We Took Over the Podcast!

35:10But now they're actually, knock on wood, I don't have wood around me, going to do it. So now they're going to be scraping or letting people scrape their Reddit data, which is really interesting. I feel like the moral of the story is just know that Reddit just cares about IPOing and making money now and doesn't give a shit about any of its users, except for all of the stuff that they post on there that now they can scrape for data for AI. And except for the top 75 ,000 of its biggest users, which Wall Street Journal reported this morning that they're planning to save some of their IPO stock for those users.

35:43Cool. They've been trying to IPO for three years. It's such a show over there. Also, like, you know, they I'm looking here online and it seems like last year they had a total revenue of like eight hundred million dollars about that to just like give it to all of your fans. and supporters and then the reward being 60 million dollars which is a lot of money but not for like a reddit sized company it's like damn bro well that's 60 million a year i know but it's like yeah like you gave all of those developers and like loyal people on your site the finger for 60 mil it's like you could even crack 100 mil really damn that unnamed come that no wonder the company's on they don't want to they don't want to out who f***ing dogged them i mean i don't know dude like that's what i take away from this like like to do to to to just just just give it to all the people who support you for for 60 mil well they're gonna give some money back to 75 000 of those top users who i don't know who's still there because the like most excited loyal reddit users i feel like left or like stopped using it in that way that's what i was gonna ask do you think so obviously we have our stance on it and us being particularly concerned about privacy what fraction of actual because 800 however many million people use reddit every month how what fraction of those people actually care enough to stop using reddit because remember we talked about this last time you're upsetting the most important 10 % of your audience and let's say you leave them you still have 90 % of the people yeah yeah well your answer is that in 2023 the revenue was up 20 % yeah like listen I think like I hate what they did with it reddit's still doing absolutely fine and I'm sure to them it doesn't make a difference I would argue that probably a lot of people moderating subs are not as well versed as the old moderators used to be who left um I mean we gave up the mkbhd subreddit to just like it's just an unofficial subreddit now because we didn't feel like dealing with it anymore but they're fine i always knew they were gonna be fine but it doesn't mean they didn't give a giant middle finger to all their like really loyal users and again they were a web-based uh website that didn't have an official app until they bought a third-party app called it the official app it is still terrible by the way it is an awful app and then just said oh yeah everyone so yeah Steve Hoffman.

38:20Is there like a Reddit competitor? Is there another site that you can compare to Reddit that people could even go to? Yes. And no. It's the same thing as like the Twitter competitor. There's a competitor? Yes. Does anyone give a shit about it? No. I don't know if it still exists anymore, but iFunny feels like it was comparable to Reddit. No, it was not. No? Why not? Wasn't iFunny just like a random picture of the day? that like a shit name that Elon just stole pictures from all of them? It was sort of, I mean, I never used it. It was more of a Gen Z thing that I was a part of, but my little brother used it.

38:56iFunny has been around for a very long time. No, no, no. Well, that's what I'm saying. It's like when I, you know, when my brother was like nine and had like a whatever device he had, like iFunny was the app for him and his friends. So it's like just the r slash funny subreddit. Yeah, exactly. But I think there's like a likes and points. I don't know. I should shut my mouth before the iFunny community comes after me. yeah I was gonna say Lemmy Lemmy is the one that everybody talks about potentially being the alternative Lemmy never heard of that yeah I've never heard of that yeah it's an open source one you only hear about it when you hear about people being mad at Reddit is it on ActivityPub?

39:29I don't know if it's on ActivityPub that was a joke that was a really bad joke ha ha ha ha nice nice getting it alright you know who else has billions of dollars? Walmart Walmart baby oh man okay Walmart thank you thank you Walmart buys Vizio. Okay, so before we launch into this, I just want to say a lot of the cool stuff we're about to say in this story came from some really good reporting in The Atlantic by Justin Pott and also some Associated Press reporting that I found in the San Diego Union Tribune. Just wanted to lay some credit where it's due. Get all our sources. So for everyone listening, when Alice and I found out that we were going to be doing this, we went crazy just fact checking everything we put in the doc three times i know because we were so nervous it's terrifying so there's the sources there you go uh yeah and uh just like really great research and reporting by them but um okay first of all 2.3 billion jordan jordan uh second of all that's so much money that's like a ton of money 2.3 billion and uh and i wanted to you know it makes you think because Vizio is a budget TV manufacturer, right?

40:47And it's not like they've like skirted around and found this market as a budget TV. Like they have made budget TVs since the beginning. I don't really think they've gone into too many other product categories, too many other markets. Sound bars, maybe? I don't even know. Yeah. But so this is like a weird time to enter the budget TV market, right? And that's because TVs are like ridiculously cheap right now. Some are free. Exactly. They're so cheap that you can literally get some for free. And this is a new thing. Like if you're 10 years old, I don't know why you're listening to the Waveform podcast, but if you are 10 years old, then you don't remember that 10 years ago, 15 years ago, TVs were really expensive.

41:31Did you guys ever play Club Penguin? Yeah. Oh, you did? Okay. You asked me the other day, and I was like, I feel like that's a Mariah game. Do you remember what one of the most expensive furniture items in Club Penguin was? It was the big screen TV. That was 5 ,000 coins. You could get, I'm pretty sure, someone will have to price check this, but I'm pretty sure you could get an entire LED dance floor in your igloo for about the same price as a single television. Oh, wait, let me fact check this. Yeah, fact check that. It is worth noting that, and this I did fact check, okay, this I did fact check, that a Puffle in Club Penguin was one sixth of the price of a TV.

42:07You could purchase literal flesh for less than that of a TV. Okay. Anyway, TVs are cheap for a few reasons right now. One is they completely changed the manufacturing process. They use this thing called mother glass, where they start with like a big giant glass sheet and they can stamp multiple displays out of that. That's crazy. So there's a lot less waste, which is great. Also, TVs have a lot of competition from the bottom side of the price equation because companies like TCL and Hisense can make really cheap TVs that are still really decent. And that forces the expensive guys like LG and Samsung to effectively lower them prices to compete.

42:48But the big reason TVs are so cheap right now, and this is something people don't think about a lot, is because they scrape an unbelievable amount of data from you. And that's how they make the money back. Just a frankly unbelievable amount of data. And that's why, according to this blog called Carpe Diem, which does like financial graphs and stuff like that, TVs have decreased by an average of 97 % since the year 2000. That's right. 97%. And another little fun fact I threw in here that's related is that Roku, a company that also makes really cheap TVs, usually partnered with other people, makes four to five times as much revenue off of what they call a platform.

43:33The extreme platform. Yeah. So that's like ads on the Roku channel, licensing out the operating system, this, that, this, that than they do on their actual devices. So it's way, way, way more profitable to be in the data game when it comes to TVs than it is to. Which is why the telly is completely free. Exactly. And I'm still waiting for mine. Yeah, where is it? I'm thinking about something right now. Yeah. What's on your mind? They scrape a lot of data. Oh, no. Find it. Find it. One. No. No. Top left. I mean, that's a lot of smarts, but also a lot of data. Nice. But also, is that even, like, okay, what kind of data would a TV scrape from me?

44:17Let's say it knows everything I watch. Yeah. And when you watch it. And when I watch it and when I turn the TV on and off. Do you have kids? Do you have a partner? Are you alone? Do you think they know that? Yes. Or do they infer that from the data? Do you watch Love Island at 8.30 p.m. two nights a week? You have a girlfriend. That's except. Damn, that's good. Damn, that's good. Yeah. Okay. Let's say. So is any of that information that they're scraping particularly sensitive? Well, no, there's different kinds of data. So there's like PPI, which is personally or PII, personally identifiable information.

44:51And then PII to something like that. I forgot. Everyone's going to yell at me. I know they exist. But I think it's that first kind of data that is not exactly like your social security and everything like that. Right. It's just regular data where you live. What time are you watching these things? Do you are you home all day? Do you work from home? That kind of stuff. Yeah. Because I think about like sensitive data. I think about like what I buy, what I what I spend money on my tax. like the where I live and things like that and uh obviously that stuff like a browser would know or like a someone you buy a product from would know but the tv it's like I don't really mind if anyone knows how much tv I watch or where or how much it's on or any of that stuff well it's not exactly it's not I think the crazy part is that because of your habits like because of your viewing habits then they're able to infer other things that you may care about that's really interesting yeah also they'll know like what services you subscribe to they'll know how you use them and i think yeah they can use that to infer a lot of purchasing data and then also don't remember uh don't forget um you get served ads on uh on these platforms um and that i think is the big reason that uh yeah you know yeah that's how i was gonna say it's kind of an interesting point to think about in any types of like scraping data is like there are plenty of people who are just like i don't really give a damn about what it is because a lot of it's marketing or or whatever and there are people who don't care as much and there's people who care more i mean the reddit stuff and like scraping it for ai is like i don't really care as much about what i post on there it's just more of like they're screwing the people over and like making a bunch of money off of it but like yeah it's very clearly this stuff is there scraping your data and that's how everyone's making money these days yeah pretty much but do you remember the story of how target figured out that the girl was pregnant before her father that was all from just data yeah advertising stuff arguably target would know much more sensitive information about you than your tv yeah they did that just off of buying so target knows where you live target knows when you bought things what you bought your tv knows where you live yeah for sure yeah they could have where i live but they don't know what i bought when i bought it and in the frequency that i started buying it more they might see that i didn't skip a certain ad and can maybe think about that a little more but i just i feel like there's levels to like how important the data is yeah this is a little bit underneath the one that i am most curious about do you know what would bump up targets uh ways to scrape data if they bought a television company and then scraped all the data from that.

47:35Yeah. I feel like you just went into the point of where Walmart was like, how do I get more data? Let's buy a TV company. So it's actually not just about Walmart getting more data. It's about Walmart leveraging that data. So Walmart has this platform that doesn't get brought up very much. That's called Walmart Connect. You guys ever heard of this? No. Exactly. So Walmart Connect is sort of like Spotify for art. Ellis time. Teach me a thing. It's for brands who sell things at Walmart. So if you're like a brand or a seller, you can go into your Walmart Connect and you can buy placements on the Walmart homepage.

48:10You can buy ads as part of Walmart's ad stuff. And soon, because Vizio has this whole TV streaming ecosystem, they'll be able to plug all of those ad spots and all of that demographic data into what they describe as a closed loop ecosystem. That's a big part of the Walmart Connect selling point to sellers, is that not only do you give them money and they place ads, but then they give you also Walmart customer-specific feedback, which you can then use to do a stronger campaign and create the closed loop. And this is huge because Vizio, according to their last shareholder thing, had 500 advertising partners.

48:53500? hundred five hundred advertising partners which means all of those partners are now partners with walmart wow i guess it's kind of similar to like amazon in a way where if you buy enough stuff from amazon they know a lot about you and then if you're an advertiser who wants to sell something and you want to get in front of the right people boy does amazon know how to get it in front of the right people and walmart is that big and they kind of have the same system going on where it's It's like, all right, yes, we have physical stores, but trust me, we know a lot about how to get the right product in front of the right people.

49:30And Vizio, boy, do they have advertisers that want to get in front of the right people and vice versa. They have a bunch of information and we can use that information. So it checks out. It makes sense. And I think it puts a really cool spin on some of the stories we've heard over the past year with Amazon and Netflix adding ads to their user experience. it's not just so they can make a few bucks. I mean, I'm sure it is so they can make a few bucks here and there with ad time. It's always about the bucks. But it's about turning into a business that is leveraging your data, that is doing targeted ads, that is effectively an advertising company.

50:08It's almost like they're taking a page out of Google's book in a really interesting - Who's also a ruthless advertiser that you never think about. Yeah. Well, I think about it. Well, yeah. But yeah, so this story, I just thought the story was cool. It combines a bunch of different weird things about the time we live in. I also just want to say, assuming you're not afraid or freaked out by the data being collected about you, this is a great time to buy a TV. It just it just is like like I don't know if the gravy train is going to keep going for how long. And I'm not saying like go out and replace your TV.

50:45We should all be trying harder to make our electronics last longer. but that being said it's just a great it's a we live so cheap they're so cheap it's it's it's well at least here they are i don't know about in other countries but in the u.s they're very that's true yeah i would say they're commoditized to the level of the smartphone yeah probably more so uh speaking of ads we should get to some after we do the next trivia question you nailed it there it is all right all right oh no i've been waiting so if you knew you'd only have one opportunity i don't even remember the last question damn okay i gotta think all right so we've been talking a lot about reddit uh data social media etc reddit according to statista has 800 plus million monthly active users.

51:39Oh no, he went into Statista. That's a wrap. That is a lot of users and a lot of data that they generate. Really? That's a lot of smarts, but also a lot of data. Nice. Doesn't that make them like one of the biggest social media platforms? Red has 800 million? 800 million monthly active users. You're right, Ellis. That does make them. I knew it. I was about to Google it and I was like, wait, I probably shouldn't Google this. That does make them one of the largest social media apps or services in the world. but it doesn't even crack the top five. No. Really? Really? 800 million? Name the top three.

52:15Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How many of them do I have to live in China to use? Zero. No. What? Are they all owned by one company? No further questions.

52:30Well, we'll be right back.

52:40Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and... Did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to the Producer Forum podcast with Ellis and Adam.

53:15Official name. Official name change. Trademark. Official name change. Trademark. We have some Apple news, though. Yeah, this is an entire, well, not entirely, but a big Apple section. Big Apple section. First, Apple Music monthly replay. It's like Spotify Rewind. Spotify Wrapped. It's like Spotify Wrapped, but every month. Too much. You think so? It's too much. I have been listening to pretty much two albums since the year started I've learned this like serious two album kick yeah so it would just tell me how much I listen to those two albums that's what I'm saying uh which should be kind of interesting but I don't know I could be wrong but personally my listening habits don't change that much month to month I like the yearly recap because it's a the year is long my winter mood my summer mood my fall mood I feel like doing it every month I'm just never going to check this.

54:05Like, I don't care. I'll wait till the end of the year. Yeah, it doesn't. I don't know. I mean, we saw it also like Spotify wrapped has a lot of really interesting, fun little data and they'll make your like aura or whatever. Yeah. This is not that. This is just like you listen to this song for this many minutes. So no complaints, no notes. I don't know. Yeah. What are the two albums you've been listening to this year? Let me let me see. While you do that, I want to do a quick interjection. And that's because Adam and I drive home together sometimes. Carpool, save the environment. And on our drive home, we've discovered we really, really like listening to this radio station in Jersey City, 91.1 WFMU.

54:52So if you live in the Jersey City area, or I think the transmission makes it all the way to Brooklyn. So anywhere in the New York City general area, check out 91.1 FM. There's like always something good on. Always. It's so good. But the two albums I've been listening to, and I'm the host. I can talk about whatever I want. Oh, let's go. I've been listening to Andy Schaaf's Norm. Terrific album. And I've been listening to the compilation of Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, Nina Simone. You would. Record. Nice. Both terrific. I don't need to know how much I've listened to it, though. What about you?

55:31I've been doing Insano by Kid Cudi. Insano. great album and creatures of habit by kilcho which is a random indie band really good cool you guys want to shout out some music that's no but i'm open i'm opening up my uh replay for february right now oh yeah walmart has i should say you use apple music not much oh okay so that's funny i only use it in vision pro so it's gonna be real limited and you're you're looking at this replay in the apple music app right uh it brings you to a website and then takes you out to the web apps exactly yes for some reason apple music replay can only be looked at in the browser don't know why wait is spotify wrap the same no it isn't no no yeah you can do it in in the desktop and the mobile app but i don't yeah that's the thing they just only do it in the browser which is fine marquez what were you listening to in division pro so i i get to the part where it says uh this is your replay jump in so i click jump in and it's like your replay is still in progress check back in early March.

56:34Oh, that's for February. It doesn't give you a January one? I think there's a January button. I didn't listen to anything in January. Okay. Wow. Well. Big letdown. Yeah. In other Apple news, there's an Apple sports app. Literally got launched this morning. Yeah. And it's basically just a score aggregator is what it seems like. but and this is one thing we were talking about like in before we were recording um if you open up the app actually let me open up right now just to make sure so i don't get this wrong but if you open up the app it gives you the game that's upcoming so and if you click that game the very first thing is betting odds on the game oh no stats no stats about players or anything like that just betting odds no which is even have stats no it does if you like click into it but But it's more like the first thing it gives you is the betting odds, which I found very interesting.

57:33Look, if you sports, if you if you daily fantasy or whatever the kids are calling it these days, it's like no shade. You know what I mean? I get it. It's fun. But it's also like Apple. What are you going to do porn next? Like this is like the least Apple thing I've ever. That's more what interested me. It's very un-Apple like to me to be like because that is like for adults. betting is for adults it's like and apple is positioning itself always to be like safe for your kids like their whole ipad thing turn off the screen and everything and now it's just like nope here's some betting odds this is unsavory but anyway besides that the app looks pretty cool no it does i'm excited i'm excited to not have to google philadelphia 76ers three times a day yeah exactly yeah i know i know andrew yeah so i signed up for the mls uh apple tv thing that they had and i actually was really impressed with how they do the scoring and everything like it pops up on the dynamic island you can watch it there it's all really cool it also does that with uh other teams that i follow so like with nicks sometimes it'll just pop up on the screen and i'll not even know there was a nick game that day and i'll be able to like keep up with the score One thing that, I mean, first of all, I should clarify, this is only available in the US, the UK, and Canada.

58:49Why? I don't know. It's unfortunate. But we are in the US, so I can talk about it. It doesn't have as in-depth stats as something like, I don't know how to pronounce this, FOTMob? F-O-T? F-O-T? F-O-T? Yeah, it's an app that specifically has crazy stats for soccer or football in the rest of the world. okay um it's actually the apple sports little dynamic island thing is faster than my tv like a couple weeks ago we were watching an arsenal game shout out arsenal um and the we're watching the game jess is sitting next to me and on my phone i see soccer scored soccer is like a good player and i was like oh and jess is looking like what what what happened and she's looking at the tv and nothing happened yet and it was a full like 11 seconds before he scored which is crazy so i have to like literally put my phone upside down when we're watching the game because otherwise it'll it'll be spoiled okay i'm on fought mob right now and you are not kidding bro oh yeah it's crazy this is crazy i have never heard of a stat xg on target and then in parentheses x got i don't know what that means you know this reminds me of what the what you said earlier about how the number this is going to take away from the like the number of times you google who's winning or what's happening in a game yeah it reminds me of apple's weather app which is it's not as detailed as the most detailed weather apps but boy does this take away a lot of google searches yeah for sure like if i just add my top three favorite teams i google the scores a lot yeah who's winning the game who won the game last night yeah they play next when did they play this team a lot of google searches it's all just there now something to keep in mind yeah it's really smart So some of the sports that they have currently are MLS, NBA, NCAA basketball, men's and women's, NHL, Bundesliga, La Liga, Liga MX, Liga 1, Premier League, Serie A, all the soccer ones.

1:00:43Well, I shouldn't say all the soccer ones. A lot of the soccer ones. Wow. You mean football? Yes. Football. Sorry. Okay. Excuse me. Football. There's also more leagues that are coming. Wait, there's not even football. Because the season. Well, that is a good question. are they going to add football next season supposedly they're going to add it so the ones that where the season is over there it's not included in the press release but it's upcoming when the season starts again so wnba uh mlb nfl those are coming word yeah so pretty cool overall like i just found it again very interesting that the betting odds was the first thing you see dude i'm not happy about that but you know i don't get to decide the world we live in and uh that is what it is i'm just like why are they getting a kickback from that do they get any money from betting apps doing great like why have that at the top is it just one more google search they can take away also i didn't realize that the odds were like the same for all the books like i would assume different bookies set different odds but i've never placed a sports bet so i i don't even if you like click the odds does it take you to whoever's odds they are or like is it just vegas sods it actually just reaches into your pocket and it does not say because if it was specifically someone i would say they're making advertising dollars off of that's fair whatever but it doesn't say if i click it nothing happens yeah ladies if your boyfriend sports bets ask him if he has restrictions because if you win a lot in those apps they put restrictions on your account they kick you off if he says no i've never been restricted he's losing your money shout out buddy healed my guys played four games for my sixers he's averaging 23 points yeah this is now a basketball podcast this is now a basketball podcast psych adam adam ask who has him on the fantasy team you got buddy healed who's got buddy healed on the fantasy team marquez marquez just picked him up let me just as ellis was saying that see what that says be healed no games no games today it's all-star break oh okay yeah but uh i do in fact have buddy healed yeah yeah nice yeah what what place are you in in our fantasy league marquez top two but not one top two i'm half a point behind alex okay you're sorting wrong that's no that's i've you're sorting wrong i'm right behind alex okay but this is not totally a basketball podcast because last week we did not get the chance to talk about the stupid regular host somehow forgot to talk about OpenAI Sora.

1:03:19So we're going to clean up the mess they left for us. Wait till you see the mess of this producer's table. Lights fall. OpenAI Sora, it's a text video AI. yeah um just want to say uh like all the coverage i was reading about this were like yo like this is the first to market like this is here runway has had text to video for a while you and brandon always talk about runway what we don't just talk about we use it yeah like we use it professionally specifically like it has this feature it's it looks more diffusion-y than the examples that yeah it looks a little more spaghetti-y but no it's like it's much more of like well first let's talk about the announcement so on OpenAI's website they made this announcement for this new thing called Sora they are still red teaming it which I think means they're trying to have people do bad things with it so that's like a security term Yeah.

1:04:26Again, we're not security guys, as you could tell from our cryptography quantum computing segment here. Before I was almost killed by a light. But it looks really good. And the cool things that they're sort of like pushing forward as big features. And these are things that I have found runway to sort of struggle with. Custom resolution. So you're not just locked into like 720 or 1080 or 4K. you can do lots of weird resolutions, which sounds small, but when it comes to machine learning is big. I use this software called Touch Designer, which has some AI integrations. And I remember reading this whole thing about this facial recognition, facial tracking AI that someone built for it wouldn't work if you used a vertical webcam feed.

1:05:12Same exact thing. But as soon as you changed it from a horizontal to vertical thing, it just broke. But so yeah, custom aspect ratios, custom resolutions uh it can do multiple figures and subjects really well um interesting so it seems like it's pretty cool the part that i found really cool was in the sort of like tech paper thing that they published alongside and that was that um they already have gpt which we know is a transformer model and they already have dolly which uh okay i'm getting i'm getting a note for my producers here, folks. Live. Live coming in. Breaking news. Will Smith eating spaghetti.

1:05:53I'm assuming we're going to cut to that clip right here. I guess so. Does he make a sound in that video? Oh, yeah. Does he? Boy. Well, it also came back because he did, like, a post recreating it in person. Yeah. Will Smith? Yeah, yeah. Oh, you didn't see it? Yeah, he tweeted it. Will Smith posted a video that said AI then, AI now, and it's just him redoing all of the scenes. And he, like, unhinges his jaw like a snake in the video, right? Well, no, it's the updated AI that doesn't unhinge the jaw. It's not actually. Him violently getting spinned. Yeah. Okay, I got to watch this. It's just as crazy as you're imagining.

1:06:28Oh my gosh. But it's awesome. That's a win for Will Smith and his team, I think, right there. Truly. There's a lot happening in his life and everything, but that was genius. That was good. That was good. It's interesting. So GPT is a transformer model. That's what the T stands for. Dolly is a diffusion model. I'm pretty sure that's what the D in Dolly stands for. Sure. Someone should double check that for me. But they're saying that Sora is a diffusion transformer or a transforming diffuser. It's like some combination of the two. Oh, interesting. Which is interesting, right? And it took me a little bit to get it.

1:07:05But the gist of it is that transformers are really good at sequential understanding. And they can do this across really long sequences. And that's why ChatGPT can write you five paragraphs and the fifth paragraph still is related to the first paragraph. Language tends to work sequentially. Images do not work sequentially. They can have sequential elements in them, but they don't work sequentially. And that's why we use diffusion models for a lot of image generation stuff. Diffusion models are really good at understanding spatial relationships and building these sort of complex relationship networks.

1:07:42where there's not a linear sequence to it, but there is still a connection of ideas. A video is a bunch of images that don't have these sequential relationships, but then the images are arranged sequentially. So to generate a video from nothing, you actually need to deploy both kinds of models in tandem with one another. And there's a bunch of really interesting stuff about how the sort of like token system that a lot of transformers use doesn't exactly work for video. You got to use these sort of temporal tokens called patches. It's really interesting. I recommend, and this sounds silly, but this is actually what I did, reading the OpenAI paper with chat GPT in another window so you can get clarification on stuff that's like a little too hard to understand.

1:08:32That's awesome. Did it lie to you? I hope not. I hope not. It seemed like everything that I was reading was I could sort of fact check. I found this cool guy's blog. It's Jono. It's Jono with an H. J-O-H-N-O dot com. Just some random dude's blog. Not our Jono. Not our Jono. Got it. I mean, unless Jono is like secretly an AI wizard. But the thing that I'm really excited for with Sora is if they're able to develop like a platform for it in the same way that Runway does. because the runway tool, you have like text to video. You also have image to video. You also have video to video. And the video to video is like really cool.

1:09:14Like the example they have on their website, which I think illustrates really well, is someone set up a bunch of books standing up on a desk and then using and then filmed a shot. And then using runway was able to turn those books into skyscrapers and have it be like a city fly-through scene. Interesting. Um, then they also deploy the runway models to do things like automatic, uh, background removal. If you've seen the Ellis versus AI video, the scene where like my hair is getting blown back and stuff that I, we didn't use a green screen. It was just shot in a normal room. Oh, I was there. And then we AI.

1:09:50Yeah. I know. AI the background out. We sprayed water on your face. Yeah. So I, if Sora is actually all that and as good as opening, I wants us to think. I can't wait to see the platform that it is wrapped in. Thank you for letting me talk about that for 15 minutes straight, America. Nice. Let's go. Quick fact check. DALI is not an acronym. It's not an acronym? We've definitely talked about this before. It's just the combination of Salvador Dali and WALL-E. Damn. Nice. Well, I will say, Andrew, now that you're back in the pod talking, you mentioned the other day something really good that now I see in every Sora video.

1:10:30which is the keying on like random movements. So like if you watch a video, the camera will just like drift to the right and then out of nowhere, just like really hard start drifting to the left. It's like they haven't learned how to ease in and out yet, which is interesting. Yeah, it felt like there was one specifically with a turtle and it was kind of like panning on this turtle and then just kind of like went left. It looks like anyone who's ever video edited before the first time they add keyframe movements to something where there's not the smoothing. it's just like left left left left right right right and like there's it's almost smooth but not smooth at the same time i don't know if you're into if you know keyframes you would see it in a second it's just very interesting because some of these demos are insane like it really replicates hand movement of like cameras that are holding or people holding cameras and the little jittery things that you get but then like that one motion it just really messes up every time i watched every single thing i could find generated by sora and did you like you should do a video on this yeah no i i showed a bunch of them in the video that we made but it is remarkable how good it's gotten so quickly and how how well it is able to reproduce the parts of videos that you can ask for like some of the prompts are like make this look like 35 millimeter film make this look like cartoonish or hyper super realistic and it does that stuff too which is yeah crazy and it does make me wonder because now there's a meme of people tweeting real videos with made by sora prompt of like handsome man walks down broadway and it's just a video of themselves and it's like made by sora but it looks like you but now it's like how many these videos really could just cross your twitter timeline or instagram timeline and just look like a real video and you wouldn't know unless you watch it a third time or a fourth time, upon which it becomes very obvious when you see the things like the keying or like the legs overlapping or the hands turning into seven or 12 fingers or whatever.

1:12:28But it's really fast. It's scary. Like Mr. Cheddar. Oh no. Oh no. Mr. Cheddar was this thing that spread around Twitter. It's really hilarious. It's a picture of a rat wearing like a tuxedo jacket, I think, with his arms. He's standing on some carpet. He's rat-sized. And he's holding out his arms like this. If you just Google Mr. Chetta, it'll come up. It's not the first time we've looked at this on the podcast also. Oh yeah, we've talked about Mr. Chetta before. But no one knew it was a mid-journey image until like months after. Not that obviously it's not a real rat. Yeah, I feel like everything is believable where if it just crossed your timeline, but a lot of times the giveaway is fingers.

1:13:12In a lot of these videos it felt like the giveaway was like real world physics it didn't quite get like there was the one of the birthday cake where candles are blowing in different directions which didn't make sense and turbulence inside your house and there's another one of the cat in the bed with the person and the bed comes or the like blanket quilt comes from like behind her and just like flops over top of her with absolutely no movement it's just like the way it moves it's just totally wrong you know what it doesn't have it doesn't have conservation of mass yeah like like the if you watch the iconic one everyone shared of the lady walking down the street in tokyo walking down watch her legs they like merge and blend into each other over and over again and just swap back and forth i don't know if you noticed that like that not that dance move with your knees yeah except her right leg becomes her left leg and then swaps back in like the like you said with the hands like people will clap and the hands will just merge into one hand and then split back into two hands.

1:14:14That is weird. The blanket will become more blanket and less blanket. And it looks physically realistic, but also where did that mass come from and why is it moving? Weird stuff like that. It is weird. Am I the only one that's terrified of this? No. You too? Me. I make videos, so I'm pretty worried. I'm terrified, but I feel like I've gotten enough mileage out of the runway platform platform and it's helped me do work enough that i'm feeling excited but you're not also trying to like de-establish a government or something you know not that you know not that i know not to my knowledge it has looking at you belgium no we've talked about how the video the photo making tools have gotten to the point where we can use them as a tool so it's like oh it's not good enough to replace me great but it is good enough to be used as a brainstorming tool or even like a rough draft tool for me yeah and even to the point where like i said this in the video the the drone shot of big sir or whatever it was i think that's good enough for i think a lot of people looking for like the license footage who are gonna buy a drone shot of big sir like there's enough high resolution video of drone shots of big sir that ai just made another one for you and you don't have to now hire that drone pilot to make your own or pay that license fee to get that footage that already exists just for your you know internal powerpoint or whatever you're doing damn samsung was ahead of the game with their moon photos what what what do we think uses more electricity a drone flying into the sky over big sur and capturing or the server farm that would generate okay a video have you ever flown a dji drone those batteries have clarifying go crazy how did the drone pilot get to the spot to take off is his car electric did he take a plane did he fly yeah no he's a mountain man he crawled there he never leaves he's always there yeah yeah i don't know this thing just kind of like it's really cool but like the first thing when you were playing it for me when i walked in that morning you were like oh look at these like new videos that dropped or whatever i did not realize they were ai at all i just i just thought you were watching videos and like some of them again if you really look like there's one with a guy reading a book remember you showed me that one and like at one point the page just kind of like flips up like one of those yellow notepad books but he's holding like a novel so it's like the page wouldn't turn that way so that's like a tell but at first that was like 13 seconds into the video there's a solid like nine seconds of just a dude reading a book and i didn't think anything of it and when i think about tech like tech theoretically with people working on it gets better and better and better which means that the tell for us right now, which is, oh, did you catch that with the hands or the legs or the book page?

1:17:05The tells are going to get smaller and smaller and smaller. Theoretically, right? One would hope. Until it's completely indistinguishable from reality, right? Which then what? What happened? Which then you look around and you're like, what about this one? Is this reality? Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Are we in an AI? Did Vision Pro get that good that fast? Yeah. Ellis Roven's in this one. So is Mr. Cheddar. oh no

1:17:34anyway I think that's about that about wraps it up right that about wraps it up thank you guys for sticking with us I know I think that's it that's all we have to do we don't have anything else to do that's it alright bye see you no no no no no no no we have the thing oh the thing okay oh my god I get to write on the way grab your pens as well your markers also country of Belgium I am not planning your demise I'm sorry. Sounds like what you would say if you were planning it. No, no, no, no. I love, I love Belgium. The Antwerp Zoo, a place I've never been. I've heard it's great. I was just going to say, have you ever been to Belgium?

1:18:08No. It's awesome. I'm sure I would love it. You would love it. Yeah. Chocolate. The flag is dope. Yeah. Waffles, Antwerp, Brussels. Yeah. Lots to love about it. Sprout. Flemish. Great language. Anyway. Sounds like you're trying to think about the trivia questions a little harder before we got belgium there yeah speaking of belgium just kidding all right are you ready first question i'm so ready okay you've got the music for me yeah is it that one oh yeah it is that one marcus is way better okay all right we talked about garmin before damn they were named after the two co-founders gary burell and min cow but they started in 1989 selling a 2500 gps device under a different name that combines two words.

1:18:59What is that name? Good timing on the music there. Thank you. I just realized how hard it is to think and talk at the same time. Now I know why you guys get so quiet. Two different words. I want the name of the company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm writing it down. You should do a score update. Hold on. I'll potentially give you a hint here in case I did that poorly. Yeah, sure. It is the abbreviate the two the abbreviation of two words. It's not too forward No, no, no. I got it. Okay pencils up pencils up. Andrew was talking It's cool. Okay boys there it is What would we say I wrote global mapping or GM I put low-Q track like nice location tracking what is it pro nav pro nav oh dang I've heard of that professional navigator or navigator damn I tried to make it reasonable to think of I kept mentioning the GPS device to try and think of navigation damn okay that was a good one price is right rules my turn we're only playing delta

1:20:20all right well you still have a chance to get on the scoreboard yeah okay no worries this is the tough one but this is a fun one i think you i think you have a chance at this one so on the subject of social media reddit data reddit has 800 plus million monthly active users as of january 2023 today that doesn't even crack the top five social media websites by monthly active users name the top three oh top three do we have to name them in order? I just want to say again Marquez is just naturally good at everything that we do and it's really annoying sometimes he has come into this producer role perfectly while I'm just here slugging along hoping to not get drowned okay can we get one point per app?

1:21:08sure do they have to be in order? yeah okay Do they have to be in order? They do not have to be in order. They do not have to be in order. Okay. I only got two. Can we get another? Yeah, extra points if they're in order. Oh, okay, okay. You already wrote three things? Yeah. So I'll give you one point per correct answer. All right. And a fourth bonus point if you have them in order. That's four points. I can take the lead here. Top three. You could. Most use social media apps. I'm ready. Oh, my God. By monthly active users. Sorry. I'll give you a fifth point if you name all of them. Of the top five?

1:21:46Wait, you asked for top five. I asked for top three. One point for correct answer. Fifth point if you name all of them. All of what? Every social media network? Alright. We good? I think so. Flip them and read them. I wrote one, Facebook. Two, WhatsApp. Three, Instagram. yeah no in order very very very close oh wow but unfortunately you named well i'll let elis go first i put one facebook two whatsapp three tiktok damn so here's the catch there's a tie for third and adam you named both of the ones in a tie for third oh so i'm gonna I'm gonna give you credit for naming the top three, even though that was technically 3A and 3B.

1:22:43Okay. Wait, what? He only named three apps. He named three. Yeah, so I missed number two. You named number one, Facebook, 3 billion monthly active users. You named number three, WhatsApp, 2 billion monthly active users. And you named number three, Instagram, 2 billion monthly active users. What's number two? What you both missed is YouTube. Damn! Get out of here! You can't even send a DM on that website. Oh, no! No! Where's TikTok? TikTok, here, I'll pull up statistics. I mean, I feel like we all love the numbers. TikTok is right behind Instagram. 1.6. Oh, so, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

1:23:26So you have to convince me YouTube's not social media. You can't send a DM. Marquez, Marquez, Marquez. How many followers, how many subscribers do you have on YouTube? Almost 19 million. Correct. How much engagement do you get when you make a community post? Depends, but 1 % Doesn't sound like a social media site to me How many followers do you have on Twitter And how much engagement do you get when you post to them? It depends on the post But I've Well, hold on, let's go to my Twitter now Damn I've gone viral Sure, same

1:24:06that was good that was good fun like obviously facebook's huge youtube second whatsapp and instagram are both owned by meta as well then you have tiktok and then you have a bunch of messaging apps wechat facebook messenger telegram duyen is the one from china snapchat x is on there qq is on there pinterest is on yeah i was a little nervous if we were gonna include messaging apps on this list. So I'm glad that was a good call. If you go actually into YouTube analytics and you sort external video traffic by social media websites, often the number one driving external website to an MKBHD video is people messaging each other on WhatsApp.

1:24:43Interesting. They send the videos to each other and that gets tracked by YouTube. Which now has bulleted lists and numbered lists and format of text. So there you go. Man, I don't think YouTube is a freaking social media. I also don't think the messaging apps feel like social media either but that's also true weird kind of thing yeah also seeing twitter getting dumped on by snapchat is really funny to me for some reason people still use snapchat people still use twitter i do not as many no i love twitter still some of the some of the ratios are crazy started we're diving off the deep end but like would you have thought like tiktok's huge right yeah would you have thought that i don't know telegram is half of the size of tiktok that seems gigantic no but i also wouldn't consider it a social media app would you have thought whatsapp is 50 percent more people than tiktok yes that one checks out tiktok's global now so is whatsapp isn't it well tiktok's not in china no yeah it is they just have a different version no it's called do you in China.

1:25:49Dooyan is separate. If I include it, it's number two. Right. But it's separate from TikTok because TikTok proper is the one that's not in China. I think Dooyan has lots of rules and restrictions that are on TikTok. But would you have thought that Twitter Twitter, which is very unpopular and less than Snapchat, is also a third of TikTok? Damn. That's pretty huge. I wouldn't have thought of that. yeah would you have thought that pinterest is 75 of twitter oh i'm sorry what's twitter i would have assumed pinterest is bigger than twitter yeah that's what i would know i'm still people love pinterest bro pinterest is crazy single celebrity on pinterest i'm not on pinterest so i can't but i guarantee you like when if paltrow has like a crazy pop in pinterest or something like that when when pinterest used to be big i remember it just being the one social media site I could never understand.

1:26:47I don't know why. And it wasn't from lack of trying. I tried on that website a bunch of times and I just don't know why I couldn't figure it out. Yeah. Well, I still can't believe that there are 800 million Redditors. When they say... Monthly. ...Le Reddit Army, they are not kidding. And Reddit doesn't get listed as a social media site by Satista. So I can include that from Reddit's own numbers. Why is YouTube a social media site and Reddit... I'm done. I'm done. Waveform is produced by Marques Brownlee and Andrew Manganielli. Great job, guys. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and our intro-outro music is by Vane.

1:27:26So... Thanks.

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