Waveform Podcast Live at SXSW 2025!

23:39Competition. So maybe, maybe, maybe, companies compete. That's true. We win. not monopolies. It's huge. Big. Yeah. Dig. I'm interested, is there anyone who's on Reddit that has been frustrated with it that would, you know, we don't know much about Dig, but would you be interested in moving to Dig? I guess you can go to both of them, so it doesn't really matter, but anyone? Cool. Okay, so never mind. Dig is screwed. Nothing is going to happen. Well, the other thing about, the other thing about these sites is they are so dependent on community, kind of like social networks, so they kind of require at least some mass migration event to have a bunch of users, to have a bunch of content, to have a bunch of stuff to do and to sort through and to follow, etc.

24:19So even if you're one of a small number of people who is interested in Digg, Digg doesn't exist without a whole bunch of people there. So that's a barrier that I see, but at least they're here, they're doing stuff. Yeah, I'll be interested to see what they say tonight. South by feels like a place to announce things, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do that. What are we announcing? Good question. Our first live event happened 20 minutes ago. That didn't do very well. Cool. I have, let's move on. I have one more quick question before we get to audience Q &A, which hopefully there's some people interested in asking questions.

24:56This is our first time at South By. We've been to plenty of other tech events. I know both of you, I've never done Mobile World Congress, but you guys have, and we've done CES, and we've done kind of everything. And I think if you're watching the video, you don't get the general vibe about what's going on at those events. So I want to pose a question of what is the coolest, most unique, or weirdest thing you've ever witnessed at a tech convention? It can be someone trying to sell you something. It can be a piece of tech that looked really cool, but when you got closer to it, it wasn't quite as cool.

25:26Or it could be one of the coolest things you've ever seen, and you wonder where it went. I have a thing that came to mind that's probably not where you were thinking, but it works for me. I've only been to Mobile World Congress once. This year, by the way, was really interesting. A lot of stuff happened there. But it's in Barcelona. and it's every year. And the one year that I went, I had no clue what I was doing. I was an Airbnb several miles away from the convention center. And I saw the taxi line, which was hours long. And I decided, what if I just walked back to my Airbnb? And so I just walked with all my camera gear through the streets of Barcelona back.

26:00Oh, no. No, it was and it nothing happened. Oh, good. And it was great. It was cool. I saw all sorts of architecture and all sorts of parts and I had some good food and it was a good time. And that was the coolest part of that Mobile World Congress for me. So that's... That you walked? Yeah, that I saw. I saw a new city and it was like a cool experience and it had nothing to do with any of the tech at the show. We are really bad at experiencing new cities because like we flew in when we landed at six last night. Our plane is at five today. So we're really bad at experiencing. And Austin's a really awesome city.

26:33I wish we were here a little longer. Speak for yourself, man. Yeah, you're staying, but do you have a fun experience? Oh, man. I like the ping pong robots at CES. They're there every single year. I feel like the first year they were there, it was like the biggest hype. There was a huge line, and it was really hard to get there. And now, since then, they're just still running off of that hype. Didn't they play one? I got to play the ping pong robot the first year it was there, and they had this roped off area around it, and they had someone doing a demo. And so I got up there and I started playing against it.

27:05And I was kind of holding a rally for a while. And then I hit one kind of fast, you know, and I beat it. And I was like, wow, I beat the ping pong robot. And they were like, cool, great. Yeah, so we can change the difficulty level here. That was on baby mode. Yeah. And then immediately it was incredible. So, yeah, it's one of the coolest things there, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I have one small one, maybe a second funny story if we have time. But we were looking at, it was a BMW experience in one of their new autonomous, I think it was like an i3. It was a smaller hatchback. And it was kind of on the floor at the BMW booth with a wire around it.

27:43But they were nice enough to let us go in and film it with a bunch of people around. So Marquez sits in the back seat to get a shot. And he goes to scoot over to the other seat. And all the BMW employees are like, no, no, hold on. that middle C is actually cardboard underneath. And if you scoot across it, it will collapse. You'll fall into there. And so we had to walk around. But that's just like, on video, all of this stuff looks really cool. A lot of the stuff at these events are like held together with twist ties and chewing gum. Many of the things at many of these events are not real. That's kind of the sad part about it.

28:18Especially with cars. Do you remember when the Hummer EV came to our office? And they were like, it can melt if you leave it outside. In the sun too long, the interior functions might melt in on the dashboard. Yeah. That's kind of the state of, this isn't a news thing that we have, but that's kind of the state of a lot of early EVs right now. Like I just saw a video from a fellow YouTuber, good friend, Zach, JerryRig, everything on the Telo truck. I watched it on the plane on the way. Super cool concept. It's like this small footprint electric truck with four seats and a five-foot bed in the footprint of a Mini Cooper.

28:53I was like, oh, that seems really cool. I mean, cool. Had a reasonable range, 1 ,100-pound towing, or I think it's 7 ,000-pound towing, 1 ,700-pound cargo capacity. It was like, oh, this is a really cool thing. I'm very inspired. I go to their site. They're like, this isn't out yet. And this is kind of the one that they've built that works. But you can reserve it. But you can put your$150 down and reserve it. And it's like, I've seen this a lot of times. I've been Zach in this situation. I did a video about the Faraday future at CES 2015. I don't even know how long ago that was. Just 2017 because that's the one you hired me.

29:26Yeah, 2017. And that never came out. But we got a really cool working car in person. And it turns out it's really, really easy to build one. And then you can roll it around CES or south by southwest, wherever you want. And then it's really, really hard to build 100 ,000 of them. And so that's been my new philosophy. when Tesla rolls out this RoboVan, and they're like, trust me. The RoboVan, you mean? Yeah. And I look skeptical because I've seen this pony show before, but we'll see. We'll see. I want these things to come out. It's just really hard to trust when I only see one. Well, unless that Trello Mini Cooper thing has a twerking AI dog on the dashboard, I don't want it.

30:09That's a deep cut. That's a Mini Cooper reference. Yeah. Well, hey, look, that's about all the news that we have, so I think what we should do is we should introduce Ellis is over here and Adam. Where's Adam? Adam's back there. They're waving their hands and they have microphones in their hands. Can you hear me now? Yeah. So if anyone has a question. Does anyone have questions? Who's near? Adam, I think this is a you. You've got the talkative side. This is a you problem, Adam. I see someone. Hold on. Coming over. Scary. Scary, scary. We're going to try and get as many questions as possible, too.

30:43Yeah. Hello. My name is Tree Wendell. I'm from Ohio University. This is also my first time at South by Southwest. I'm very excited to see you guys here. My question for you is if you had unlimited resources to invent or create a ground piecing piece of tech, no matter how futuristic or unrealistic, what would it be and why? Crumple phone. Thanks, Ellis. Whoa. Unlimited resources is huge. I have a really quick one if you guys want to think of it. I just had a child. She's like 14 months old. Every piece of baby tech is absolute garbage. I would completely reinvent BabyTech, make it actually high def, make the apps actually useful.

31:21Or maybe just, you know, maybe we don't need apps for it. Maybe the white noise machine just needs an on and off switch. But I think there's an untapped market there because everything I seem to do as a tech person hurts my soul. I like that answer a lot. That also doesn't require unlimited resources. It seems like it does. There's a lot of babies out there. Dang. I never thought about that. Do you think there are as many babies as there are, like, non-babies? No. I don't think so. There's a lot of babies, though. There's a lot. I think I've got one over here. One of you guys had a... Wait, they didn't have an answer.

32:00I want to hear an answer. On the mid-resources, my brain weirdly went straight to, like, could we do humane over again? Oh, my God. And, like, make a good... Yeah, because, I mean, they essentially take unlimited resources. So I would want to create a good AI that has a personal understanding of everything in my phone, even though that's kind of impossible, and then can be super useful for me. So Humane Pin that actually connects to your phone and you don't need a separate phone number for it? Yeah. Like an accessory. I can't believe they didn't think of that. I'm going to maybe do one of my senior projects in college that I got an A-plus on, by the way.

32:40So it's a good idea. Are you pitching this right now? We are at a place where I can do this. Okay, so imagine this, right? So it's an ISP, but for people's homes, okay? And it's called Wi-Fi. This is already all built out. It's called Wi-Fi. So it's Wi-Fi, obviously. But it was right after the Google Home, no, the Google Wi-Fi first came out, where they were like, oh, mesh networks. We're going to do mesh networks. So imagine you have a node in your home, but it's like two gigahertz. It goes super far, right? And it goes to the street, but it can also ping off of other people's homes. Okay? So the whole idea is we give everyone in the world free internet, but then you have local ads that are running from local businesses if you don't pay for the internet.

33:31But then if you're at home, you get to say, I don't use my bandwidth from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., So I'm going to give 85 % of my bandwidth to the community. And then you get money off of your payment every month, the more bandwidth you give out. Great pitch. So it's a pitch. Comcast stole this idea from me. Comcast did steal this idea. You have to be a Comcast customer in order to use the internet. And I think that everybody should have it, not just Comcast. Man of the people. Man of the people. Well, there's the answer. Okay. That does require unlimited resources. Thank you for the question. Hi, my name is Darius.

34:10I love the recent video called Our Foldables Cooked. Great title. In the US, foldables really haven't gone mainstream. Do you think that Apple releasing a foldable will change that considering the premium they'll probably charge, or do you think this might be another Vision Pro moment? I'm a little biased because I've owned like five foldables and I just purchased the Opal Find Inn. I'm so jealous. Yes. Really good question. Thank you. That's a part of the video I left out of the video, actually, which is the Apple factor. So just to catch people up who haven't watched it, foldables, really, really cool tech.

34:49But they're kind of stagnating a little bit in this way where it feels like the tech has gotten super good, but then people just aren't switching to them yet. And short answer, yes. I think Apple jumping in with a foldable will reinvigorate all of the competition, all the attention, all the eyeballs, and will make that interesting again. But the premium that you mentioned is also real. So these foldables versus this foldable? Hot dog versus hamburger. These all have this massive premium, and I think that's a huge barrier. But this one, which I think might be more likely for Apple to try, we've seen those for$699 for Motorola,$999 for Samsung.

35:28And I think this could be in a not-so-Vision Pro price category that I think could get a lot of people interested. And I think that's the moment Apple jumps in is when they can make that and it's reasonable for people to consider. So good question. It's like a section of the video that probably fell out of my head and into yours. I like that. I've also started to see a lot of hamburger foldables in New York City. Is that flip or fold? It's the flip. The flip is hamburger. Because hamburger, you put the top square. The patty would fit better in that. Yeah, exactly. So this all works great for an audio medium.

36:01Yeah, yeah. It's our specialty. I'll just do that. Okay, so yeah, I've seen a lot of them on the subway. The category's growing, and that's even on non-Apple phones, which in the United States is a very low number. So I think if they release that and it's in that$1 ,000 category, I think that will be a bigger super cycle than Apple intelligence. Totally agree. Would Apple do that? Because right now a 16 Pro Max is$1 ,200. Would they release one with a folding screen that's less expensive than their Disney Plus? It has less features. I think it has to be the most premium. More expensive. It still doesn't matter as much though.

36:37The Pro Max is the most popular iPhone in the United States because everyone just gets a carrier plan and it's like$3 more a month. They'll do it. Everyone will buy it. Cool. Next question right here. Hey, how's it going, guys? I've been following you guys for a long time. Appreciate you guys. Thank you very much. Do you think Apple will ever come out with a touchscreen device, like a Mac or even the studio display? Because sometimes you're trying to edit and stuff like that, and it sucks to not be able to just go there. What's the matte screen called? Nanotexture? Nanotexture would hate that.

37:16No, they have a nanotexture iPad. Is it the same as screens? Your screen, you accidentally touch it once. My Pro Display XDR is the messiest thing on my desk. I have a lot of thoughts on this. My general philosophy is if they could have, they would have done it already. They could have. They would have done it already if they wanted to. They don't want to. Apple has enough overlapping products that if they gave something like a MacBook Air, for example, a touchscreen, then iPad Pro with a keyboard would be cannibalized a little bit. They kind of have to keep these things separate enough that a Mac with a touchscreen, as much as we all think it makes intuitive sense and there are tons of other touchscreen laptops out there, Apple won't do it because in Apple's universe, that's not good for their other stuff.

38:00I think it's way more likely that they add a feature on the iPad that allows you to use it as a drawing tablet mirroring onto your display than it is they release an actual touchscreen Mac. They have these ads all the time where they show somebody who has an iPad and they plug it into a studio display. That's a real person that they think exists. that they think exists. They think is the key word there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no. Sorry, I unfortunately don't think so either. All right, next question over on this side. Hi, guys. Name is Yarian, long-time viewer. Great to see you in person. My question is about your use of AI.

38:37So you've shared a lot of sort of personally useful uses of AI. But in the running of your businesses, of the YouTube channel, the podcast, what are uses of AI that are saving you a lot of time or just making your business way more efficient? Helles wants to answer this really bad. As of last week, I became a vibe coder. I'm officially writing tons of code and don't know what any of it means. And Claude did something crazy for me last week where I'm building a website in a web builder that's really cheap and doesn't support tables. Oops. And I needed a table to build a table in it. So I'm building it in HTML, CSS style, like no idea what I'm doing.

39:14And my idea was like, oh, I'll use Google Sheets that'll maintain the table, and then I'll download the HTML, throw it in the embed. Google Sheets, when you download HTML of a table, puts all this formatting in it. Ew, gross. Disgusting. And I don't know how to code, so I don't know how to get rid of that formatting. And I was like, Claude, what do I do? And Claude wrote me a web app that automatically removes all the styling. It was like, I got you, bro. So that's what I'm using AI for. I'm vibing my way through code. And yeah. That's actually very legit. Is this an industry term, Vibe Coder?

39:47It's a Twitter term. Same difference? It is now. I have another use of AI that we kind of dig into a little bit. And I mean, so we make YouTube videos, and there are endless analytics that we can dive into on YouTube because there's a whole spectrum of YouTubers, those who check studio every day, those who just kind of make the video, and then it's just vibes. I'm in the numbers. I'm very curious about things like retention and things that we can optimize. And there are AI tools now that will look at past videos we've made, other outliers from other channels, and things that have worked well on the platform in the past and suggest versions of that that could work for us.

40:22And video-making decisions for me have always been a combination of what I think people would watch and what I'm interested in. So I'm sorting through that AI-generated stuff to figure out what sort of overlaps between them. And it's been surprisingly helpful. The most useful use for me is when I'm doing research on something that has one total source on the internet, and it's from a forum from 50 years ago. And just asking it a question that I like, I can take the time to read a math book and dissect how it works, or I can have it tell me in baby talk how it works. And then, oh, that makes a little more sense.

40:59And then I read the math book and then it's a lot easier to understand. 50 years ago is not an exaggeration. When we were doing the I Can episode, we were pulling sources from Usenet posts that had been archived, which were from the early 80s. Yeah, not quite 50 years ago. That was 50 years ago. It was 40-something. Feel old, yeah? Damn. Feel old, yeah? I don't really use AI at all currently, but Adam did use it the other day. We were thinking of a name for a segment in the podcast where we say the best thing and the worst thing of the month in tech, and it came up with the idea Crown and Clown, which I thought was actually super creative.

41:36I could have done that. I don't know. That's why I don't use AI. I have David. That's right. Yeah. You can't spell David without A-I and a few other letters. Next question over here. I never thought about that. That's pretty good. Hi, everyone. My name is Yuri Benedict, and I would like to ask about the podcast. Your YouTube production quality and storytelling is top tier. And I would like to know, how do you translate what you learn doing YouTube video into your podcast? How does one make a great podcast like that? We? Yeah. I remember, so when we pitched the pod, when I pitched the podcast to Marques, everyone on YouTube was kind of doing it.

42:19And I really wanted to make sure that we did it in my eyes, like correctly. So we went audio first because in our eyes, and we're still very bad at this, but we wanted to be able to describe things to audio listeners. And we thought we needed to go through the audio version first. So we did that. And I do think we learned a lot as, you know, now that we're on video, we've probably gone back a few steps. But that was our main goal of doing that. And then since then, in typical MKBHD fashion, we're shooting in the most unnecessarily high definition and have way too many people working on it. But I think we've been, not way too many people, sorry, Adam and Ellis.

42:56I ain't going to do that. I think we're crazy efficient in terms of how I hear a lot of other podcasts. And I think keeping it close has let us do that and let us really grow the show organically and get to test new things and see it directly in the numbers. Yeah, I think when you are building other YouTube videos, you probably just develop strategies and kind of concepts. It's kind of like making a normal YouTube video in a lot of ways. Because I've talked to people who do podcasts and they've only ever done a podcast and not done YouTube videos. And they're like, oh yeah, we record for three hours and we get 25 minutes of useful content.

43:30We record for like two and we do like an hour and a half show, which I think is a pretty good hit rate. Closer to three. That's the guy who has to edit it every week. And in general, I think a lot of the production quality stuff that you see on the main channel, it became the expectation for the main channel. So I think what was interesting was this sort of just chat show format became a void that we opened, and the podcast was a perfect way to fill that. It's still high production for a podcast, but we have these stories and these incredible big pieces that we do on the MKBHD channel, and then we can kind of just chat.

44:02It's a different way of doing the same thing. Waveform was originally pitched as, I would come into the office in Marquez and I would be, hey, did you see this? Hey, did you see that? And we would talk and realize we're like an hour and a half into our day and we haven't actually done any work. And we're like, we should record this. Our conversations are so cool. We should just record them. Everyone wants to hear us. Total ego move on that one. But I think because of that, it's just conversation. We're all friends. And I think it's worked out really well from that, even though everyone tells us we interrupt each other all the time.

44:32Sorry. All right, we'll take one more quick break. But when we come back, many more interesting questions and all the answers.

44:52From Pushkin Industries, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and Heavyweight is back. The new season is bigger than ever. Bigger hopes? I keep waiting for this moment when he says, Mom, I get it. I'm sorry. Bigger dreams. Tom Hanks wants to meet with you. This is a real chance. And bigger heartbreaks. I thought it would be my movie moment. And maybe he would even whisper in my ear, I've always been in love with you. Check out new episodes of Heavyweight on Apple Podcasts.

45:32Cool. I saw one in the front row. Can you remind me? Thank you very much. First of all, I love your videos. I've been watching since I've been in elementary school. My name is Sarvesh. Feel old yet? How old are you? I'm 19. I am ancient. Go ahead. Returning to dust. My name is Sarvesh. I'm from the University of Tulsa and also the founder of Aura Patch and Glauc.ai. As a 19-year-old in medtech, I wanted to ask you, how can we integrate healthcare into our mobile technology that we have currently? Big question. That's like the big next frontier of what all these companies are trying to do. So if you watch enough Apple keynotes, there is a heavy emphasis on like you have these devices on you all the time and we're in your pockets already.

46:24So we might as well be collecting and creating as much useful information for you as possible from that. And that works in the ecosystem of Apple and the stuff that they do. So that makes it difficult for those outside to create something that you also carry on in person every day and also gives useful information. So it's kind of these two worlds of health care on your person, the stuff that you already have and the stuff that you might also want to add. I do think Apple does a pretty good job. I mean, they have great stories every keynote about like the Apple Watch saved me because it alerted me of this thing I didn't know I had.

47:01And I was in the woods and a bear attacked me. In someone's house that the bear came in. Yeah, crazy stories. That was the weirdest one I've ever seen. But they're real stories. And so this advantage of them being able to do as much as possible with the sensors and the things on your person is inspiring. But the other side of that coin is they make it really hard for others to plug in. I've seen a good amount of things that plug into Apple Health. What is it? The Eight Sleep has all the plugs to Apple Health. So I get a watch notification that tells me about how my mattress thinks that I slept, which is crazy to say out loud.

47:37What a world we live in. But long story short, yeah, there's a lot of data being collected and I'm pretty happy about a lot of the value I've gotten out of that. Yeah, I think that's pretty above my head. I know nothing about med tech or anything. I don't think I have a specific answer for that. I mean, I'm a very health anxious person. So if there were things that could help with that anxiety, I would love it. Yeah, I mean, especially in the United States where healthcare is a bazillion dollars it's very clear that the next kind of frontier there is preventative health and I think that's what all these companies are trying to get into it's like can we actually just try to keep you healthier throughout your life can we alert your doctor of like early symptoms so that you don't actually have to go to the hospital and then go into bankruptcy that'd be great and if you haven't watched our Dr.

48:24Mike interview it's really good and he has a lot of opinions as a medical professional as well for anyone out there it's a great episode Yeah. We have approximately six minutes before we want to do our trivia. So if we want to do some kind of rapid fire questions. Okay. Yeah. Right over here. Or quick ones or if you want to point them at somebody. All right. Hi. My name is Tashal. I'm from UT Dallas. This is my first time at South by Southwest. So it's pretty cool to see you guys in person. So yesterday I attended a talk by the CDO of D-Wave. So they're invested in quantum computing. So right now everyone's talking about AI.

49:00And it kind of reminded me a few years ago, nobody really understood AI, but now everybody somehow understands AI. And I feel that we're on the frontier of quantum computing, especially with what Microsoft did, I think, a couple of weeks ago. So just based off that, what's your opinion of quantum computing? And do you see it being relevant in the next five years? I'll leave this to you, too. I have one really overarching thought, which is that the branding is terrible. So I did a video where I got to actually see a quantum computer and learn essentially everything I could possibly dream with Cleo Abram.

49:35And I went to IBM and we got to see all this cool stuff. The stats are incredible. The super low temperatures in the thing are incredible. Just the hardware is amazing. And at the end of that, I came away thinking, wow, these things are super, super cool, but I still can't explain it to anyone. And I think AI, in its branding, is artificial intelligence. I think to my parents, I could say, hey, this is another intelligent thing that can help you with stuff. That's super easy. Quantum computing has never had an easy, at least to me, explanation of why it's super helpful, even though the advancements are incredible.

50:08And this huge stuff Microsoft was doing, I don't know if you saw that, they started giving people tours of their quantum computer. They're setting new records with the amount of qubits in theirs. But how do I tell people who aren't going to use that technology how useful it's going to be? Really, really hard. So AI seems like it's the most connected to us. It's in our pockets, it's everywhere. but quantum computing has a branding problem. They need a marketer. The big question, too, is when is it actually going to be released for scientists or people to actually use? Because I feel like quantum computing's been five years away for 50 years.

50:39I remember reading Wired magazine when I was six years old, and they're like, next year's the year. We're going to change everything. Everything's going to be better. And I know that there are huge advancements being made in this field, and we're getting up to these insanely high qubit numbers that we didn't have before, but Marques, Tell me what that's actually useful for. And then also, is it real? I guess a lot of it is because it's very research. It's not very consumer-facing. That was part of what we talked about in the video. It doesn't really touch the end consumer. With AI, I keep bringing it back, but people use AI.

51:11With the research and with all the stuff that quantum computers are good at, every time they pass this milestone qubit number, there's some new thing that they've unlocked that they've been able to do more simulations or be able to compute more things. and that's just for the researchers that are doing that type of stuff and it's like not consumer facing. Right, right, right. Last two. Ellis, do you have one? Do we have time? We're doing it? Yeah, do two more. You're on. Let's go. Hey, I'm Pulket. I work at a privacy tech startup based out of New York called Cloak. I had a question around AI hardware.

51:40What do you think is the final format of AI hardware on body that would win out? Would it have to eventually be baked into a smartwatch or a smartphone or do you think there is space for a rabbit hour one or a human AI or a meta ray band who eventually went out as well. Can I just, are you recording on your glasses right now? I think glasses is the answer and I think you're the exact reason why that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I think there are so many cool ideas of things that seem like naturally they could work. Glasses are obviously one of them. The pin, I'm not against the idea, like a little simple garment that you hopefully can charge up.

52:16Like that stuff could be cool, but they are so up against the limit of how much data they can get from your phone. The smartphone is so good that they have all the data and they are not letting anyone else touch that much data. So if you're going to make something that lives on someone's body and collects information and is useful to you it has to do that independent of the smartphone. And that is so hard. So I think the glasses are the... It can be connected and just be... It can be connected but the information that the smartphone has, it's not given up to you. So the glasses stand the best chance, I think.

52:51Half the people in front of me have glasses on. It's very natural to have glasses. But it is a serious challenge. I think the absolute best way to drive adoption of a new technology is to integrate it into an existing piece of hardware that people already use. So AI, for example, on smartwatches, on earbuds, on your phone, they can all sort of interact with each other. Everyone wears, well, a lot of people wear watches. Most people use earbuds. And so just integrating that technology into these existing devices that everyone's using every day already and then it's like, oh, there's an additional thing you can do with it.

53:24A lot easier than saying like, oh, throw your phone in the trash and stick a pin on your chest, man. Everyone loves that, you know. Tough sell. Yeah. Tag us in that video. Last question. Wait, Adam, we got to get this guy up here that has his hand up. He can be second. He can be last question. Yeah. Do you want to get? Yeah. Okay. Adam can do his and then we'll do one more. Do we have time? We'll just do it real quick. I'm Cody from Austin, Texas. You spend most of your time reviewing other people's products, but I'm wondering if you had unlimited resources, what kind of technology or product would you want to create and why?

54:00Crumple phone. Crumple phone would be sick. I get asked all the time if I would like to make a smartphone, and the answer is always like, well, that's an insanely competitive market, and I don't have that kind of time. But if I had unlimited resources, I think I would want to make my own ideal phone for myself, which is an exciting idea, but it's really hard. We did that question earlier. Kind of, yeah, and nobody would want to buy anything from me anyways. I just said an ISP that doesn't suck, basically. There's one more right up front. I see you. I'm coming. And then we're going to do trivia.

54:38Let's get it. From London, anyone. Watch out. Anyway, so thank you for the last question. Yeah, you spoke a lot about AI and stuff. I just wanted to know for YouTube itself, do you feel like it's going to help the creativity? Because I want to enter that field, just graduate. So just, yeah, do you think it's going to boost creativity or kind of just make the content really similar? So yeah, just a quick five. Both. So I think the trend since I started making videos online has been that the barrier for entry has gotten lower and lower and lower. So it's easier and easier for anyone with an internet connection to make something, which is awesome.

55:17That's exciting. It's made the masses of like tons of YouTube videos being able to come out super, super cool. What's also happened is the ceiling has gotten higher and higher. And that means that the production value, the amazing stuff you get to see people doing full time has gotten more and more amazing. I'm going to a panel right after this where we're talking about should YouTube creators win traditional awards like Oscars? Like that's how high the ceiling has gotten. And I think AI has been pushing it in both directions. So I think the floor getting lower is like anyone with an internet connection can generate a cool script, can fact check it, can make, can come up with super cool ideas and can start making a YouTube video just like that.

55:56and I think using AI as a tool to brainstorm and think of new unique ways to do things and come up with ideas that have never been done before and then how to execute on them and using all these tools to try to make something that's never been made is raising the ceiling more and more. So I think it's both. I'm hopefully using AI to do that one but I understand that everyone wants to make YouTube videos and I think that's going to be something we see a lot more of with AI too. Yeah, I think it's a combination of There's a lot of AI slop being thrown on YouTube right now, which is really destroying a lot of the stuff on there.

56:30But at the same time, it also makes it so you stand out more if you're actually a good human that is making human content instead of the slop content. So if you're used to seeing slop and then you see something that's actually pretty good, it looks even better. So there's that too. Yeah, I think it's time. Okay, so the last part of what we're going to do here with our final few minutes is we had you all fill out that survey at the beginning. and if you have watched Waveform, you know we like to have a little bit of trivia on the show. So what we're going to do is have Ellis pull up the answers to your trivia questions.

57:03I have the answers. And I don't think we have the whiteboards. The one thing we brought for this trip was our whiteboards and we did not bring them on stage. We forgot the whiteboards. What? Cool. We will just say our answers out loud. We'll say our answers at the same time. We'll each say our answers and then Ellis will be the judge of who wins the trivia point, who knows this audience the best. Okay. We got to speed through these. We're running out of time. Get ready, boys. Adam, hit it. Adam, hit it.

57:30That's right, everybody. Welcome to Trivia. All right. We asked everyone in this room, do you have a case on your phone? David, what percent Price is Right rules of people in this room have a case on their phone? Price is Right rules? Price is Right rules. 81. Fantastic. Andrew? 95. 95. Marquez?

57:5575. Marquez gets it. It was 80. I'm sorry, David. Oh my god! You said 81? Question number two. What is the number one feature people in this room look for when buying a smartphone between performance, camera, battery, build quality, and the display? I'm gonna go camera. Camera. Battery. You're all wrong. It was performance. What? They're all good. You can buy any phone. All right, question number three. What was the worst piece of tack released in 2024? I'm going to do as many of these as we've got time for. The humane pin. The humane pin. The humane pin? Marquez? Somebody, yeah, it's the humane pin.

58:36It's the humane pin, by far. But notable answers include Apple Intelligence, and someone put Blue Sky. Didn't like that. Wow. Let's go. All right. Wait, wait, someone. Wow. Rude. Final question, guys. Yeah. Who had the worst takes on waveform in 2024? Oh, no. David didn't know this was a question. Andrew. Andrew? I'll say Andrew. Andrew? I think they said it was me. No, the answer is me. You're all haters, and I love it. Were there any other questions? That was way faster than I expected. Do you think more people in here do video? or audio? Oh, listen to the podcast video or audio? Yeah. Can you just tell us the answer?

59:24No, I want to guess. I want to guess. I want to guess. I think that more people in here do video. Video. I'll go... Oh, wasn't there a third option of, I don't listen to Waveform and I'm not sure why I'm here right now? And a shocking number of you have never heard of Waveform. I don't know if that was a joke or... I think there's a QR code to subscribe on the side. Yeah. Just saying. No, it's not there anymore. They're all here for today, Explained, which is coming up next. That's why they're here. I'll go audio. The answer was video. Let's go. I'll be real. I was not keeping track of who got points.

59:55So we're going to need to review the tape. But as of this season, David is still crushing. And I will crash and burn in the extravaganza for sure. Yes. We have four minutes. Is there like one more? We have four minutes. We have four minutes. Is there one more question? Because we cannot go over it. Oh, there's a lot more. I'm really sorry for everyone else. Let's go through some speed questions. Speed. Yeah. You had your hand up earlier and I missed you. Hi, Alphario from San Diego. I have a really fast question. So I'm a long-term SE user, rode the SE wave. Ayo. Touch ID love, hate the notch.

1:00:33Where do I go next? I'm sorry to say that Touch ID is gone. It's going to be gone. So you might as well go 16E, which is a crazy recommendation. But look, it depends on your budget. I could ask you a thousand questions. But I think in general, now that Touch ID has gone the wayside and Face ID is a thing, you can healthily go with almost any of the newest three iPhones. The breaker was no.5 selfies. Yeah, that's tough. So 16, man? 15. Are you opposed to Android? Yes. I kind of figured that. You don't even want to ask questions. Buy another used SE. Just go forever. Cool. Another one real quick?

1:01:18So 12 mini just thought? Hey, JT in Austin. So Marcus, going back to your first Tesla Model S, we did a video that you had an anecdote of being at an intersection, a car coming up to you from the back, and you felt your Tesla was moving a little bit, nudging. And so there's other consumers at the time. It seemed like that was kind of a thing that Tesla's were able to do. So going back then and what you know now, do you feel like that was a feature that it was doing? Or is this a... Well, that was a long time ago. I don't remember exactly if I know. So I'm a fan of the car having sensors and being able to intervene when it detects something happening.

1:01:57And it has done that in multiple directions and multiple times over the course of my ownership of those cars. So I'm generally a fan of that. I don't recall the exact incident that you're referencing, but it's good that that car has helped me a few times. One more. Yeah, really fast. All right. I'm so sorry, everybody. We've got 55 seconds. All right. Thank you. My name is Jack. I study mechanical engineering in Germany. And I use ChatGPT for almost everything when working on my car or learning from math or physics or anything. And I just think I submit so much data. And we're all talking about getting AI on the phone.

1:02:31And I just think when it's in the app and maybe on my internet browser and my photos and in my WhatsApp and in everything. What is your take on this whole data privacy thing? You know what I mean? Isn't that at least a bit concerning? We're always talking about getting more AI, more on the phone, on the glasses, on the pin. I just think about, yeah, maybe data privacy might be a thing, yeah? We have 10 seconds to answer. My high-level take is that there is constantly a question that these companies and all of us are asking about the direct trade-off between how much data you have to give up and the convenience that you get back from it.

1:03:11And the more they push that envelope of, well, you have to give up more data, but you get more convenience. Okay. You have to give up more data, but you get more features and convenience. People tend to take the convenience with it. So yes, data privacy is a concern. And for a lot of people in this room, they don't want that trade-off anymore, but I've seen it get pushed really, really far and we get really cool features out of it. So I think those companies are going to keep pushing it and keep trying to offer more things in exchange for our data. Cool. We are over time now. And before we get physically kicked off of this stage, thank you all for coming.

1:03:43Seriously, this was super fun. We super appreciate it.

1:03:49All right. That was it. That was a lot of fun. Thanks again for the people who were there, for submitting all the answers to the survey and for everyone who gave us ideas on what to do. We thought it turned out pretty good, but there is one thing that we didn't get to do on stage, which is, Andrew, you didn't get to read us out. I didn't read out live. A little sad, but huge thanks to the Vox Media team who set all of that up and let us do our first live show. Totally no issues at all. It was awesome. Smooth sailing. And Slido actually helped us with the survey thing. That went really smoothly too.

1:04:20Definitely recommend that for a live show like that. And other than that, Waveform was produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Rovin. We're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network. And our intro outro music was created by Vane. So...

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