FBI Tales & More Untold MKBHD Stories

37:39And so they were essentially running an illegal business. There's a whole bunch of things that they should be getting in trouble for. They were just first-generation Samsung Galaxy Folds with the Escobar logo on them. It started as a Royal FlexPie, and nobody got those years earlier. That phone is terrible, by the way. Yeah, I know. then it was the original fold that just had this crappy gold plating on it and then just like they already logged in and put a like mugshot of pablo escobar like as the wallpaper yeah and then they actually went one step further and then did an gold iphone 11 pro which at that point they were in on the whole thing of like well we're just refurbishing these and selling them for cheaper because of apple they had a wild marketing campaign where it was like they bought rip rip samsung.com and rip apple.com yeah because they started off calling it the escobar phone they weren't calling it a samsung phone at first they were saying we have made a folding phone and we're selling it for cheaper than samsung and it when i had eventually gotten that device and i peeled the gold off it was just the samsung phone we all knew it was yeah and so the only way for them to be selling this phone for a couple hundred bucks which is less than what it was costing is if they weren't actually doing that.

38:54I have a question about this in their scamming theory. Do you think their theory from the start was just like, we are actually going to trick people to thinking this is a new phone and we're just not going to send it? Or there was this weird thing where it was$400, the actual phone was$1 ,000. People were buying this phone despite it looking like a scam, but I think it's because they were trying to pull one over on the Escobar people thinking like, that's a$1 ,000 phone, but I can get it for$400 and just peel the gold off the back. And then also getting scammed. But do you think they thought that?

39:28And that was their like, we're going to pretend to be dumb and then still scam them? Right, it's hard to tell. Yeah. I don't think. Because it's so insane that it feels like parody. Like they released a little booklet with it with a picture of Pablo Escobar on the front that says, I made billions selling cocaine. Now my smartphones will destroy Apple and Samsung. Which is just - Direct quote. Yeah, direct quote. direct quote they have these crazy photos of like almost naked models with just like the phones unfolded around their privates it's like it was so and they're they had a video there were a lot of videos there was videos about this with like tons of coke and like naked people and phones on youtube on youtube one was about how they're gonna like cook apple by uh like it was a bunch of like women in underwear essentially and they had a bunch of iphone 6s they kept like putting on grills and lighting on fire and like it was very strange yeah yeah weird thing i i mean maybe there's a world where they thought that they could trick people into thinking that they were going to get everything that they were saying yeah i it's really hard but it feels like so much like parody it does that it's hard to think that they couldn't have been like if we make this look like a parody then people might actually buy it because they think it's funny because there's like an irony yeah i'm not i'm not totally sure and it worked too because i believe for the first phone they were using clarna and clarna froze their account and it had like four hundred thousand dollars in it or something like that because again i think a lot of people were like well if i don't get it it's four hundred dollars but if i do and it's a good story yeah but if i do get it i get a thousand dollar phone for four hundred dollars yeah and i get to tell people that i bought a drug lord's phone and i'm super cool now yeah marquez i have a question yeah so the whole walk to the studio that morning it's a pretty long walk like with them following yeah with them following you like what's going through your mind were you guys talking were they saying anything was it just silence so when they met me at the door they showed their badges and i was freaking out inside.

41:42I was very confused. I was like, I can't imagine what they're here for. But I think they immediately were like, yeah, we would like to talk about, we're doing an investigation about this Escobar phone or whatever. And as soon as I heard that, I was like, oh, thank God. I can help you with that. Okay. I will snitch. Yes, that's me. So from then, yes, I just was like, yeah, come back to the studio. And yeah, I guess that was probably a quiet walk but eventually like i uh i like talked to them they had a whole bunch of questions that made sense like what were your communications with them you know can we see the phones they actually say took the phones as evidence they sealed them up in plastic bags and took them as evidence you were you still logged in i never like yeah i did not log into those yeah yeah i did not log into those phones you just found the like receipt for them taking that for evidence right i did yeah so i'll have the paper because at when they left they they left me with let's not talk about this until you know this case is like wrapped up someday so just like this is consider this confidential and so i was like okay i'm not going to tell a soul about this but someday i will be able to so i'm just i'm keeping this paper i'm keeping all this and then you eventually we kind of just figured like maybe we should figure out how long it's going to be Can I step back a little bit?

43:08Yeah. So my morning that day, this was also, I'm realizing how wild the timing was because this was June 2020. So at that point, the only time I was coming into the office was once every other week to record the podcast. And then I was leaving and editing at home. So I happened to come in that morning and I parked the car outside and I had an email that said, it was just subject Escobar phone. It was from somebody that said their name and then in parentheses FBI from an FBI.gov web account. And she said, hi, Mr. Brownlee. We would like to speak to you in regards to the Escobar phone. We are currently in the lobby of your building.

43:48If you come downstairs or contact me at a number, thank you, special agent blank. And so I was running. I had the public email address coming to me. So you never got this email. I parked my car and was like, are we getting spoofed? is like somebody trying to scam us or something. The easiest way to figure this out is if I park at the front of the building and come in the front instead of the side entrance, they don't know who I am or that I work for you. So I can walk by and see if there's people that look like agents. And then I can come in and tell you about it. Because it was like they sent it a few minutes before I got there.

44:23Scouting. Scouting, yeah. So I walk into the lobby and no one's there. Like we're getting, someone's trying to scam us. Somebody spoofed this email address. and I walk down ready to tell Marquez this funny email that I got and then I see him in the middle of the room as I'm opening the door with three people in suits and Marquez is just waving me in and I'm like what is happening and then I maintain that you should have just turned around and started running I don't know if that would have neither of you guys between finding out that you were about to talk to the FBI and talking to the FBI neither of you reached out to a lawyer did you no no bold well because i was too late marquez marquez waved me and at that point i told me what they were going to ask me about and i was immediately like oh i am not in the wrong here i am just helping with evidence collection for a case against someone else that's still a very valid question else look matt damon fortune favors the bold let's uh let's get it boys you know but so when i came in that was the point i had been the one who got all the emails from them because it was at the like business account.

45:28And yeah, they basically just said, can you forward me all of those emails? They asked if there's any other sort of information we might have of like who they might contact. And we told them about, they were running this weird thing on their YouTube page where they paid a couple of random celebrities to do cameos talking about how cool the phone is. They didn't say they were cameos though. They just uploaded the videos of people endorsing their phone. It was Chris Hansen. Nice. It was this Swedish figure skater, I believe. Check out. Anna something. And it was Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager.

46:02Those were the three people. So not that Cameo's the one doing that dealing, but we let them know about that. And yeah, other than that, they just asked the questions. They did take the phones. We have not seen them again since. That's correct. And yeah, we were, you referenced it a couple of times. You mentioned it one time at the end of a smartphone awards. Yeah. I said like, I'd like to be able to tell the story someday. You said, I think that's what you said on a Reddit AMA on the smartphone awards. You just said like, here are all the phones from this year. The Escobar phone is missing because the FBI has it.

46:37And you just kind of like brushed it off. I did do that. And Reddit was like, not sure if you were joking or if that was real. And there are some people like, I can't wait to hear that story. And a bunch of other people who are like, that's just a joke. Come on. There's no way that's real. but that was four years ago the reason we feel finally comfortable to talk about it now is because the guy Olaf who ran that whole company is now in jail in Spain for fraud and a bunch of other things and there's potential talks about him possibly being extradited to the US to be investigated I believe I don't think you can come to a studio when you're in jail but yeah So I don't believe we will be interrupting any investigations at this point.

47:23Also, didn't they kind of wrap this up like a year or so ago? I thought something happened with this case. Well, in December, he got picked up in prison in Spain. Nice. Everything I've had to read about this is in Swedish, so I have to translate it all. Yeah. Can I just say that I remember the first time Marquez mentioned this to me while I was just like walking around the studio. he's like oh yeah you know when the FBI took the phone whatever blah blah blah and I like did a hard 180 like what? what are you talking about? it's also not the only time the FBI has contacted us about something it's true yeah after the meme coin video where we talked about the influencers doing we got emails from Tron the crypto company asking Asking us to do an undisclosed tweet.

48:21Asking us to do something super illegal. Yeah, just straight up. And not only asking us to do something illegal, naming the other people that did the illegal thing in the email. So you mentioned that in a video, and they pretty much were like, I think they needed us to send the emails to them again. And that one was fairly quick. We didn't get to see any FBI agents, but more than once. I'm not a very smart guy. You know, last week I said a Southeast Asian country, which when I in fact meant Nepal, which is not in Southeast Asia. It's just in South Asia. So, you know, not the smartest guy here.

48:56But I would never ask someone to do something illegal in a DM and then name my accomplices in the same DM. It's like to later get screenshotted and put into a video. Am I a snitch? Am I? Is that just what I do? No. Snitching unreasonable. Unless only ask that of the podcast audience. Commit crimes. Do it. That is a sound bite. But clearly I'm brain cells ahead of these meme coin folks. Well, that was a marketing agent for a meme coin. So you've got two levels of cluelessness going on, I think. Yeah. Was that after we made a Dogecoin experiment? It was that video that Mark has put in the video.

49:39That email. Yeah. Man, that was a wild time. TLDR if you're doing some illegal stuff don't email us. Don't. Yeah. We don't want to be involved. All these waves. We will snitch. Yeah. We will snitch. You're going to end up on YouTube man. Sorry David. There's all these waves of like tech scams that just keep coming through you know. There's all that crypto and then there was all the metaverse stuff. Yep. Now we're probably going to find out most of this AI stuff is just smoke and mirrors. Just waves and waves of it. Which we kind of already know. Yeah. So that's that. Anyway, yeah. Ideally, we have a much more fun retelling of that on the main channel, which is a good time.

50:22We're going to take another quick break, but we do have a couple more fun stories to close it out. So we'll be right back.

50:42I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back, and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the internet last year, and I think this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife, who keeps stealing all my hoodies. Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals. Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online, and in store.

51:13When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th, and never miss a meme or milestone, all protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you.

51:52Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. All right, welcome back. couple more short stories for you all of which are untold in the channel this is our told yeah but all of which are hilarious from our perspective or at least worth telling okay next one is a ces story it's a story of how i became uh a villain for at least 24 hours i was i was hated a couple weeks i would say yeah oh really a couple weeks well because the video had to come out yeah so for a while i still hate you yeah a big time hated guy from this um at the time and this was again 20 so 2019 uh before i had ever watched any formula one this was around the time where lewis hamilton was like winning everything and that's all i really knew about formula one at the time uh but okay so we're at ces 2019 and ces for those who don't know for a tech youtuber is a very hectic time.

53:01I mean, it can be hectic or less hectic depending on what you make of it. But for someone like me, we are bouncing around between things we're trying to do at CES. Going to a meeting, and then going to see a thing, and then going to shoot a thing, and then going to shoot a different thing that we got told about, and then going to another meeting, and then going across to this thing outside of the convention center. And it's just, it's very busy. It's a couple days of that. And they'll like, that convention center is big it's not just like oh i want to see this thing it's a couple minutes away it could be a 20 minute walk away it could be an hour-long taxi car right away i left a tripod at a one plus briefing and went to another briefing literally yeah that's that's the first time we ever saw you yeah you almost collapsed on the floor in front of us because i sprinted back from like yeah a 45 minute walk across the anyway whatever yeah there's there's stuff in the convention center there is stuff in the hotels outside the convention center you know booths like meeting rooms all kinds of setups i actually find that that's hilarious that the first thing you ever saw from me was me being like we were like eating on this table and you like literally came up to the table and just went like this that's the most cest that is cest anyway so okay so we're in the thick of it in this CES and I do remember I mean people come up to me at CES and take either pictures or like want to say hi and I'm totally cool with that I will say hi to people and take pictures of people at CES this is pre-COVID as well so like we're just shaking hands sucking, it's great, it's a good time CES you get to meet people was it 2020?

54:412019 2020 actually funny enough was the year I was like I get sick every year at CES so you know what I'm going to do this year? fist bumps only and that year i went around saying hey no one gets sick this year right and then it was at that moment that everyone they did yeah yeah anyway so yeah ccs we're we're hauling around we're busy we're shooting a bunch of stuff and uh trying to be curious in between things so i remember we were on our way i want to say it was from from razor or to razor we were in the mercedes booth going to razor and if you've been to c yes the autumn auto booth i think it's the north hall oh and i think the razor booth is generally in the east hall they are extremely far away they're as far away on the convention floor as possible yeah so i'm trying to like hustle my way across to to make this this meeting uh on my way someone like sort of stops me and goes, hey, oh, you're the guy from...

55:45Now, pause. Everyone has a different way. This is something I've noticed. Everyone has a different way of trying to explain that they know who you are, whether it's, oh, you're the guy with the iPhones, right? Or, oh, my son knows your videos. I've seen your video. I've heard your voice from his bedroom. Everyone has a different thing that they say. What this guy said was, oh, you're the YouTube guy. My friend really likes you. My boss. My boss really wants to meet you. Hang on here for a second. I'm going to go get him. uh okay so so i'm like with another guy he goes hi oh good to meet you and he's filming me now okay oh no so now he's filming me and this guy comes out hey um and i think he basically just says like oh i'm nico you know you know that guy lewis hamilton yeah i beat him i'm the guy that beat him and i'm like okay great keep in mind i am not watching formula one at this time so i don't actually know really what that means i know that uh lewis hamilton is an f1 driver and i know that's oppressive but i didn't really know what to say so i just kind of didn't say much and uh i think he says one or two other things like uh i don't even remember like nice to meet you like you know well it's in his videos so it this oh this whole interaction happens we end it i shake hands and i'm like all right well i gotta go see you later and i keep going to my meeting i shake a few other hands on the way fine a couple weeks later i log into youtube i think actually probably on twitter and everyone twitter is like why is marquez such a jerk like why is he such a dry unenthusiastic person and i go wait what's going on and this ended up in a nico rossberg blog now hindsight now i know who nico is now i know a little bit about f1 and obviously he's a formula one world champion this is a huge deal for a lot of people and so he's going around and it's kind of a huge deal that he knows who i am and like he's already enthusiastically chatting about ces the fact that he's at ces at all is cool i didn't know any of this at the time but uh my interaction comes off as kind of like trying to dismiss him and like leave when i kind of don't know what's going on and got ambushed with the camera so that happened uh and now i am a converted f1 fan and i'm I saw him full circle.

58:25Huge fan of Formula One. I didn't know at the time. If I have to say also, it's not only that we were trying to get somewhere, you weren't expecting a camera to come up and start getting interviewed. Yeah. But he very obviously, when you've been to CES a couple times, you know 90 % of the stuff is garbage and will never happen. And he was like, oh, I saw this really cool helicopter bike that you don't need any permits to drive. And he's showing you a video on his phone. and like to him that was probably really cool because at CES your first time and you're not that into tech that is wild all of us would have seen that on the floor and been like never gonna happen and just walked straight past it so like it was also showing stuff we knew which is pretty much vaporware um so like yeah the video is him showing you that on his phone you trying to get out of there and feeling kind of dismissive which it looks not great but like we had a very long walk to go to to a meeting and didn't know who he was at that point i was then late for there are a lot of comments that are not very happy yeah so yeah that that is a fun story with a not so fun ending but it did happen um yeah so my uh i would say that probably the guy who stopped me to go grab nico probably should have mentioned that he was going to film possibly that would be yeah yeah Or who his boss was or anything.

59:46Or that. Nico's still vlogging, by the way. He just got some crazy F1 hyper car from Mercedes. Does he have a lot of views? He gets a million. This is a wild car, though, too. Does he have a lot of subscribers? Over a million? For a vlogging former F1 champion, I think so. Who doesn't need to vlog yet. It's just for fun. For the love of the game, David, you don't need subscribers if you just get cool cars and drive them for fun on camera. Fair enough. There's a whole subgenre of YouTube creators that is just like former professional athletes. Like him. Like Marquez. Roy Hibbert. Current professional athlete.

1:00:20Marquez in the future will be a retired pro. Retired pro athlete. Marquez is the other way where it's like Marquez is a famous YouTuber who happens to be a pro athlete. No. Well, the other genre that's so popular now is active players with podcasts. Yeah. Super popular. NBA there's like seven eight nine big and active NBA player podcasts it's now we're in the era of active NBA players who are also analysts too well yeah yeah they go on and analyst which I think makes a lot of sense but it is always fun to have like Draymond like the night after a horrible game like go on his podcast and address the comments about why he didn't pass it to Steph like that's I think the one that makes the least sense now are the professional athletes that also decide they want to live stream things.

1:01:09And none of them are smart enough to maybe stop saying there was like a Formula Two driver that like said a bunch of really dumb and got dropped from his team because you decided to live stream. Yeah, don't do it live. Run it. Well, don't do it at all, but definitely don't do it live. But at least because these guys, they're not editing their own podcast. They hold up the mic and they say the thing and then somebody edits it. As the old adage goes, if you're thinking about whether or not you should tweet it, you probably shouldn't. Dang. David and I have each other's backs when that stuff happens.

1:01:40Take away the keyboard. Unplug it. David, you're typing too fast over there. What are you doing? Whenever I see you typing fast and I look at your monitor and it's Twitter, I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop, stop. David, no! My favorite is when David's like, have you guys seen this guy that tweeted at us, blah, blah, blah? And we're like, oh, no, I haven't seen that. Three seconds of silence and then just... usually I don't send it and then you hear enter and you're like oh no he sent it that's delete now yeah it's delete so for the next story I just wanted to introduce this because we're all going to tell a quick little short story to wrap up this episode Ellis in the docks has Ellis colon dash pirate and that's the story I'm very curious to see where this goes Yeah, this is I feel like a forgotten part of my lore here at the office and it's it's from just before I got hired sort of so that before the question I get asked the most is how did you get this job?

1:02:42How can I get a job like you? And it's a difficult question to answer because weirdly, this is the job that had the most traditional hiring process of like any job I've ever had. Like before this, I would get my I would get jobs by like showing up unannounced with my resume and a flash drive and like doing all sorts of like crazy stuff to try to get a position. This was like I filled out an application. The application wasn't a tweet, though. That's a little unconventional. Actually, technically, I was not on Twitter at that point. I fill out the application because Marquez made a video where he specifically said I'm hiring a podcast.

1:03:16after. Anyway, like a year before, this is my answer to how do I get a job like this. About a year before I had gotten hired, this is like August, maybe September 2020, like still early on in the pandemic. I had recently started playing a video game Sea of Thieves. I was playing it with my best friend who we were roommates, so spent a lot of COVID time together. We had also So we had also just watched all of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies over the course of like two days. Like we were double featuring these and we were both just like, argh, matey. We had both become like borderline, like pathologically obsessed with pirates.

1:04:02It was like all we could think about was pirates. All we wanted to talk about was pirates. It was just like the whole thing was like super in our brain. And so what we decided to do to like get out this obsession is we got all of our friends together. Not all of our friends, but like our five or six like closest friends. We pooled all of our audio gear together. We're all audio and music peoples. We had a lot of gear. We isolated for a week or two so that we knew we would be like totally good. And then we all loaded into our house and we turned our entire house into a studio like a multi floor One floor was the control room that had mics going to the the bottom and top floors so that there was like perfect isolation and we recorded an hour-long feature-length radio play about pirates with music and sound effects and everything and this is what I submitted to you guys to be like, let me work for you.

1:05:03And I have it here and I wanted to play. I'm trying to find it. You won't find it. No one will find it. Yeah, I'm going to play the full hour of it. Nice, awesome. Can I say before you play it, I do specifically remember something else you sent, which was a podcast about tap dancing, I believe. Yes. And you had a very specific part in it where you really, like this was right after you guys did the Boosted Board episode. Yeah. And we were talking about how we wanted somebody who was very good at also being able to add sound and like ambiance to storytelling and you posted this great part that was talking about tap dancing where there was like shoes tapping in the background and music and like all these things that made it feel like in the story tap dancing was happening i appreciate that it was great in my head you know that was for another project that was like very much like just a gig and like i had three extra hours and i was like oh I have time to like record this and it was very fun to do and do at my home and if you ever need a tap dancing sound effect that you can't find Packaging tape being pulled taut and then the suddenly ripped is like pretty similar to a tap shoe Hitting the floor at least similar enough that none of you guys noticed that that wasn't the sound of attached You know is the sound of packaging tape, but much cooler is my pirate thing Which I would really like to play a clip of here.

1:06:19It is

1:06:25you just did this for a class is that you? no I can play you one that I did but all the sounds the background chatter this is all us all recorded originally but it is it is a drama so without spoiling too much I will skip to... This is an hour long. It's an hour long. It took us about a week to write all the parts and write the script. What? Who are you? Tell me who you are! Tom! What are you doing? Where did you come from? This is a dramatic moment at the end. Captain! Tom, stop! That's me. That's me also.

1:07:27I know your face. I know your face. I know who you are. You're all damned. You're all damned. You're all damned! Anyway. So, Marquez Brownlee heard that and said, that's the guy. I don't think we ever played that out last. Really? we ever played that. So like why doesn't waveform sound like that? Bro. If we did, we didn't understand the situation. Like, maybe if we played some of that, we would have just thought like, oh, there was way more going on. I remember sitting at Andrew's desk with Andrew and I think Adam and going through the applications. I'm trying to find your application. Well, never mind.

1:08:15I totally thought that this passion project I made with my friends was the reason. I have no doubt in my mind I skimmed through it. I probably didn't hit that exact part. I kind of wish I did. I was just going to say, I vaguely remember skimming through. There's a lot. Actually, I don't want it in case there's copyrighted stuff in here. Long story short, if you want a job like this one, watch all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies get completely... No, just follow your heart. Why can I not find your application? Follow your dreams. Follow your heart. Do what makes you happy and Marques Brownlee will eventually find you.

1:08:51Facts. That's how it works. do it all right uh okay i don't know if any of you who are watching this or listening to this have seen this series but one of the first things that we did when we launched the studio channel was we did a ev road trip comparison race not really race but effectively what we did is we took the one of the longest range evs at the time that wasn't a tesla which by the way at that period of time there were not very many evs out it was like tesla and a couple of others and ford had just launched the mustang monkey uh the tesla model s long range was like the longest range tesla and then we took a regular gas car that we stuffed uh adam and andrew and tim into that was very funny so we kind of like i don't know if we pulled straws or like how this worked but effectively Brandon and I ended up in the Mustang Monkey Marquez and Hayato took the Model S yep was that the Plaid?

1:09:57it was right after he got the Plaid it was right after he got the Plaid so anyway at the time especially the infrastructure for electric vehicles that were not Tesla's was trash trash it was so bad it's still really bad but it was a lot worse and that was kind of the entire point of the video was like could you buy anything that's electric that's not a tesla and make it up to niagara falls and back about a thousand miles stopping at a certain amount of places i think we tried to make it also like you just get in and go like this is the average person getting yes we didn't map out specific routes outside the correct Built-in navigation.

1:10:40Built-in. The idea was like, if your mom bought an EV, how would it go? So, Brendan and I get the Mustang Mach-E. And we start going. And everything's fine at first. Everything's great. We stop at one of our first pit stops to charge. And the charger just doesn't work. So, we're like, okay. Well, we're pretty much out of gas completely. Well, electricity. So we ended up having to plug in at a gas station to a wall outlet to be able to get us enough energy to go to another charger. Regardless of all this, this was effectively our experience on the entire trip. It was just bad, bad, bad. And part of this video series, which you should go watch on the studio channel, it's called Behind the Thousand Mile Race, part one and part two.

1:11:31Very funny. An hour in total. So it's an experience. I start getting DMs from Ford's being like hey we don't like this and I was like yeah me neither and if you don't watch the video series Brandon and I are just devolving into madness because it took us like 17 more hours to complete the trip but regardless they start pushing me they're like my boss is not going to be very happy about this and I'm like cool that's not my problem and then randomly I get a message from her that's like so okay we sent people out to a bunch of different EV charging locations and we created a map specifically to get you to Niagara Falls and back where we can ensure because we already had people that went out there and checked that all of these chargers are operational and i was like you know as you do literally the opposite of the point of this video yeah um and so i was like look the whole point about this is that we're trying to use the inbuilt navigation also when ford launched the maki they also launched the like ford charger network map thing ford pass or something like that and the whole idea was that they worked with all the like ev go and charge point and all the like third party charging vendors to basically map out where all the chargers were but especially at that period of time there was no way for you to know if the charger was working or not or what like level of charger it was because some of them were just like all chargers yeah like wallow yeah basically wallow it's a seven kilowatt something like that um and so it was just a total disaster it was just such a mess and uh i just had ford in my dms constantly being like please please please can you not do this and i'm like we literally told you what this video was gonna be when we asked if we could borrow a car and you accepted it and now we're doing it and now you're really upset so for weeks i had i had people from like ford comms and my dms being like i really just don't think you guys should publish this video and we were like what did you think was gonna happen dude that's why oh and the other thing we also got like the new york state head of transportation like tweeted about it was like something like department of transportation yeah it was like the new york state head of department of transportation like tweeted about it and was like this is unacceptable levels of like ev upkeep when i started in this administration i promised that i would do this and seeing this now is insane it's funny what i like to say is when we do especially tests like that like we are in a way like professional users like our our skill is evaluating the experience that most users will probably have right like when you like if you look back at the rabbit and the humane videos it's like yes we could go super super in-depth to find the exact best possible experience it could possibly offer but the vast majority of people are going to have a different version of that experience and we're trying to uncover and understand that experience yeah and so we could have gone on the exact pre-planned route that ford created for us where they sent people ahead of time to chargers to make sure they're online and working and it's like yeah then we would get one version of the answer which is yeah in ford's best interest yeah but the point of the test is to understand what most people who get this vehicle are will default to for their experience yeah and it turns out that was very different and i had a bunch of people on twitter and stuff too being like why don't you just use this spreadsheet that's been shared around where everybody like mapped out exactly where there are chargers and what their wattage is and i was like because my mom would never do that and i'm trying to be my mom here you know i would argue at university we also get another mach e which has their optimal best route and another and we'd have like seven variables instead of just three but we had three it's just funny too because like That ultimately wound up being the best thing for Ford because when you're trying to convince people to go to an EV and that's the experience they have, you've just lost that person as an EV customer forever probably.

1:15:56I made that video. Just giving us a pre-prone route that looks perfect is not going to help the people who then get absolutely destroyed on a road trip. Right. I later made a video on autofocus called this is ruining EVs for people. And it's literally, I overheard a conversation. Well, I had a couple experiences, but I overheard that conversation, which is literally like someone pissed off at a charger. Like, I'm never getting an electric car again. I'm returning this. I hate this. And there's another one where I like helped some lady charge when I was going to get food and like trying to explain how to charge her Model 3 at this charge point charger when she didn't have an account.

1:16:36It was just like, honestly, just go to a Tesla Super. I'm sorry. Like, this is not going to be easy for you. and that all those things add up to just like there's too much friction everyone knows how to go to a gas station yeah and there should just just be that same level of zero thought zero friction for charging and that's that's the thing i highly recommend watching like all of the videos we made about this um you can just see multiple points where brandon and i are like okay this one is guaranteed to work and we show up and it's like one in the morning and we go and it's just not working i get on the phone with the charge point person being like yeah this one's down and they're like oh yeah yeah we knew that but you didn't change it in the app like what is going anyway yeah so it was ridiculous go watch those videos okay adam you're in the stock and you have like five stories how quick can you tell these because all of them are really good 100 hamburgers yeah so okay first one apple messing with our timeline during wwdc a year ago and we needed to record two podcasts in one week which was crazy we recorded the waveform x vergecast trivia extravaganza on apple campus featuring featuring the vergecast well also featuring the energy drink so during that time slot we were supposed to record that with vergecast and then also record our podcast what actually ended up happening was we recorded the slot with vergecast after they snuck in some execs so that marquez could interview them right which took up our time slot which is fine you know it happens pr people have to like do things sometimes they have to pr they have to pr uh we didn't find those interviews all that interesting so we never ended up publishing them but it took up our time slot it was and yeah because we were like one of the last time slots in the night so like it pushed up to the people that they had hired to do the podcast stuff which who are awesome who were all amazing and they were union workers and stayed there till their last second of that yeah i saw them again when we did the tim cook interview yeah yeah all the same people were those yeah those people are awesome um which then meant though not only did we not get to record it on campus which like looks cool and has done really well for us we had to fly home and record it like first thing yeah thursday morning or whatever so i was off the plane i I was editing the podcast that we had just recorded on the flight back.

1:19:03We landed in the YouTube video. If you watch that episode, there's a Red Bull on my desk because I am just crushing Red Bulls that day because we recorded it. And then I had to get it live Friday morning the next day. And because this was in California and we flew back, Ellis had a previous engagement in California. So he just stayed behind. So in that episode, he wasn't there. So I had to send him the audio remotely and he had to edit it remotely from I think his parents house, right? Yeah I remember yeah, and we're like FaceTiming each other like and it was it was crazy When we FaceTimed him he just just like outside with sunglasses on I was literally editing the podcast like on the sand on the beach Like damn Adam you look stressed Logistics go crazy.

1:19:48Yeah, so that was one story the second story I have is when I first got hired the first like week-ish here um i pretty much just got handed the reins to the podcast immediately which was terrifying the first week i think andrew like we came in here i was sitting off to the side you guys recorded like normal whatever you walked out and you just handed me the micro sd and we're like here you go and i was like okay in my defense and i'm sorry that's how it felt but i immediately knew whoever we hired had more experience than i did and i was the one doing it previously so i think it was like take this we recorded it early like take your time with it and i'll go over and like check everything when it's done but like i had full confidence in you being far more capable of whatever i was doing for however long i appreciate that yeah still terrifying sorry but earlier in that week we were setting because i was one of the first like other employees i think brandon and vin were obviously here and michael's remote yeah and then it was like adam and i got hired at the same time but i took an extra month off yeah so then i came a month before david so i was here when we didn't have any other deaths for anyone else um and there was a point where we're like planning like okay you know we're doing this waveform video thing that we want to launch eventually like we're changing up the intro music like let's let's listen to some of the tracks that i have here and andrew was like setting up pods for the desk so he's just building desks while blasting 20syl because i think marquez was like at an event or something or doing a briefing so i'm just like sitting in the corner and we're like listening to a track pausing it like oh how do you feel about that one oh that felt like that felt intro okay yeah let's let's put that off to the side we'll mark it down as potential intro music and we narrowed it down that way to the song that you hear today yeah well 20syl was basically like here's like 20 different drop or like beats that i made that are like two minutes long that i didn't use and if you want to license one of them for the podcast, you can.

1:21:45So we just listen to it over and over. That's what I learned about my favorite music producers is they all just kind of have beats that they just scrap that they just have on a hard drive somewhere and they're all fire. We'll take them all. So yeah. Another story I have is when we hired, when we hired, when we bought Monstro, what's the name? No, no, no. Colossus. Thank you. Which is our current camera robot. When the current camera robot showed up, we were all very excited. We've Run outside to the truck because it's like, oh my God, it's here. We start running out. We're like six strong, seven strong at the front of the building, just like staring at the back of the truck.

1:22:23Turns out it tipped over in the truck. This like 10 ,000 pound robot. Yeah. And then we're all like inside trying to move it. And we realized very quickly, like we can't move. I think it's like 1600 pounds. Us, the owner of the company and the driver all open the door at the same time. and it was just knocked over it was just laying on its side and we're like oh my god and like the driver and the owner of the company keep going back and forth like did you know that happened and he's like I didn't hear anything it's like it's a 2 ,000 pound robot that fell over in the back of your truck how did you not feel that he definitely took a turn a little fast and just heard like a I don't know what that is we were planning to release that video on Studio Channel and at some point during this whole fiasco Andrew just is like we should stop recording we should stop recording there you go yeah uh next story david and i staying up till 3 a.m here working on the boosted board episode yeah going ultra hard on transitions yeah sound effects and where should we put what and it was just like a very fun core memory of like early working here it was our first special episode that we ever did and because it was audio only there's so much more you can do when you're limited to audio because you can really like encapsulate someone in their head and use sound effects and music and transitions and yeah until like 3 a.m.

1:23:43because we were publishing the next day we were just like oh but what if we did this here what we did this here and we're just like sitting at our desk like yeah to be clear the episode was done but we were just like going just adding stuff so hard just like adding a bunch of stuff yeah it was very fun it's very good you ended up with an hour-long pirates which was so cool and those are my stories yeah okay but what about wait can i tell this one okay okay i was i was there for the whole thing we were uh i was in the kitchen uh the kitchen has a window which overlooks the uh like the part of the parking lot where we have like dedicated spaces like mkbhd employees only and uh there's yeah big flex uh and brandon on his tesla needed a tire change and uh correct me if i'm wrong tesla owners But Tesla will come to your car wherever it is and just change your tire while you're at work or while you're in any sort of public parking.

1:24:38So Brandon was having this service done. There's a Tesla service van, you know, sort of parked perpendicularly to the row of our cars. And someone is like, hey, look, there's a little bit of smoke in the parking lot. And we all look. And by the time our heads have turned, this Tesla service van, not an EV, gas vehicle. Sprinter. Sprinter van, yeah. just uh so it's popping it was popping and the smoke has turned like deep black and it's clear like this is a car that is on fire um and uh it took about 20 ish seconds for the car to be like definitively on fire the driver hopped out was gone not not like not fleed the scene go went to go get someone who could deal with and get away from a car that is on fire getting worse and it worse and worse and this car that's on fire is like maybe three feet from marquez's like brand brand new porsche and and so lo and behold marquez is actually in the bathroom at this point and andrew's like marquez uh marquez you might want to come see this marquez comes out of the bathroom and i've never seen someone cooler under it was crazy marquez's hands might have well been in his pockets because he was just like accepted defeat it was just like well nothing i can do it was like 10 feet like it was yeah it was uh and and everything was fine the car didn't explode um the most Tesla car exploded no it didn't explode window like window I know but if it had exploded the row of EVs parked within feet of it would have also you know it would have been way worse but the the part of the story that i think stuck in everyone's mind is the at this point in the story the car is definitively on fire like the flames are much bigger than the car it's a fire van itself yeah yeah and the fire department has just rolled up and this one firefighter man just walks up to the flame gets what feels like inches from it and just stands there like this do you know the meme of the guy at like the server rack with his like pants down a little bit like like that's what the firefighter i guess he was looking for something getting getting info but I had just never seen anyone with more chutzpah than that guy in that moment.

1:26:52I think it was because the fire was coming from inside the sliding door, like where the service happens. And I assumed he saw Tesla and was wondering if it was battery fire versus a compressor. Yeah. Yeah. The strong the really powerful irony of this whole situation is that people are always anxious about electric cars catching fire because of the batteries. and it happened to be the gas-powered Sprinter Tesla service van that caught on fire because of the compressor. I think it might have been a transit van, not a Sprinter van. Ford Transit, yeah. I think it might have been a transit van. Okay, yeah.

1:27:23But it was a service. It was a Tesla service. It was really fun. Ford just catching strays in this episode. Either way, shout out to the fire department because they were so calm and collected. They came, they're pulling out the hose, and we're all like, what are they doing? What's taking them so long? And they're just taking their sweet time. And they like turn on the faucet and then and it's gone. The fire just went out immediately. From my perspective, I'm in the bathroom, which is 10 feet from the window. And I kind of just overhear like, oh, my God, is it on fire? That's the first thing I hear.

1:27:53And I'm like, do you think it's in the studio? Something on the studio on fire. And then I get out of the bathroom and everyone's faces are just like up against the window. And it's just a fireball. I'm like, what is going on? We were pretty close to the window. And I think all of us, I don't think we're against it. I think it was so quickly. We were like, we should back up. Yeah, because it's glass. I think my dad came in a little too much, maybe. We all put videos on Instagram stories and all of the replies were like, get away from the window. I'm pretty sure Adam was on the phone and I ran and like knocked on the door and he's like talking to somebody.

1:28:28I was like, hang up. You have to see what's happening right now. I was like, well, I guess Brandon's flat tire isn't getting fixed today. It did get fixed. It was after the tire was fixed. It was the same. Oh, it was after. I think the tire was fixed. the compressor to inflate the tire just that was its last gasp yeah yeah everyone was okay driver was okay he got away he came spoke with us after yeah fine there's still ashes in our parking lot there are there are and there's still like some stuff melted into the parking lot too it's pretty sick it's pretty funny souvenir a lot of stuff has happened in that parking lot yeah all right i got one more story um we we go through a lot of airports and we kind of have like a little ritual of like going trying to pack as efficiently as possible so that when we bring all of our camera gear through tsa it hopefully doesn't get stopped now when we travel with a bunch of camera gear it looks like a lot like there's big cameras glass dozens of kilowatt hours of batteries all stacked on top of each other uh weird looking things red also went through a period where they named their cameras the weapon and all sorts of other not great tsa friendly names.

1:29:38So we have a litany of stories of like, oh, one time we were late to check and we had to check the bags. So we just held the cameras for a six hour flight. You remember that? That was going to Canada and the overhead compartments weren't the same size where our bags are set for that. So they wouldn't fit. Yeah. So we. Sorry. At least like twice. Yeah. Because that happened also where we were late and they ran out of checked bags and they were like, you have to check those bags. And I were like, oh, they're full of glass. I can't really can't really check them where we're like you have to check them so we pulled all of the glass and cameras and batteries out and like cradled them and walked to the back of the plane with them put our clothes like in the camera bags threw them under and then like our bags were just full of cameras instead but my favorite tsa incident was uh when we flew uh to this tiny little west palm beach airport where we shot this video on the lamborghini aventador or maybe it was a hurricane i don't even remember anymore we came back and as we're leaving we are basically the only people in this airport and it's like pretty early in the morning and the tsa there pretty bored they don't have anything else to do clearly so as we go through they're like wow look at all these crazy bags let's go through all of them and they go through and check every single one of our bags and i do remember a moment where they open a camera bag and they see the the red weapon camera in there and the guy's like so what is this i'm like this is a camera and he's like okay you sure about that uh do you mind if like you show me that it's a camera and i so i pull the cap off and i go see look that's the sensor right there it's a camera and he's like all right let me just swab that real quick i was like nope never mind i'm closing that up like i'm sorry you cannot swab that it's i swab the outside do anything else he asked to swab the actual sensor of the camera and I was like I don't think we could do that we'll drive yeah just drive yeah so there was uh there's always a fun little tidbits of things that happen at TSA side note um TSA at Newark is pretty cool because I go through the same one so many times they kind of just know me now which is I guess fine Ellis do you remember the TSA guy in Ohio there's two two TSA guys in Ohio the first one is uh with I when we're traveling together I'm usually responsible for the audio suitcase which has cables microphones not quite as threatening as the camera bag but still like stuffed full of electronics and like it got flagged going through the x-ray and so like see your guy like takes it pulls it to the side puts it down and then he like on his monitor like pulls up the x-ray image which is just a mess and he looks at it and i watch him go nah and just gives it back to me doesn't even open it it's just like i'm not even gonna deal with this right now but the other story is for people that know what a fill is or a card a bounce a bounce oh yeah this is the story you're talking about yeah yeah like the big bounce cards yeah and like the way they when they explode open so like there was a story where like well no like we were going through TSA and the guy's like can we check this bag and we're like of course you can check this bag and he unzips it and immediately this like four foot wide thing just goes like like if you used to have one of those get down it wasn't like that it was like if you used to have one of those old car windshield yeah it's crunch up like it just and the dude looked at us with just like a eye it's too early those yeah he was so and those tsa things are always like it's a clear glass with a like space under so you can slide it so he's pretty much in this almost like plexiglass box and it goes down to pretty much a quarter of its size because it's a circle that spins and then turns into four small circles packed yeah and he just opens it up and it just goes and like fills the cube that he's in and then like you just see him pull it down and just look so mad and then like proceeds to look through the thing and we're just like I'm so sorry didn't he have to like hand it back to you like you should fold it that's like the snake in the can exactly also I just want to say we know we're the problem here the good people at the TSA they're doing their job they don't want people like us we've got no other choice so yeah we love you tsa yeah i appreciate it that was trans-siberian orchestra um it was going to be that i had a i've had a couple of like less than 24 hour california flights either for a or a briefing and i remember i flew out on the first flight out to sf and it was like six in the morning which means everyone is like barely awake and i remember uh that flight attendant being like oh I just like shook my hand or whatever and then uh we shot all day and then I was the last flight out of the same airport and I walk onto the plane and it's the same plane and the same flight attendants and they're like oh you're back and I'm like yeah whoa it's the same day still this is crazy like they must have had a whole day and they can't be out it was it's a good time we've had lots of we're all hanging together yeah i have possibly one final one unless anyone else has something but i like this yeah um we did a ps5 an xbox series x giveaway with dbrand one time where we had 12 of each when they just came out when they just like came out dbrand somehow acquired 12 of each 24 total and we were questions don't yeah never ask questions to dbrand about stuff like that and then our fedex guy comes in and our fedex guy is the nicest sweetest guy ever he's been our fedex guy forever i believe his name is al but he's just like always the first guy in the morning dropping stuff off you guys have a great day you too like awesome and he just so happens that he like kind of knows what we do um he shows up with this cart full of these huge boxes and i mean like a stack of them and he's like he comes up and he starts helping us unload them and he just goes man those new ps5s are so hard to find i'm really trying to get one for my son at nowhere we could get one and we realized he's unloading 12 ps5s into our like studio and he doesn't know they're ps5s because they're not from sony they're from dbrand oh and I've cardboard boxes I felt so bad about that I almost wanted to be like take one take just don't tell us well just debrank and mark it as lost just leave one on your cart but I hope you found your PS5 that was a few years ago but I've always felt bad about that because our FedEx guy is awesome they put them all under the Christmas tree and gave them all away and gave them away yeah well that was a fun time I hope you guys enjoyed we have I'm sure we'll have we have many more stories these are just the ones that we picked out that were fun but if you enjoyed this bonus episode maybe we'll do another story time bonus episode in the future but yeah until then it's been a fun Tuesday thanks for hanging out see you Friday Peace Waveform was produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Rovin we are partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by Vian Sill that was the worst one I've done in a long time bingo let's go alright time to go listen to that pirate episode

1:37:13Can I tell one quick final story? I want to tell the lady that said about the internet. Okay, I have to tell this one final story. I'm sorry. I don't remember this. Okay. Was this not in the video? No, it wasn't because we stopped recording literally directly before we started talking to her. Okay. Okay. So there was this, there's this episode, there's a two episode series that we did. It was I can in the secret history of the internet. And it was, oh, no, it was I can in the seven keys of the internet and the secret history of the internet two part series. for the i can and the seven keys of the internet episode we drove to virginia to take place in a key signing key ceremony to engage in the signing of the security keys that maintain the internet with i can very cool series of episodes go watch them anyway we were like vlogging the whole time because we made a studio video about it um and so we were taking video we got to our hotel the night before middle of nowhere Virginia like absolute middle of nowhere and we walk in and we're like we're vlogging a little bit we're like oh there's only one person at the front desk because we got there at like 10 p.m and we're like all right we should probably just start vlogging stop vlogging so we get there and she goes what y 'all here for and I jokingly say oh we're here to save the internet and she point blank is just like oh the internet my daughter uses that sometimes yeah she loves she loves that and i was like not even joking and i was like yeah yeah i think we're talking about the same thing yeah tiktok is the internet right and i was like holy moly while she's typing on her computer about our room number and everything and i'm local it's land baby yeah land anyway that was that was super funny i'm sure we have other i know there's some other stuff from that trip like when we're driving up to the like security building there's just like more and more often there's these signs that just say like stop filming seriously if you have a camera you cannot film here like stop filming and we're filming the whole time we're like should we stop it so we did but it was uh yeah that was a fun trip do you know you forgot the the coolest part about that that part where like more and more stop filming like seriously stop filming like if you are filming you're you're done bro uh and then we like get there and we do all the crazy spy stuff like retina scanners fingerprint scanners cages that have thermal sensors and will only open when two or more people are in there at the same time to prevent solitude.

1:39:42All sorts of stuff. Finally we get through the last security measure and we're in the ceremony room and they're like you can film now. Wait, now we can film? They're like, oh no one's getting in here. Yeah, it was like we don't want to show how to get in here but once you're in here, I'd like to see you're in a cage, bro. Wow. Yeah. Film anything you want. They were literally like, film anything you want. That's awesome. It was crazy.