrari has said that they're going to make an electric car. This is the interior reveal of their eventual electric car. They will at some point reveal the exterior and the price and the specs and all the rest of that stuff, but this is a car that they've said they're going to actually make.

1:35:48Shen:But none of these are pictures.

1:35:50Marques Brownlee:They're like 3D renders. There are videos? Yeah, I'll show you. I'll send you one on Twitter or something. Of like an actual Like someone driving it or inside it? No, just they've like taken the interior and like put it in a studio and let people hit the buttons themselves and they sound really nice and stuff.

1:36:06Shen:We got to talk about the binnacle, man. What's that? What's the binnacle? These dials are sick, man. The binnacle is what they're calling the gauge cluster behind this steering wheel. A binnacle is, you ever seen on like an old-timey boat, there's like that tower right by the helm that has like a compass and maybe like a clock. Oh, does it have one of those? No, but they're calling the gauge cluster the binnacle. And I like saying the word binnacle.

1:36:27Marques Brownlee:Because it's like pinnacle, sort of? Yeah. Sure. Yeah, yeah. yeah man i i like each individual piece i hate the whole thing though i'm also very curious like there's so many screens that are sort of hidden in this car and i'm very curious if you're going to be able to see bezels that's a great that's going to make a big difference about how tacky it looks it's just running android bolets that would be really funny definitely is you would be you would be rational to think that such an expensive car has to use the latest tech and screens. But if you look at any other Ferrari... Are they all CDs?

1:37:03Marques Brownlee:They don't look great.

1:37:04Shen:I would not trust Ferrari to go and write horse OS. That's not what I would want to use.

1:37:12Marques Brownlee:It's weird. Anyway, that ends my Ferrari crash out for now.

1:37:15Shen:Alright. My turn. Andrew brought you guys another game. Buckle up guys. Yeah, it's called How Long Can You Listen to Me Crash Out About X-Men. How's the Super Bowl? Yo Andrew, did you see Olympic figure skating the other day? I have not had internet for a very long time and that is the start of my crash out. But I want to open this with a question to you guys. If at your house a wire connecting to the telephone pole I'm going to stop you right there. Three of us don't have houses. I know, but just imagine. Okay, just imagine. Imagine you and your family live in a house. I'm going to stop you right there.

1:37:56Shen:I do not have a family. A wire is down across your driveway and you contact the company that deals with that wire. Three of us do not have drive-wise. Sorry, I'm so sorry. How fast do you think that company should come to deal with that wire? Is it a live wire? How am I supposed to know? I'm not an expert.

1:38:16Marques Brownlee:Well, this is the internet. Your internet went down. So it's not like a power line. Okay, so...

1:38:22Shen:A wire has come down from the sky. A wire has come down from a telephone pole. Okay. Do you feel confident enough that that is a power wire or a cable wire? I don't know. It sounds like it's cable. Okay. I only know it is a cable wire because... Here, I'll paint the picture. Andrew, the video showed me there's a transformer on the pole. Yeah, yeah, okay. Instantly, it was a power wire. I'll explain a little further. This is on Saturday. Remember, we're recording this Wednesday. That will help in this story. On Saturday, this big tree in front of my yard, it's a very tall, skinny tree. it's probably like 50 or 60 feet tall.

1:38:57Shen:Pine tree is swaying in the winds because we have had super, super cold days, lots and lots of ice. And on Saturday, we had one of the coldest days of the year, including wind gusts of like 40 to 50 miles an hour. So like 11 a.m., there's two of these trees standing next to each other. And I noticed one is significantly leaning more than the other. I also have pictures of Adam. I'll give them to you. If you're watching, you can see these. To the point where there's this like bulge coming out of the ground. and I'm like next to the tree. That looks bad. And I realized that the root system is pulling up on this tree.

1:39:28Shen:So I immediately call our power company and say this tree is going to fall down and is most likely going to hit a telephone pole. Within an hour, I'm sitting at my bay window and I hear the gust of wind and I look out and I watch this tree come down and snap the telephone pole in half.

1:39:44Marques Brownlee:Yeah.

1:39:45Shen:It hit the wires, not even the pole, the wire is so hard that the telephone pole about a third of the way up snapped clean off the whole telephone pole flips upside down because the transformer and all the wires are at the top. It is now hanging in the road and a tree is across my driveway and across the road. So I do what I should have done. I first call 911 because there's active wires down in the middle of the road. Then I call the power company to tell them what's happening. Then I call Xfinity. Did you leave power? Immediately. Also, so at the telephone pole, it's technically across the street, no sparks.

1:40:22Shen:but it's across the street but there's a wire that comes and then runs into a telephone pole between me and my neighbor's house to then split off how we get our utilities. So dispatcher obviously picks up. I talk to a real person, power company. I talk to a real person. Xfinity, who's my cable company, I tell them about it and through their automated services at 1-800-Xfinity is just, you think, it literally is like, would you like to report a down and potentially dangerous wire do you want me to text you a way to submit this and at this point i'm like i just want my power back i will just take the ticket and submit it so that happens the power company fixes this telephone pole by 10 p.m it was still a really long time of being really cold at home because i had no power um but they get that stuff done then the next day my wires saturday was the coldest day we it was the coldest day we've had I could see my breath inside my house.

1:41:21Shen:We sent Claire and Lane to someone else's house and they stayed there. This is all going to end with me talking about customer service and how every large company is a bunch of f***ing cowards and that they use customer service to just deal with all of it. But, okay, I'm going to try and go as fast as I can here. Next day, Sunday, I realize there's still a wire across my driveway. The only reason I know this is not a dangerous wire is because I personally talked to one of the power company people and they say, we did all our wires. The wire left down on your driveway right now is the cable company's and we're not going to deal with it.

1:41:56Shen:Sorry. So then I call that day Xfinity. The problem with Xfinity's horrific call answering service or whatever it is, is it connects you to pretty much no one until you at some point can get to technical customer support, the people who are trying to help you troubleshoot your router and everything. First guy tells me someone will be there today between 6 and 11. And at that point, I'm like, that feels like way too long for a wire to be down. So I get mad. And then no one shows up that day. And so then I call the next day. And they're like, oh, no one showed up. They're supposed to be here at 10 to 12.

1:42:34Shen:Call us later if no one shows up. I call them later, no one shows up. They're like, oh, it's scheduled for tomorrow. And then yesterday, I call again. They're like, oh, 10 to 12, 12 o 'clock. I actually did get an automated thing saying like, they'll be a little late today. I call again at 5 p.m. Oh, the schedule's for tomorrow now. Oh my god. No one can connect me to the like.

1:42:54Marques Brownlee:Actual person.

1:42:55Shen:The technicians that are doing the exterior things. Every time they're just like, well we're just technical support. There's nothing we can do. And I go, what's the line for customer service? And they say, it's 1-800-XFINITY. Which is how I got to those people in the first place.

1:43:11Shen:Super TLDR. I'm not proud of how many times I freaked out at people on the phone. I mean, I probably have spent six to eight hours on the telephone in the last three or four days. Marques came in the other day at me like the holds for me. Yeah. No, no. Physically talking to people for that long, trying to get anything done. It's just literally nothing can happen. No one can connect me to any of these technicians. None of these technicians are calling me to tell me they're just not going to show up that day. it's got to be the worst customer service I've ever dealt with and we all know that Comcast and Xfinity sucks but this is not just them like if you think about it most places now if there's customer service you get this crappy answering machine of like here's a bunch of different options that take you nowhere hang the phone up on you all the time and when you talk to someone it's a call center that probably can't help you and those poor people on that side are definitely just getting screamed at for nothing Why don't you just change your provider?

1:44:11Shen:We have plenty of options. I literally don't have any other provider option in my area except for, I think their spectrum and it offers 25 down as their max. So I don't have another option, but, uh,

1:44:25Marques Brownlee:California has a lot of laws around this. So I would kill for in San Francisco and Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz. We had cruise net and we had gigabit before anybody else had gigabit because there was like 20 different options just in Santa Cruz, which is like a town of like not that many people. I was trying to say that having multiple options creates competition, which then... Marquez, careful.

1:44:45Shen:Yeah, it's like... No, Marquez, competition is bad. Competition is bad.

1:44:48Marques Brownlee:We need to own people. Are you saying you could bust trusts? Is that what you're saying? Wait a second. Wait, what if we did that? Yeah. What if we had more than one option? Have you ever guys played that game? It's kind of old. You have to like... You own the stuff and then you keep... Is it a board game? And then you own more stuff? Yeah. Wait, how do you win that game? You don't. You just hate each other. Everyone gives up. Oh, I know how you win. You just make sure you're the only option. I think it's called mono poly because it means one. That's why there's only one poly market. There are two.

1:45:22Marques Brownlee:There's call sheet as well.

1:45:23Shen:I want to say I appreciate you guys because I'm still fuming thinking about this, and it's helping me not look as much of an idiot. It's crazy. Can I tell you some of the funniest things that I dealt with in these calls? one of them was me on the phone with somebody and then getting a text message from xfinity saying service in your area has been restored that really helps oh yeah i had one person say i kept just asking they were like oh the the appointment with the external technician is for 10 to 12 tomorrow and i was like can i get any confirmation for that can you send me an email no we're not able to do that and then one of them said we can do that and i said well i haven't gotten it yet and she said is your internet working i said no the wire is down across the road and she said well you didn't get the email because you don't have internet and i was like i'm calling you on my phone like this is the this is the point where i i tried to keep my cool for so long because i knew and i was just hoping someone could give me a number somewhere but then they basically just lie to me yeah and like basically call me an idiot and then i just start freaking out and I was not nice and I feel bad because it's not their fault because Xfinity is using a bunch of labor somewhere else as punching bags to completely dodge any responsibility which then just makes me even more mad so honestly anyone out there if you have Xfinity and can change do it because that place sucks even though everywhere else probably sucks but what I would give change i know what i would give can't for verizon fios who are probably almost just as bad yeah verizon as a fios yeah i promise you it's the fios customer service is so laughable like the ways they have managed to screw me over dude but i have an andrew i have an xfinity story for you but i think i told once like years ago on the podcast but we know we're just gonna tell it again because I hate Xfinity.

1:47:19Shen:I was paying an insane amount of money for Xfinity gigabit, like$80,$90 a month. Oh, I pay more than that for their 1.1200. Yeah. I never, ever, ever got more than 100 megabytes down. Ever. Most of the time I was in the low 30s. And we would complain to Xfinity every day, like, why are we paying all this money if you just cannot deliver the right service? And every day they'd be like, we don't know what's going on it must be you somehow like you need to get a new router you need to do this we'd be like no no no no don't lie to me and after months of this we were talking to someone via the like live chat at xfinity and they go hold on give me one sec test your internet speed now gigabit gigabit up gigabit it was like crazy we were like wait a second how did you do that They were like, I can't really say.

1:48:11Shen:Yeah. And chat. Similar story. Four days later, internet speed goes back down to 30. What happened? We get back on the live chat talking. We're like, no, no, you fixed. Someone fixed it last time. They're like, they don't fix it. Finally, we got them to admit why we texted them. You have a button on your dashboard that says, give us gigabit. And you're just refusing to hit it because your boss said not to. And the guy goes, yes, period. I'm sorry period ends the chat oh my god

1:48:43Marques Brownlee:that's similar not with all the proof but I had a similar story briefly in college I had like horrible there was like two possible service whatever providers and I'm pretty sure it was Comcast was the first one and I was getting like Comcast with the wig on and the second one yeah basically I was getting like three down or whatever and it kept going in and out of like internet outages and I just called them and I was like cancel my service cancel it now cancel it I don't even want to bother working with you. Just cancel it. And they're like, no, please, please, please. We can upgrade you for free.

1:49:10Marques Brownlee:And that's when they start offering bargains. They're like, we'll upgrade you for a discount. I was like, cancel it. I don't care. And they're like, okay, we'll just put you on the highest tier plan, and we won't have to change anything else. And I was like, fine. And I hung up, and immediately my internet was like 300 up and down. It was zero changes to price or anything else. I was like, this could have been my situation the entire time, but they hold you in the little box as long as they can. Yeah. So it's true.

1:49:36Shen:So real quick, then I my neighbors who also are missing Internet when they called them, they said, oh, we don't see any other outages. It must be something in your house, but we can't get a home technician there till Wednesday. This is on Sunday while I'm screaming at someone on the phone saying there's wires down and they know that they're telling me there's no reported outage right now. I think it actually got fixed and I only know that because my neighbor texted me during this podcast saying hey our internet's back up I think it might be working still not a single technician has called me or done anything if I go home and that wires on the ground Boy, yeah, I don't know what's going on when I got my files installed

1:50:16Marques Brownlee:They didn't show up on like the first three days They were said they were supposed to show up and I kept being like hey They said they were gonna show up between these hours and they didn't and then when the guy eventually came He's like, oh, yeah, like if we take too long in another job, we just don't come. And I was like, but do you tell anyone who tells me? And they're like, no. My Fios technician took nine and a half hours to put Fios in my house.

1:50:39Shen:I don't know why. Like he didn't do anything. And then there's a bunch of other stuff that happened while he was there that was like so crazy. I was like, this is insane. But I will say I got a lot of really nice tools out of it because he left half of his stuff at my apartment, including his hard hat. So I have a variety. I have a Verizon hard hat now, which I'm like really into. That's cool. Do you know the hours they gave me? 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. And then say someone must be home when they show up. I was like, that is not happening. You're fixing this. That is silly. Wow. I'm sorry about that.

1:51:10Shen:So they basically have expected me to miss three days of work.

1:51:14Marques Brownlee:Yeah, they often assume you don't have a job. They're like, you must just be home all day, right? Yeah. You're good? You're home all day? Cool. Yeah, we'll show you anytime. Honestly. When you have a job, just use the internet at work.

1:51:24Shen:Idiot. I mean, I guess I was thinking of the scenario where if I didn't get to talk to the power person to know that that wire down was not electrically charged. At this point, I would have had to call the fire department probably to come get it. But like, I asked every single person I talked to, like, is this is this wire dangerous? And they were usually like, yes, it's dangerous. Like, do you think you should get someone to come here right away? And they're like, well, I guess if maybe it's just the power or if it's just the cable line, then that doesn't have electricity flowing through. and I was like, do you trust me knowing if that's the power?

1:51:56Shen:I didn't tell them. I knew it was the, but like I had people basically telling me, oh, you could cross over the power line. Don't worry about it. Damn. Which seems like an insane liability for us. So is your car not in the driveway? I've, I knew it was safe. So I've rolled over it since then, but it's a, but that's only because of the power people. But I wasn't telling them that I was trying to get them to clean up a wire or actually show up. Wow. I feel it. I'm titling this the crash out episode.

1:52:22Marques Brownlee:Thanks for tuning into our weekly crash out podcast.

1:52:25Shen:The one where everyone crashes out. That felt good. F*** you Xfinity. Seriously, like I... Plus one. Yes. F*** you Sam Altman too.

1:52:36Marques Brownlee:While we're at it. I don't like any of your Ferraris either.

1:52:41Shen:And f*** your binnacle. I need Adam to say, Adam, who are you mad at? Ring cameras. Right now, WhatsApp. But that's a story for another podcast. I was going to say all of you for making this an impossible episode to edit afterwards. That too. Wait, what did WhatsApp do? Really quick. Bro, I can't get into this right now. Tune in next week. Choose WhatsApp. Choose WhatsApp.

1:53:02Marques Brownlee:Subscribe to find out what WhatsApp did. Really quickly, related to WhatsApp, really quickly, there's a funny thing that happened. Where, do you guys remember when ChatGPT was in WhatsApp randomly all of a sudden? Well, it was. I don't remember. Well, it was. Okay. I only remember meta AI being in WhatsApp all of a sudden. Yeah, so also ChatGPT was. And then meta was like, oh no. And then they took it out. Because they were like, nobody else can have AIs in WhatsApp now. Isn't that like anti-competitive or something? Yeah. And then the European Commission very quickly was like, uh-uh. Uh-uh. And now they are passing legislation to force meta to allow AI.

1:53:45Marques Brownlee:Shut the human. I know they're saving our asses about everything. Greenland come on a lot of stuff competent government is crazy it's crazy anyway it would be great come get your boy Xfinity over here European Union

1:53:59Shen:please come break up Comcast can we have the city of Philadelphia somehow join the EU so that podcast is like under you now like that would be crazy they've

1:54:13Marques Brownlee:just moved it there was a Jersey now there's New Jersey there should be like New Philadelphia. New New York. It's about time for some trivia. I forgot we had trivia. This is a crazy episode, dude.

1:54:29Shen:God. You know, I am feeling like I went a little too far. So because I said, f*** you, Sam Altman, I'm going to change my trivia question. I feel like at a certain point I got to draw the line. So today's new trivia question. What was the answer? The answer was 6.8 gigawatts, which is, so we can round it up to seven. So that's 70 % of what Sam Altman says it would take to cure cancer or tutor every child. Is that with the full capacity or the 30 % capacity? That's full capacity. That's with the flux capacity. That's with the flux capacity. Very cool. Very cool. How that translates to gigawatt hours, I don't know.

1:55:05Shen:But the trivia question I do know the answer to is, was inspired actually by something David Amell said earlier this episode, which was about the band Straight Line Manifesto. No. Three Doors Down. U2. Specifically, U2 is now forever associated with Apple because they put that one album out. And there was a U2 edition iPod that got sold. That's different than the red edition though, right? I think so. The product red. Yeah. U2, Apple.

1:55:36Marques Brownlee:Like this. Yeah. Homies. It's like Tim Cook and that guy with the shoes.

1:55:43Shen:However, Samsung and U2's lineup share one thing in common. What is that thing? What do you mean by lineup? That's it. That's the question. Oh.

1:56:01Shen:David, I'm not going to give you the answer. Stop staring at me like that.

1:56:04Marques Brownlee:I don't know anything about U2, so that's going to be tough for me.

1:56:07Shen:What I'm really confused about is I kind of thought David would nail this one. I kind of thought this was

1:56:12Marques Brownlee:a David layup.

1:56:14Shen:That means it's a pun.

1:56:17Marques Brownlee:I wrote down the only thing I know about you two.

1:56:20Shen:Please, I hope yours just says Bono.

1:56:26Marques Brownlee:I just don't know anything about you two. So, is that it?

1:56:32Shen:No. Andrew? I didn't write anything. David? Galaxy Sunday, Bloody Sunday The answer is The Edge, which is the name of the lead guitarist in the band U2 and the Thin Phone

1:56:50Marques Brownlee:I mean, Viva La Vida Somebody else listening to the podcast and immediately because they know a lot about U2 they immediately went through and they're like oh yeah, The Edge, I know

1:57:01Shen:You would have to both know a lot about U2 and be aware of the current lineup of Samsung Galaxy, folks.

1:57:06Marques Brownlee:Well, the Edge thing has been in the lineup for a very long time. Galaxy X6 Edge, Galaxy Note Edge. Shout out to the Note Edge. That one was insane. I didn't know that his guitarist was named the Edge. Or that their guitarist was named the Edge.

1:57:18Shen:I thought Bono just played all of the instruments.

1:57:21Marques Brownlee:Is Bono his real name? Is Bono Jovi? That's going to trigger someone I can tell. Next question, but first, quick update on the score. Of course. Wait, did Marques get that point? No. No.

1:57:34Shen:Marquez with 14, speaking of which. David with 16. Andrew's still carrying the one with 17. I don't think David and I's points have changed in a very long time. No, it's been a while. I think ever since... No, you had a great... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ever since you complained about not getting any points, I don't think David and I have gotten any. Voodoo magic that's so hard. Okay, the next question. Yeah. In 2024, one company accidentally broke the record for the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours. What was that company? Was this in 2024? It was in 2024. David, can you put that down because you keep blocking your face?

1:58:13Shen:Sorry. Oh, I forgot about this. I know. Me too. Me too. I was wondering if they would remember because I completely blanked on it.

1:58:23Marques Brownlee:I feel like I remember the story but not the specifics. You know? Oh, that I'm wrong.

1:58:30Shen:I didn't even write anything.

1:58:33Marques Brownlee:Anything. Flip him and read. What do you got?

1:58:37Shen:Well. Marquez, what'd you put?

1:58:41Marques Brownlee:Rockstar? Like the energy drink? No, the GTA trailer. I didn't write anything.

1:58:45Shen:You didn't write anything? I panicked. F*** Xfinity.

1:58:52Marques Brownlee:He's just thinking about it. I put OnePlus for when they ran Marquez's entire video as an ad. Oh, yeah. No, not that. That's a good guess, though. But that was like the OnePlus 6.

1:59:03Shen:I didn't know you were such a OnePlus show, Marcus.

1:59:05Marques Brownlee:That was like the OnePlus 6 or something. Yeah, it was a while ago. It was like an actually published trailer for something.

1:59:10Shen:It was an April Fool's joke that Discord did that it was a 17-second video that was on loop in their servers and it accidentally crossed over the line. And YouTube had to take away that. It was like a pop-up thing. So they basically botted the views because it was embedded into it. In Discord. 1.4 billion views in 2014. Oh my god.

1:59:35Marques Brownlee:I did not hear that story. Whoa, infinite money glitch unlocked. The worst thing Discord's ever done

1:59:41Shen:maybe next to this face recognition stuff is adding these stupid little pop-ups in the corner that you always have to be like, I don't want to do a quest right now. Shut up, it's an ad or whatever, a new feature. Wow.

1:59:52Marques Brownlee:That kind of defines 2026. Side quest. Is it an ad or a feature? Do a quest to find out. It's 2026. well thank you for tuning into the crash out podcast we appreciate your time next week we'll be crashing out about a slightly different set of things yeah whatsapp possibly whatsapp will be on the list of course and then just keep in touch with the news maybe we'll get an idea of what we're going to crash out to next

2:00:17Shen:if you're still here kudos

2:00:19Marques Brownlee:that means we appreciate you already because you're probably already subscribed but if you haven't already get subscribed see you guys in the next episode peace Goodbye.

2:00:28Shen:Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We're a partner with the Vox Media Podcast Network, and our traditional music was Vane Silk.

2:00:41Shen:Am I the only one in this room who has not met Reggie Watts and or knows who he is? He was at Mark's birthday party. He's a football player, right? No. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo.

2:00:59Marques Brownlee:It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Thank you. Support for this show comes from Odoo.

2:01:32Shen:Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

2:01:38Marques Brownlee:Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

2:01:56Shen:That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.