What Caused the Largest IT Outage Ever?

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0:49CrowdStrike did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The gift that never gave The gift that only takes away

1:02What is up people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And this week, we've got a whole bunch. I mean, you probably are aware of the whole CrowdStrike, Blue Screen of Death, Global IT Apocalypse, Y2K situation that happened. We're going to talk about that a little bit. But then some other stuff. We've got Tesla Roadster maybe finishing production. We've got Apple Folding Phone Rumors and a gaming keyboard that's basically cheating is what the doc says. I don't know what that is. I'll try to explain that later.

1:34Yeah. So, yeah, we can just jump right in. But first, welcome to the Fediverse, Marquez. Why am I saying that? I'm the last person you should say. Are you on the Fediverse? No. See? But you are. I am. Andrew's next. And all I took is significant bullying. Yeah, you were bullied by basically everyone else in this room. Yeah. For a while. Yeah, I hit the button. I mean, all that really means is I went in my Threads account in the settings, and then I checked the box that says, like, Fedderize? Federize? Federate. Federate my account. And it's, so now it shows up on every server and people from all sorts of servers, Mastodon, all 12 of them are interacting heavily.

2:15Hey, look, we got to start somewhere. With my Threads account. The social web is important. When I get a notification now from the Threads app, they are separated into Threads notifications and then Fediverse notifications. Yeah. So it'll say, David said this reply. Andrew said this reply. and three Fediverse users liked your post. Yeah. And I can't reply to anything from the Fediverse from the Threads app. Eventually. But it's there. It sounds like they got to clean up notifications on that, which is probably based on which app you're using. But they're also moving fairly slowly and just like building out Fediverse integration into Threads, but it's supposed to theoretically maybe possibly be done by the end of the year, maybe possibly.

2:55So speaking of... Yeah, no, I was gonna... You know. Too easy, sorry. Oh, that's a pretty good one. Yeah. which if you want to do it you can't send it well speaking of things that maybe are possibly coming soon maybe possibly maybe and i've been rolling out extremely slowly extremely unlikely to be soon but could be because they're working on it i think maybe maybe we don't know unclear allegedly yeah apparently elon musk mentioned on a tesla earnings call recently that the Tesla Roadster will be going into production in 2026. Oh, yeah. Because they've completed most of the engineering on it. The car in 2017, they've completed most of the engineering on it.

3:42I'm pretty sure I could design a car in seven years. Yeah. I know nothing about it. There are whole companies that have designed a car, stole a bunch of money, and folded in the time that this hasn't come out. Well, they designed a car, stole a bunch of money, and haven't folded. That's a fact. Because they also shipped other cars. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. This has clearly been what the messaging has been the whole time is this is the cherry on top. It's the dessert. It's not a priority. We're prioritizing these things that are way more important, like robo-taxis. Yeah. Tesla bot. October, theoretically.

4:20Yeah. I mean, Model 3 and Model Y are the most obvious priorities for that company and they're ramping up cybertruck production as we speak so yeah all those things cut the line and roadster has been on the back burner i would argue surface laptop review just just keeps getting cut in line you know by other things i think they nailed the messaging that the tesla roadster is last on their priority heard you loud and clear tesla Jerry on top. Yeah. It should be maybe a little more prioritized considering people gave them$250 ,000. There's low priority and there's no priority. I think we're creeping towards no priority.

5:01Yeah. Yeah, like they could announce on their card tomorrow and it would take priority. Yeah. I mean, Elon also just says things all the time. That's really the main thing. That's really the main thing. This is an article because everything he says on those earnings calls gets a write-up of an article. So this is one of the things he said. And now it's an article and it's a headline and it's, hey, could it come out in 2026? I saw this headline and I literally sighed and kept scrolling. Like, I'll believe it when I see it. Your car will make money for you by 2017, Marquez. Allegedly. It'll drive itself across the country too, huh?

5:34By 2017, Marquez. I feel like at best, what these articles do is just remind you how much people have put down as a deposit already. Yeah. And be like, oh, shit. I feel really bad. I'm missing that money right now. Yeah. Because if you had put it in stock, you would be wealthy. Oh, yeah. Or if you just had it, you would have$50 ,000. There's also a better car that's come out in the meantime. So, yeah, that's what I put down here. I was wondering if you would consider it better. Well, we don't know anything about the actual Roadsters. I tried to throw specs down of what the Roadster is supposed to have and then compared it to the Lucid Air Sapphire, which has come out, which you've said is a wild car, right?

6:16it's an incredible car yeah if you want to go just by the actual specs that tesla has published and just give them the benefit of the doubt and say that that's what the specs will actually be then uh they're very competitive and you should just get the air sapphire today because it's it's just the same car without this tesla supercharger network right are they also moving to nacs later yeah aren't they moving to nacs uh so i don't know the specifics of if you when you'll be able to buy a Sapphire with the NACS port on it versus adapters. I don't know that yet. It'll probably happen before the Roadster comes out.

6:51I hope so. I think what we do know is the Gravity is supposed to have... Actually, no. I can't remember. I did a video on the Gravity, but I think it also had the CCS port. Any cars coming out in 2025 are supposed to have NACS, right? That seems like when we're starting to get the physical ports inside of cars. yeah and then this year is the adapters or is it next year's the adapt we're getting adapters now like the rivians have adapters right now yeah but either way so zero to 60 under two seconds they're both crazy fast the top speed being over 200 miles an hour for both of them it's supposed to be over 250 for the roadster yeah okay yeah um the price also 250k for the founders series roadster 250k for the lucid air sapphire i didn't realize that was and the the weird thing that we don't know if they're going to keep because they keep saying they're making the car better but they also said at launch 200 kilowatt hour battery and 620 mile range uh that's insane that's just a lot of weight if you try to do that with today's battery tech that would be extremely heavy so i kind of doubt that they're going to nail those specs but hey benefit of the doubt let's say they do they finished the engineering it's done well almost oh my my bad the thing that also keeps being said by people like franz and other people at tesla is that this car will be better in every way than what they originally announced so we keep going i hope so yeah well no the specs that they announced are world beater like the crazy not anymore the speed is yeah zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds a nine second quarter mile and 620 miles of range is like okay if those are the specs that would be the best electric car you can buy today but they say it's going to be better in every way from what they originally announced i mean how maybe maybe they basically elon just said you need to make all the specs at least this good and the engineering team was like the technology is literally not there yet so we have to wait until the tech is there that's why it took seven years but now yeah now they're saying it's better and the tech is ready and the engineering is almost done.

9:05We'll see. I feel like one thing that Tesla would have over Lucid, but I would also argue isn't that relevant here, is full self-driving. I'm sure their automated driving is better than Lucid. But if you're buying one of these cars to just be an absolute monster, I feel like you enjoy driving and don't care about that quite as much. Also, full self-driving is terrifying still. And I wouldn't put my$250 ,000 car in the potential for an insaneer. Now what would it be? 265 ,000 with full self-driving? I'm assuming this does not include full self-driving. No, it does. Oh, it does. The 100 Series includes everything.

9:43Man, they're just really throwing your phone here. They're so thoughtful. Value. Holy crap. Yeah, I don't know. I just want, if you wind up getting this car ever, can you make the license plate 2017 LOL? That's a solid one. That would be pretty good. I think that would be so, it's the exact amount of letters, I think. Yeah, it is. Seven. do we think this comes out in 2026 2026 yeah what it was same thing with cybertruck 50 50 production line vehicles i think so yeah i think it's possible i'm going no you think it's gonna be 10 years man just hit that double digits baby it looks way cooler no i don't know i'll just say i'll just say no just because history can i actually kind of say about another car that is going through a similar thing sure this is very niche just like the roaster the lord the koenig seg gemera yeah i've heard of koenig seg so koenig segs makes like a bunch of extremely expensive but also really really high performance cars and years ago they announced a two-row like super family sedan type thing and they had this crazy spec of like a crazy zero to 60 super fast but the other thing i did was they announced two different uh powertrains for it they said there's going to be a hybrid i don't remember the exact details but it was like a tiny three cylinder with electrical assist so it would be super efficient and get great gas mileage but also be super powerful this like crazy wonder motor they were going to build okay and then also they would offer like an eight cylinder with a huge engine that has even more performance and And apparently nobody bought the three-cylinder one.

11:27Almost nobody. A few people did, and they just decided to cancel that one and shift everyone to the eight-cylinder one, which they're also still not making yet, but at least they can just focus on one SKU. How much is the down? Like how much you have to pay for it? How much does it cost? Oh, I've known it. It's probably a trillion and a half dollars. How do this many people have this much money? Well, they don't. Oh. Not anymore. What, would like a hundred of these be made? That's a lot of people. This feels like not that far off. I'm asking this as a question. I'm not saying it's similar to the Rivera, like in terms of low numbers of production.

12:01Low volume, yeah. Yeah, super low volume. Super low volume, but just another one of those things. I just, I don't know how many, I want to know how many people actually have a Roadster pre-order still to this day. Yeah, if you, you can get a refund on your deposit, right? I don't think so. Have you never checked that? I thought the roadster was non-refundable. Yeah, it's... The deposit? Yeah, it's an order fee. It's not a deposit. It's an order fee. Yeah, I believe that's... Good. Oh, it was like wire transfer. This is sounding like the Escobar floor. Are you still getting another one because of the...

12:36Well, that was the thing. It was like there's a free one from the referral program. Yeah. Are you still getting that one? I don't know. No one knows. That's another completely open-ended question that nobody knows. Oh, my gosh. I keep forgetting about that. Yeah. No, apparently it's refundable. I'm looking it up right now it's refundable as long as a purchase agreement hasn't been entered yet which there is also no purchase agreement yet so so that money's just been sitting with us yeah they put that in an index fund and just made a lot of money yeah well we should talk about the whole y2k thing the elephant in the room crowd strike there's an elephant in here that's the noise that elephant makes um yeah so i think casey newton had a very funny tweet about this when the whole thing first started happening well it wasn't a tweet it was a threads post and he said i think he said like a sad day for me is i unfortunately need to learn what crowd strikes um and that kind of describes our last week yeah i feel like so a lot of people asked us this obviously happened on a Friday after the pod was released already and everyone was like can you please talk about CrowdStrike but we released the pod already so it was an insanely worldwide outage of Microsoft computers because of this program or company called CrowdStrike and a program they have called Falcon and I knew almost nothing about it so a lot of the explanation here is going to be research that we've done and videos that we've watched and i will include some great sources that really know what they're talking about yeah but this is extremely confusing i haven't researched this at all okay but i remember what i saw happen yeah yeah let's let's describe what happened yeah like we i we woke up and you log in and you just see that like tons and tons of businesses and major compute things are just not working like you know how you walk into chipotle and they're like our systems are down today sorry you're like no that's too bad it was that for everyone at once everywhere everywhere all at once everything so it turned out to be not just like businesses but major transit centers airports 911 call centers like everything that relies a shocking amount of things rely on this specific setup and these programs that all had this outage at the same time yes so it was kind of just like a rolling cascading set of stories of oh by the way these seven states you can't call 9-1-1 right now because that's broken right oh by the way these 12 airports like every flight in the u.s is grounded at the same time because they all rely on this delta had over 5 000 canceled flights because of this damn which is crazy it was 8.5 million computers affected worldwide um people were calling this essentially what y2k was supposed to be yeah i hope everyone remembers y2k uh if not that's all you can look that up yourself but uh so this outage you're talking about was physically these computers were in the blue the windows blue screen of death like if you walked into an airport which andrew is wearing the same yeah so i think accidentally should temporarily superimpose the bsod on his shirt um but like if you were to walk into an airport most of the screens were just the windows blue screen that annoying smiley face that's like system recovery yeah um and just not working um we actually tim's flight got canceled because of it somehow my mom flew in the night before and missed all of this so very lucky but a lot tons of flights completely canceled we all know what happens when airports get backed up that was pure chaos for the weekend um but if we want to go a little deeper into oh wait actually the funniest outage though was there was a photo on the pit wall of a formula one race on free practice on friday saw that the mercedes team with their computers down i don't think it was photoshopped it's so perfect that i have to be wary of it but one of microsoft or mercedes biggest sponsors for their f1 team is crowd strike so there's a guy in a shirt that says mercedes and crowd strike on the back and like a bunch of screens that were just blue screen oh man because of crowd strike yeah so that was very funny it looked like a meme template but i apparently that actually happened i saw multiple angles so it makes me think it was real yeah but i'm not 100 sure um okay should we attempt yeah to explain it we should preface this with there's this uh youtube channel called dave's garage um from this retired software engineer uh from microsoft who does a very good job at explaining a lot of these things.

17:18He has now made, as of time of recording, two videos about this because there was the original outage in which he was very quick to make a video explaining everything. When you watch the video, unless you are a computer, like a software engineer, it's still very confusing. Just prefacing that. My notes are based on watching the whole thing through once, going through and pausing it to write notes and watching one more time. And I probably understand 30 % of what it is. It's very confusing. Okay. I mean, we can try. I mean, we're also summarizing, like, we don't have to break it down in detail.

17:50We can link this video for people who want to watch that. But what's the TLDR of, like, what happened? And honestly, my questions are, like, okay, it was an accident, so is it going to happen again? Or is that a tiny thing that hopefully never happens again? Yeah. So should I do this? Or do you want to do this? It's up to you. Go for it. And if I try and think of, I'll interrupt. Yeah, if I say something wrong. Okay. I can't promise that. So, yeah, neither can I. I'm doing my best. Okay, so CrowdStrike is a security software that runs on a lot of Microsoft Windows machines. It is software that is made to sort of intersect potential threats to the system very quickly.

18:32Intercept, sorry. What did I say? Intersect. Oh, intercept, yes. intercepts a lot of novel threats to the system very quickly because cybersecurity is a category that's just grown like extremely rapidly in the last like 10 years because all of these crazy threats are just getting insane so this sits on a lot of windows computers in order to basically patch all of these potential vulnerabilities it needs special access to the kernel on windows the kernel is something that has like OS level permissions and because that is such a safe space that okay Zuri's like uh huh yeah I got you because that is something that is such an important part of the system most things do not have kernel access and if anything goes wrong at the kernel level it will just blue screen of death because there is the potential for like insane vulnerabilities if it's like, oh my god, we detected an error at the kernel.

19:37This could be an attack of some sort. So as a precaution, it just crashes the system and doesn't let you do anything. I think Windows essentially, the blue screen is its fail-safe protection of something really bad was about to happen, or we're not sure if something really bad was about to happen. We should blue screen this. And I also just want to throw in there, CrowdStrike's the company. Falcon is the program that this ran from, which was on all of these computers. Which was on apparently more than 300 of the top 500 companies in the world's computers. Very popular. Yeah. So, CrowdStrike had pushed an update to Falcon that had this bug in it.

20:16And the bug was basically pointing to a piece of memory that didn't have anything in it. And that caused all of the systems to blue screen. The funny thing about this is that they had validation software that validates that the code that they are about to push doesn't have any problems. But there was a bug in the validation software as well. You hate to see it. It was like a multi-level problem. So there was a bug in the validation software. A bug in the bug catcher. I know. A bug in the bug catcher that didn't catch the bug. And yeah, there's a lot of memes about this that are quite funny that are just like, don't push to production on a Friday.

20:54my favorites were like first day at the office just push some code that was so funny taking the weekend off one thing that's a little strange here and potentially why this problem made it all the way through is generally in order to create things at a kernel level microsoft has something called whql certification where if you're creating something for essentially it's something if you're creating something at the kernel level, Microsoft will test it and certify it to make sure that it has no issues. So Falcon is WHQL certified, but I believe the way they update it sometimes to get past that or to not have it go through the lengthy process of certification through Microsoft in order they want to be ahead of threats coming in.

21:42So sometimes they can't wait for that. they essentially i believe had a driver pack that the already certified software was pulling from and in that situation that's how they can push it in without getting the certification it's just now it's pointing to a new set because the driver pack has been certified the the program's been certified and they can update the data that's inside the driver pack without the full certification because it's still the same program push without the full certification because of that they push something into an already certified program that it's now that program was already leading to i see adam's scratching his chin does that sound wrong no i'm just curious what's the point of the certification then well because microsoft wants to certify anything anything that can access the kernel and it's sort of like yeah you only need to certify it once the point of the certifier you want so that's that that's the big question mark that i don't know the answer to is like did is it okay for companies to do this like did they get the okay from microsoft to do this because they are a company that needs to catch novel threats as fast as possible?

22:43Or were they doing this without Microsoft's write-off? I had understood based on the official CrowdStrike statement, which I assumed is buried in legalese, but they wanted everyone to know that channel was it 291? Yeah. 293? I forget. Whichever, like, actual channel in the System32 folder it was is not actually a kernel driver and not actually operating at the kernel level, which is why they were able to push the update. But what it does do is it informs the Falcon software, which is operating at a kernel level, how to do it. So I think that is how they were able to get around Microsoft. They weren't modifying code that runs at a kernel level.

23:24They were modifying code that is an instruction set for the Falcon sensor that runs at the kernel level. So that's what was updated without certification. But the program that's certified ran that or pointed to it. and because of that now that kernel program is seeing something incorrect. Exactly. The question though is like, why should that be allowed? Because you're basically modifying the program without getting a sign off by Microsoft. I understand this is like novel threat detection and you need to do this stuff quickly. So the big question is, does Microsoft allow this kind of stuff or were they just doing it?

23:59Well, they did that time. I mean... I guess so it feels like it's kind of the perfect storm of like it was a Friday. it got pushed really quick there was a bug in the bug catcher that didn't catch the bug that was pointing to this thing and so everything just went to crap really fast and to a large number of people Also testing and production seems crazy but I don't know It's also what's so big about it is because Microsoft systems are so prominent across the world Things like this have happened with CrowdStrike before on Linux software multiple times in different types of builds and different updates and it's crashed them but this just happened to be the big one yeah with 8.5 million computers worldwide that hit and what was really messed up about this entire thing or not messed up is like how hard it is to fix it because in order to the fix was booting the physical computer into safe mode deleting the specific file and then rebooting or there was something i saw about like rebooting a system 15 times somehow helped it.

25:04I don't know. Maybe it switched it back to a... Have you tried trying it off? Have you tried again and again? Take the battery out for 30 seconds. Essentially imagine 8.5 million computers that essentially have to be rebooted in safe mode. That's tough. There were a lot of IT engineers that were called in on the weekend. Shout out. If you're listening, you're the hero. Yeah. You really are the hero. Yeah. Guys, it's okay because CrowdStrike gave everyone a$10. What? No way. Uber Eats gift card. No, as an apology. You have to be kidding. Are you serious? Who's everyone? Tech Crunch articles. Some of their partners.

25:37No way. $10? That's the biggest part of this story. Wait, is that true, Adam? Thanks, IT guy who just reset 10 ,000 computers. Enjoy. What can$10 get you on Uber Eats? Is that even a whole McDonald's meal with the charge? That's the delivery fee. That's like the tip in the delivery fee. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. that's great so what was funny is i i had a frisbee game during the weekend and like sometimes there's people in the stands and i'll say hi to them after the game and inevitably there's like one or two people who are like oh have you heard about this like gadget or this story or whatever and the only thing anybody asked me about that day was did you hear about those windows computers it's like they're all blue screening everywhere i was like yeah i did see that i think what's unfortunate is like the way that this turned into an issue or the way it reset itself in recovery is such a microsoft forward thing like everyone knows blue screen of death as a microsoft thing so it almost it looks like solely a microsoft issue yeah the uh dave's garage in his second video brought up some points on how like it's this is crowdstrike's fault but like is it kind of microsoft's fault for letting people do this should they have a different way of it being able to he explains it so much better than any of us could but if you're looking for like what like someone who knows what they're talking about thought on this yeah and how like microsoft could be partially to blame on this i highly recommend that video it's a lot of information it's a lot of information he's fantastic watch it three times and then do not watch it three times i probably have to watch it at half speed in order to actually yeah understand what's this is the one thing i cannot watch it to speed it makes a it makes a lot of sense why ios updates and a lot of apple updates come in waves yeah because if you know if someone's phone gets bricked at least they can like pull the plug before well also you just don't test in production you know were they really testing like or were they well it's not testing it the testing in production basically just means pushing without testing but i thought but it sounds like the bug was in the testing aspect yeah because they ran it through the the bug detection software oh that's fair so like as far as they knew yeah tested well in let i mean yeah i don't know the details but it like it's like did the bug detection software say that it had a bug that wasn't testing it or did it say it was okay and it was validated i don't know who knows um but yeah i mean there's there's always a lot of drama around ios updates or app updates on the iphone not getting approved by apple for one reason or the other usually it's for reasons that don't make any sense and then they eventually approve it anyway um but this is one that you definitely need to make sure everything is chill before you push that update button yeah so and it's funny that no one had to like there's that joke about how windows always wants to update itself at the most like at the worst possible time facts and no one even wanted had to update their windows computers for this to get pushed it was like a server side update that kind of just completely destroyed a bunch of people's computers.

28:44It's crazy how much of the world just runs on Microsoft computers. You know what the funniest part about all of it was Southwest didn't go down because they're running Windows like 3.1 which is like a 1993 software and then I think they tweeted actually because all their stuff went down a while ago because of their weird stuff so now they were like who's winning now still working. There was a good post from somebody where an airline in India was literally ticketing people by hand. They were just writing the boarding passes by hand. Drawing QR codes out. Well, another place that runs a lot of really old Windows systems is hospitals.

29:24There was this interesting thing where... The people at the front desk who were using up-to-date Windows were like, we can't book appointments, we can't process payments, but the surgical robots that are running on 20, 25 five-year-old windows because why would you ever need to update it? They were fine. Oh, good. That is our very base level explanation of it. There's lots of great info out there, but highly suggest Dave's Garage and there's a bunch of other great stuff out there as well. Yeah. And it made for a fun Friday. Yeah. As long as you weren't affected by it. For some. For some. Yeah.

29:57Okay, we should take a break. We got to talk about a whole bunch more stuff, including some more phones. But before we take that break, let's do trivia.

30:08so after the break we're going to talk about a certain company allegedly maybe getting into the foldable market oh yeah but before then a foldable question okay oh folding ideas in 2013 at mobile world congress 2013 2013 okay one year the same year that her came out or maybe one year before the same year don't remember what year 2013 same year as her who a company a tech company a blank tech company gave a demonstration showing off folding oled screens what company was it 20 there are two options here 13 that's what you think that's true I do remember maybe it's not true I wonder if this is the MWC that I went to 2013 sounds like around I've only gone to one MWC I think it was later when did the Vive come out because there was a trivia question I was looking at Barcelona in my Google Photos it wasn't MWC it was CES that's CES in January of 2013 folding OLEDs who did it?

31:33Who done it? Well I was at CES but I was at MWC 2015 I just found. There are three options. Well we'll think about it. Answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back.

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32:31And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. You can turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash waveform. So just go to shopify.com slash waveform, shopify.com slash waveform. All right, welcome back. So today, actually, not today, but the day this gets released is the opening ceremony for the Olympics. Have you heard about that? First time? Pretty big deal. It's pretty cool, actually.

33:12It's pretty cool. I'm excited to watch it. But did you see the gifts that were given out to a bunch of the athletes from Samsung? I heard, yeah. Yeah, Samsung always gives out a bunch of phones. I didn't know they always did. They do. For a while, yeah. There are two TikToks I found that were pretty funny, and I want to quickly talk about them. One I thought was really funny. It's from a British rowing athlete, Imogen Grant, I believe her name is. She may have made the greatest phone upgrade in history. she has the Tokyo Samsung Galaxy S21 from the Tokyo Olympics and she has saved it until she upgraded this year to the Flip 6 from the Paris Olympics she was daily driving the last Olympics phone yeah her phone upgrade was because she was an Olympian twice that's a flex it was it's the coolest flex her screen is like so messed up it's literally like missing pixels completely and she says in there she's like I held on to this and made it survive because all I wanted to do was upgraded.

34:14What if she came and Samsung decided not to do it? Or just give the ring instead or something? That would be hilarious. Wouldn't that be awesome? Yeah. So I just think that's like one of the cool thing and you know, there's always people out there asking us, hey, I want to start a channel. How do I get free tech to review? Just become an Olympian. Yeah, just qualify for the Olympics and you should be set. I don't actually know if like, does every Olympian get a phone? I don't know how that works. It feels like that's what happened. How many Olympians are there? There are a lot. A lot. thousands of Olympians.

34:44I can't say for sure all of them do, but the other TikTok I wanted to talk about is from the New Zealand swim team, and this is from a British rower, so it seems like that's a pretty big distance. Both water sport. It would be really funny if Samsung's like, we only give phones to English-speaking water sport Olympians. Yeah, basketball players, sorry about that. Track and field athletes, nah, only if you're water elite. People chase, you'll get a phone. that counts as a swimming base yeah there's a little water on the track um i just thought that was a really funny tiktok i'll also post both of these in the show notes and by me i mean adam will do it but um there's another one of the new zealand swimming team that i just thought was funny because it's a really good representation to me of how like average people view tech yeah and it's weird calling olympians average people because they're anything but average people but in our tech world they are average also the new zealand swim team is like really young they're definitely young like 19 or something it's really fun watching them open it they're they're like bro it's built like an iphone whoa it flips in half what and they say specifically at the end apple needs to catch up with this stuff like apple needs to make a folding phone but they're they're super impressed by it they've never i don't think i've seen a folding smartphone they love the screen on the back they also all do the like asmr screen peel yeah in the unboxing it's funny it's pretty sweet and samsung also has a like special welcome message on the first boot yeah to olympians funny part is it boots so fast none of them could read the entire thing tried to read it on camera just went away to your olympians and paralympians oh it's gone pretty much is how they um yeah but it's a sweet looking phone it's gold it has like the olympic rings on the back it's a galaxy z flip six yes by the way sorry if i did not mention that and it comes with a very cool case too that has like this rainbow on this is pretty sick yeah um this is like the best marketing that samsung could possibly do literally to get a bunch of people to like just organically say man apple needs to catch up to this yeah congrats samsung marketing team normally you have to pay people to like do this kind of stuff and just giving them to all the olympians and have them just naturally post about it is crazy great marketing yeah it's like it's right in the fuzzy gray area between paid and earned media because because they did have to give them all phones yeah for free which is like they can afford to do that pretty easily yeah and then once you give them all custom design phones that you spent extra money customizing for them then they'll all talk about your i'm assuming in order to even give them those phones samsung is a gigantic sponsor of the olympics right i assume so in some way i'm assuming so these athletes aren't individually getting paid by samsung but there's obviously some money exchange but i would argue the olympians saying it is organically because none of them i'm assuming signed a contract saying i need to talk about this they're just olympians all trying to get show off the olympic village every video right now is a samsung flip or a cardboard bed from olympians right oh because you know what happens they all go to the openings this is what's going to happen because this didn't at tokyo they all go to the opening ceremonies and they're all holding up the phone like recording things and then samsung takes those clips and they're like oh see look lebron james uses a z flip and that's that's that's how they get you right yeah yeah also i wish that iphones did not have dominance in the united states like they do because this would only work in other countries you know if samsung if we had a major event of some kind you mean like the world cup in 2026 was that in america well it's going to be in america it's 2026 it hasn't i'm just saying like if there was like i don't know some major sports event only the united people in the united states played for and samsung was like i'm giving you all phones everyone be like i'm not switching off my iphone but every other country is like hell yeah i just need whatsapp you know yeah i'm sure they could pay enough money to make sure all the people in the u.s only use that phone for a day for a day yeah yeah which is all they need fair enough fair enough speaking of folding phones speaking of apple needing to catch up with this stuff Yeah.

38:54Apple is allegedly catching up with this stuff. So there was a big leak recently that Apple is actually potentially allegedly going to be producing a foldable iPhone in 2026. Maybe. Possibly. Ellis looks very frustrated. No, the opposite. Excited. Excited. I want to know how many things we've said in this podcast between the alleged Roadster and the alleged folding iPhone that have been said exactly the same in how many episodes of WayVac. This is just kind of the state of tech journalism in 2024. Everything is just real, and then it's not real, and then it's real again. You're welcome. Yeah, obviously we've heard about folding iPhones for millennia at this point, but apparently, allegedly, there are suppliers in different parts of Asia that are actually getting orders for parts for a folding iPhone.