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Waveform Podcast Episode Summary: WTF Happened in 2025 - Waveform Rewind
Podcast Information
- Title: Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast
- Hosts: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, David Imel
- Description: A tech podcast that covers the latest gadgets, technology, and industry trends with insights from seasoned tech reviewers.
- Episode: Last regularly scheduled episode of the year.
Episode Overview In this episode, the hosts dive into a variety of tech topics, including:
- Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold: Marques shares his hands-on experience with the new foldable smartphone.
- Instagram's New App: Discussion on a new Instagram app and its implications.
- Electric Vehicles (EVs): Coverage of the discontinuation of the Ford F-150 Lightning and a recap of Rivian's Autonomy day.
- Predictions Recap: The hosts reflect on their predictions from the previous year, highlighting their successes and failures.
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Key Topics Discussed
- Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold
- Initial Impressions: Marques initially viewed it with skepticism but found it surprisingly functional.
- Design:
- Features a full 10-inch tablet-sized screen when opened.
- Includes high specifications (e.g., Snapdragon 8 Elite, 512GB storage).
- User Experience:
- Suitable for multitasking with apps side by side.
- Users can engage with content comfortably without feeling cramped.
- Concerns: Visible creases and hinge design could affect long-term usability.
- New Instagram App
- Platform Introduction: A new app is launched specifically for Amazon Fire TV.
- Functionality: Aimed at enabling users to scroll through reels on a larger screen, which may enhance social viewing experiences.
- Electric Vehicle Developments
- Ford F-150 Lightning:
- Discontinued due to disappointing sales.
- Shift towards hybrids, potentially using innovative fueling solutions.
- Rivian's Autonomy Day:
- Discussion on autonomous vehicle technology.
- Introduction of their new Gen 3 platform with advanced self-driving capabilities.
- Predictions Recap
- Reflection on Previous Predictions:
- Discrepancies between what the hosts anticipated versus actual developments in tech.
- Highlights include successful and failed forecasts related to various gadgets and technology trends.
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Highlights and Key Takeaways
- Hands-on Experience: Marques’ firsthand experience with the Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold shifts the perspective on foldable phones, indicating a potential pivot in consumer acceptance.
- Social Media Evolution: The integration of short-form video on platforms like Instagram reflects changing consumption habits, indicating a shift in how content is consumed socially.
- EV Market Changes: The discontinuation of the Ford F-150 Lightning signals a critical moment in the EV market, emphasizing consumer demand and profitability concerns.
- The Importance of Predictions: Reflecting on past predictions serves as a reminder of the rapid changes in tech and the need for agility in forecasting.
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Conclusion The hosts wrap up the episode with a mix of humor and insights, appreciating the humor in their past predictions while looking forward to what the next year in tech will bring. They encourage listeners to stay tuned for a bonus episode, reinforcing the podcast's commitment to keeping its audience engaged with tech discussions.
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Additional Information
- Merchandise: Available for purchase [here](https://shop.mkbhd.com).
- Links to Social Media:
- [Waveform Threads](https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast)
- [Waveform Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en)
- [Waveform TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast)
- Join the Community: [Discord](https://discord.gg/mkbhd)
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This comprehensive summary captures the essential discussions, insights, and predictions from the podcast episode, providing a detailed look into the evolving landscape of technology as discussed by the hosts.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Support for today's show comes from Darktrace. Darktrace is the cybersecurity defenders deserve and the one they need to defend beyond. Darktrace is AI cybersecurity that can stop novel threats before they become breaches across email, clouds, networks, and more. With the power to see across your entire attack surface, cyber defenders such as IT decision makers, CISOs, and cybersecurity professionals now have the ability to stop zero days before day zero. The world needs defenders. Defenders need Darktrace. Visit darktrace.com slash defenders for more information. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start?
0:36Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. We've all watched Hot Ones enough. I have not. everyone but David has watched Hot Ones enough that we should all notice the only Hot Ones episode I watched was the one where what's his name you better be careful David is right there Marquez has been on it twice I think I watched that one wait twice I watched one I didn't know you went on it again unbelievable I talked so much about you on that episode that's crazy he was like my good friend David there was a whole section where Sean is like I heard you're friends with David it it was you should totally watch it it was so good all right that's cool keep it up
1:37yo what's up people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez i'm andrew and i'm david and this week we've got a regularly scheduled i said else is gonna i haven't interrupted you that's right because and I'm wrong burgundy and I'm interrupting you because this episode is not like normal episodes do you guys know why this is a very special episode is it because it's the last one it is coincidentally the last episode of the year but that's not what I was going for last regularly scheduled of the year yeah but that's not what he means hit it rich oh no guys this episode is being taped at 5 p.m., which means this is the first ever episode of...
2:24Oh. Waveform After Dark. Waveform After Dark. Thank you, Rich. You can get the lights again. I was wondering why Rich is here. I was like, this is a long clip for you. That was it. Should we talk about why we're here at 5 p.m.? Yes, we should. That was a good transition. Okay, so today I got to finally get some hands-on time with this thing right here, which is the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold. This morning, we went into the city, got some info from Samsung on what it was about, and got to shoot some footage of it. And then we got back to the studio, and the one that I bought from Korea had also arrived the same day, and that is this one right here.
3:10So, how much did it cost you from Korea? Do you know how much it cost? So I'm going to get my invoice later. So I don't actually know, but I hear it's somewhere between$2 ,500 and$3 ,000. It's an expensive phone. But I, you know, I've watched other people's videos on it and I've seen photos of it and it looks like such a chunk. And I keep thinking, oh, it's kind of a gimmick, like whatever, Samsung's doing the tri-fold thing, but it's obviously not going to be reasonable to use. And then I picked it up and held it and I used it with the screen closed, which is basically the same as the Z Fold 7.
3:40And it's fine. and then I opened it and it's a whole tablet on the inside and I'm starting to think this is actually kind of a nice like a really nice phone this year it's obviously super expensive but I'm holding up to the camera for the video viewers this thing is a full diagonal 10 inch tablet on the inside and I like it more than I thought I would so we're gonna get rid of short form video now that we're gonna be able to have landscapes in our pockets no because like you You said this before. You don't have to do that. You can put three short form videos across it and play it like a slot machine.
4:15Wait, can you actually? It's literally short form slots. YouTube shorts. And if you get all three screens showing the same short, like it's a For You page, then you win. And you can't stop until that happens. Yeah, instead of it being like a seven, a cherry, like three or four things, it's millions of videos that you have to get lined up. So yeah, you can do three things side by side. If you get all three videos being the same, then Neil Moynihan has to step down and you become the CEO of YouTube. His name is Neil Moynihan. Not Moynihan Station. Sorry, Neil. I love Moynihan Station. That's beautiful.
4:52So there's a couple quirks about this. I'll go through. So the basic specs are actually kind of fine. They're just like a one-year-old flagship. Samsung is using the Snapdragon 8 Elite 4 Galaxy. So not 8 Elite Gen 5, but 8 Elite for Galaxy. The only spec is 512 gigs of storage and 16 gigs of RAM. So that's pretty sweet. The outside screen, like I said, is the exact same as Z Fold 7. Wait, real quick. Is there a 1TB version? I thought on the Samsung Press Mobile something. Maybe that's not coming to the US because I was told it's only 1 spec 512. There might be somewhere where you can get a 1TB version.
5:29Oh, okay. Even better. but yeah the outside screen the cover screen is just your classic 21 by what is it 21 by 9 I think it's a widescreen obviously 2600 nits 120 hertz why am I it's hard to talk I've been talking all day it's been a long day it's been a long day but then you open the phone oh on the back has the cameras same as the Z Fold 7 as well so 200 megapixel primary and then an ultra wide and a 3x telephoto so mid great okay yeah mid but then you open it and it's like it's a tablet. So dope. It's all the things. You can watch full screen videos. You can game. You can have apps side by side and they're not actually cramped.
6:09That's huge. Yeah. You can type on a full size keyboard. You have DeX all the time even without being connected to a monitor. You can also connect it to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and use that as a second display. Can I ask a stupid question? Go for it. What does DeX not on a monitor even mean? Because isn't the whole point of DeX that it goes on a monitor? It's just more computer-like, I guess. Yeah, yeah. But on the screen. Okay. Fair. No, that's a very valid question. Yeah, so it's like full-screen apps that give different... What's a computer? If you're in the Files app, it'll show the full tree structure, and then you can resize Windows, and you can keep them in certain areas.
6:46It's literally a desktop. Everything's computer. Everything's computer. I know. It's just an iPad. Well, it's a Samsung Galaxy Tab. Oh, wait, that's coming. I've got three windows open here, and then I go, you know what, I want to go to a new space. and do three more windows and then move back. I'm going to say something real quick. Those creases are pretty rough right now. Those are not good. So the creases are rough and it's kind of similar to the early generations of other phones with crease where when I'm looking at it and using it, the content is more than enough to distract me from the crease.
7:17But if I am analyzing the hardware, it's so obvious. The creases are two different sizes because they're two different hinge ratios because the left side is the inside fold and the outside folds around the inside folds. It's even bigger. So yeah, there is a lot going on with the hardware engineering, but I found that actually using the phone and just watching videos and like typing and emailing and all that stuff is really solid. Question. Yeah. Considering the square aspect ratio of a bifold is kind of lame for watching videos and doesn't really do anything for you in my humblest opinion. How much of a 16 by 9 video fits full screen on this?
7:57How many black borders? There's small black borders. So the whole thing wide open is 16 by 11. So it's pretty close to, like if you watch, I don't know if you can find a 16 by 9 YouTube video, but our videos are two by one and there's reasonable black bars, but it's way bigger than a slab. And if you go, yeah, 16 by 9 videos, you're even smaller black bars, top and bottom. So it's like, it's most of the display though, you'd say? Yeah, it's pretty nice. Apps that use the whole screen, like gaming or whatever. The split screen keyboard is literally, there's no keyboard on the middle panel. That's so funny.
8:32All Samsung's tablets do that too. So they just treat it like a tablet. It makes sense. It's just really jarring to see a whole panel with nothing in it. I do love the idea of like being on an airplane and being able to play like a PlayStation 2 game with a controller. Like, is that not awesome? Oh my God, that's sick. Is that not awesome? God of War? Yeah. I'm preemptively thinking about what the comments will be like we just published our video my hands on with it I think one common concern or question that I have is like alright I already have a tablet like why is this better than a tablet it's not it's just that it can fit in your pocket that's like the main like obviously if you already have a phone and a tablet this isn't for you but the person who wants to have a phone and a tablet but take it in their pocket with them this does that I mean you have to have a bag to carry a tablet with you basically and you don't with this.
9:21With a 10-inch screen, yeah. That is pretty amazing. So that's sweet. It has a cellular connection all the time, which is nice for a tablet. It's thinner probably than the tablet you're thinking of. But the other thing is, it's definitely a smaller battery than the tablet you're thinking of. Yeah. Most 10-inch tablets have like an 8 ,000 milliamp hour battery roughly. Even Samsung's like S10, Tab S10 has roughly 8 ,000 milliamp hour battery. This has a 5 ,600 milliamp hour battery. Is that YouTube's desktop site? No, that's actually, I'm trying to find a 16 by 9 video, so that's your iPhone 5S review.
9:51Is that a 16 by 9 video? I was guessing we switched to 2 by 1 when Brandon and Vin convinced us to in like 2018. That's pretty good and then you can enlarge it and then it's and that looks awesome. Looks pretty good. It's pretty I don't know that's definitely cutting a lot off the sides when it's full screen. It is when you full screen but yeah. What is the IP rating of this? 48. IP48 which is also the same as the Z Fold 7 so you can drop some water on it next to it around it. That's impressive. for Gen 1. A dust particle or like piece of sand being folded in not once but now twice. Probably bad.
10:27Probably don't get dust around it. I am concerned about that. That's going to be the longevity test for people that have this early. Yeah. I think this is fair to consider it a first gen product. Like it's a first gen tri-fold. So it's first gen something. I think I'll turn the rotation lock off. Rotation lock. Rotate. Rotation. I turn rotation lock off. I've said so many words today. Have you seen that trend that's been going around that's like it's on the TV and it goes rock, sock, rock, sock, box, sock, rock, sock. I feel like you could not do that right now. I'd be very bad at it right now.
10:59Mark, is I going to daily this? I've been thinking about it. You got to. I imported it from Korea, so I'm not exactly sure what the bands or situation is going to be looking like, but on this phone, I think I would like to daily it. I think I can get my eSIM in there and try it. Oh, it's not? Landscape Lock is not. Oh, wait. Yes, it was. Hold on. Oh. almost did it daily because we almost just lost it just dropped on the floor yeah out of products that we've like taken out the box and dropped on this podcast linus watch out all right cool yeah i'm i'm more of a fan than i expected to be i really think there's a big difference between the on-screen presence and the in-hand presence of this phone for sure which is so hard to convey in video because you're watching this on a screen so it's like it probably doesn't translate very well but you'll have to take my word for it.
11:45I can't wait till there's another Chinese version of this but it has better batteries and it's got like 12 ,000 million powers or something. Seems like that's in root. I mean are we talking about this later but isn't there some more steam for this iPhone fold this year? Yeah it's coming out next year. People think it's going to be like kind of a squat regular size phone and then it opens up to be wider than it is tall which makes sense because the whole idea with all these square folds is you don't really get a ton out of a lot of media situations is that a new leak that just came out i saw someone posting it but it looks rumors so poorly like i don't think it's rendered it felt i just like glazed so it like opens up into like an ipad mini like turned on its side basically kind of yeah i think i saw somebody did a mock-up of basically like imagine like the first gen pixel fold like that sort of passport size but then you open it and it's a wider screen and that makes it better for watching videos on the inside, which I could see that being a highlight, you know, of this phone.
12:44Okay, question for you guys about this. Fast forward 10 years. Are we using smart glasses or are we using phones like this that unfold into like a giant tablet? This. I mean, we'll have smart glasses as well. You said 10 years or five years? I say 10 years. Let's do 10 years. I think that not everyone is gonna, if you don't have a prescription, you'll use smart glasses as sunglasses if you do have a prescription people will start using smart glasses on the daily but i don't think it's going to replace their phone i think it's just going to be the meta ray-ban style you know it'll have a display it'll give you notifications but i don't know i probably won't wear it because i have perfect vision i think i think there's like a degree where like we're now that we we're hitting like max dopamine technology you know yeah we're finding that like outside of video games and vertical video like people don't really spend like that much time using tech so i think the value prop of a device that can't really do vertical video that well or game very well like i don't know if people are gonna wear no no smart glasses like i don't know i think though but i would argue smart glasses that's kind of the point of it is it's just it's there when you need it and because it's so convenient that it's there the times you do need it and you don't have to pull something out of your pocket or it's just like right there fun fact you can i ain't trying to waste time pulling out i don't even i use wireless charging i'm efficiency major right here wow you can doom scroll instagram reels on the meta yeah on the highway that's right yeah oh god that's one of their use cases yeah i just looked it up um we went from not having any foldables to having foldables the way we have them now in about eight years has it been that long like the z fold one is 2019 and we had foldables for maybe a year or two before that so like 2017 to 2025 and it's progressed so much that even this triple folding well the trifold is thinner than the z fold five wow it was that thick for that long like when it's Fold it up?
14:57When it's folded up, it is thinner than the Z Fold 5. Unfolded, it's thinner than the iPhone Air. We put it up to Brandon's phone. The panels are three different sizes. Are they all thinner than the Air? Well, you know, the phone is only as thin as its thickest point. Yeah, if you can't fit it through a slot. That is one of the interesting things about this phone is each one of these panels is a slightly different thickness. 3.9 millimeters on the left, 4.2 millimeters in the middle, 4.0 millimeters on the right to fit battery and USB type C and speakers and all the things happening in this phone.
15:33That's just how it is. But yeah, they're all thinner than the iPhone here. And then you fold it up and it's thinner than Z Fold 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I think I just realized a very small mistake we made in the video. I cut that out. I'm thinking the same thing. Because you said the middle panel for USB C, but it's the middle panel when it's folded. When it's unfolded, it's the right panel. Yep. Oh, God. I caught that and cut it out. I never would have thought of that. Things are a lot harder to describe when you have 3D space. Audio people are like, I don't understand. Well, yeah, audio people, when you're unfolding it, it kind of looks...
16:06I'm not doing that again. The phone's USB-C port is on the bottom when it is folded up, but because the bottom is actually the middle... The rightmost panel. Wait, never mind. It's the rightmost panel. It's the USB-C. Yes, the rightmost panel, which is the bottom when it's folded. What is... You ever bought like a fish from a fishmonger? It kind of unfolds like that. Like you lay it down and you go one and then two and then you got your fish. I believe you. I hate filet. Isn't there like, is it on Reddit or something when you like retire a phrase because it perfectly hits? Like you found the perfect description for that.
16:42I think we can retire fingerprint magnet with this phone because dear Lord, the amount of fingerprints on the surface area of this phone. It's crazy. You got to wear gloves. It's like this black and gray carbon fiber mimicking fiberglass composite. It's smooth-ish. And I think it makes sense in here because you have to make something smooth with a little bit of a bezel that you can then safely close the outside screen over. So no real texture. But yeah, very much a finger permac. Did you get the kickstand case with it? The case that comes with it is just a sort of a back spine and back cover case.
17:21so that's that's the Samsung case it also comes with a 45 watt charger in the box it's crazy throw you a little bone for$3 ,000 yeah yeah that wobble is crazy the wobble I just saw you put it down on a table I saw I mentioned in the video I got every time I mention it people are like what you put a case on okay so fine so you'll put a case on it'll be fine but this is one of the biggest wobblers of all time the case it comes with is thin enough it's still gonna wobble like this it wobbles a lot less I tried it I actually think that they thought about that when they made a case release they should bring back the bikini case for this the bikini case is actually it was kind of iconic it was iconic Ellis doesn't remember it search galaxy S8 bikini case was it S8?
18:03galaxy S8 can I hold it I for one am excited for you to test this so that I can decide whether or not I definitely will not spend$3 ,000 I did it wrong and it yelled at me oh I did want to see that it yells it vibrates at you it vibrates strongly can I see that I want to see so yeah can i break it is it bad i haven't it's bad if you break it nothing's really happy i mean if you try to like smush it it'll probably not be good it goes no you can do that you can do it the wrong way yelling at me no it does when the screen yeah ah stop okay yeah it doesn't like it doesn't like it it yells at you but otherwise yeah very intuitive well i'm excited to see whether or not you actually get value out of this this is what I have considered like the dream device for a very very long time and if I could have something that I could just carry a little bit a little keyboard with me and a little mouse with me and I could just write on Google all I want to do is write on Google Docs that's all I want to do without having to carry a laptop so if this can do that I'm very happy I just like that the light phone and this came out in the same year wow maximalist and minimalist I do maintain like the most fun I've ever had on a foldable is e-reading with one page on each side.
19:18And I don't know what that would be like. Because it looks like a real book. It feels like a real book. A real book couldn't even do this. Can this do three pages? Yeah. Yeah. Four dimensional book right here. Yeah. Okay. Great. So yeah, that was our, we have the Z Fold in house for real, for real on God underscore final dot MP4. Last week's episode, we titled the Galaxy Z Fold. the galaxy z trifold is here for real for real on god what are we supposed to title this week's episode underscore final dot mp4 yeah yeah yeah no i think yeah all right that title went hard last week also ctr was fantastic it wasn't really speaking of the things that you can do on the galaxy z trifold if there is if if there was this new social media app coming out that is supposed to replace Twitter, you could run it on one of the three screens.
20:16Was that a Segway? That's what I was trying to do. Oh. Yeah. C plus. Yeah. What? I expect that. Come on. It was all right. All right. Was Segway Wordle last night? Yeah. No, Swae. Swaeler. It was last night. I think it was Segway. It was either Segway or Suede. Segway, yeah. I think I guessed to Suede first. Well. Well, what is this social media? All right, let me tell you about this. Yeah. Okay, so a couple - Is it federated? No, it's not. And this is why I think it's a point. This is why I'm like, if you're going to make a social media app in the future, just stop non-federating them. Come on, guys.
20:50So what is it? Okay, so a couple weeks ago, this startup popped up called Operation Bluebird. And effectively, what they're trying to do is get the Twitter name back because they are making the claim that X abandoned the Twitter name when they switched everything to X, which I would, you know, agree with. I would disagree. Really? Dude. I think they very hastily changed some things like the URL and the logo to X, but for a long time, pieces of the UI in the settings still said Twitter. Correct, but that was them being like lazy. Yeah, I like agree with both of you. I think it is still everywhere and it's still almost considered Twitter for the most part.
21:32But I think the owners of Twitter - They said it's not Twitter anymore. And like they make fun of people for calling it Twitter still and like elon replied to you on x you said i'm still calling it twitter and elon said you won't yeah well is that that's got to be used in the litigation we're still calling it twitter today that's got to be used in litigation yeah anyway so last week they filed a petition to the u.s patent office to cancel x's ownership of the trademarks for twitter and tweet trademark yeah trademark uh because x had made it clear that they didn't have any intention to use the Twitter name anymore.
22:09Okay. Right? X has now sued them, which they didn't need to do. They could have just filed a motion to cancel the trademark cancellation. I'm sorry, what's X? You keep saying X. Okay, here's another problem. When I'm trying to Google something on the X platform, it's impossible. Because you just write X in Google after and nothing comes up. Twitter doesn't come up. Oh, you're trying to search Twitter and you're using like Google. Space X. Yeah, it doesn't do anything. It's impossible. Space X.com? Does that work? you could probably do a site search. SpaceX is a different company. Look what happened!
22:43It was bad. Anyway, they're suing trying to stop them from doing this. They're arguing that as of December 14th, more than 4 million users came to X by typing in twitter.com. I am one of them too. Everyone is all of them. This is so frustrating because I want to stick it to the man and call it Twitter, but I'm actually get on the platform. You want them to lose the... Yeah, I want them to get f***ed, and I'm helping them not do that. I mean, they were big about changing it to X, so, you know, commit. You know? This is such a weird thing, because like, if you, even if you, like, if I own a trademark, or whatever, and I stop using it, yeah, that doesn't mean people immediately sue me to cancel my ownership of it.
23:27If you have no intention to use it in the future, then they can file to cancel your ownership interesting so it's up to them to determine if i intend to use it in the future yeah it's like the guy who got lambo.com yeah actually that's actually a lot like that yes how long has it been called x i think since 2021 right no no it was after i started working here 2022 i think it was 2023 2023 yeah oh wow okay well anyway uh this bluebird startup has this site called twitter.new up right now where you can sign up you can reserve your handle in case they ever actually do get the twitter name that's brutal right now they don't have it so it's kind of a if we do um i just don't think that they're ever going to make it be able to be exactly like old twitter was unless they literally copied the source code and the reason that old twitter was able to be old twitter was because jack dorsey did not care about it making money that's the only reason that it was the way it was for so long.
24:29I don't know if he didn't care about it. He just wasn't good at it. Well, he had like, no, I mean, he had like majority ownership and like he didn't have to, he didn't have to like go by the whims of some investors, you know, to try to like inshittify it. Well, until he sold it. Yeah. And then inshittified it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will say that there will never be another OG Twitter. Like that was an era that came and went and now there are things that are trying to be it and it's not going to happen again. It's not going to happen again. And it's almost cringy that this new startup is trying to be the new Twitter.
25:04Like, I don't really think that's a good goal to have, but. I just got at Elon Musk on Twitter.new. Oh my God. I take it back. I take it back. Well, you reserved it? Yeah. And it said nobody had already reserved it? Nope. That's insane. This is one of those things where the Twitter.new thing is it's like, I don't care, this is stupid, but it's really funny to watch X like squirm a bit and be like, no, no, just kidding. We do really want it. Yeah. I mean, even though we've told everyone we don't, I still use twitter.com to go to X. Oh yeah. So do I. So yeah, there's just too many, there's too many micro chasms of the internet at this point.
25:38And being able to have like one central social, social media site where things are happening, it's just not possible anymore. Isn't it? I think you mean microcosm. I think you mean micro contrast. Poor shot. Yeah, they don't know that reference yet. Yeah, that'll be next week. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah, well, I don't know. They're going to try, but I kind of think that we're just going to keep using the things we use. Which way do you think that they're going to rule? What's your prediction? They're ruling? What's your reaction? I think because Twitter.com still links to X.com, they'll probably go, ah, well, seems like that's still in use.
26:12That might be enough. But I'm not a lawyer, so this isn't legal advice. But I'm not a rapper. That's funny. All right. Well, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we still got more to talk about. end of the year type news. But before we take a break. Yes. Trivia time. Guys, let's get the energy up. Come on. It's 5 p.m. I know it's 5.30. It's 6 p.m. We got to get hype. Before I do trivia, I just need to issue a correction from last week because last week I got mad and called out a company that sort of sounds like Buy Mommy for raising the price on my domain. And this is really embarrassing because a very nice fan wrote to me who runs a website called Domain Details, which posts helpful information and stuff about websites and whatnot.
27:00And he explained to me that it actually wasn't GoDaddy that raised the price. It was the registry, which is really embarrassing. The Donuts Inc. I don't know who does Vin. Donuts is the big one. Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing because we did like three hours of podcasts on how this all works and I still got it wrong. And if you want to know what a domain registry is, you can go to DomainDetails.com or listen to our two-part series on how the internet works. David and I and Adam go to Virginia. We did. We shared two beds for three people. Yes. And they did have an indoor pool. Watch the episode to find out.
27:37It was really weird you all slept in the same bed. Two of us did. And if you want to find out which two of us slept in the same bed, you'll have to go and listen to the episode. Yeah. We had two beds for three people and we only used one. I mean, this is waveform after dark. That's true. That's true. Okay, guys. Next, we're going to kiss in the Vision Pro.
27:59Anyway, 6 p.m. What's the question? All of it. All of it's making it. Come on. Guys. What three letters represent both a Chinese tech conglomerate and the initials of an American blues legend? I'm gonna write down what I think it is the blues legend it's their initials it's the initials of their stage name not their birth name I did not know that conglomerate or company
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28:34is that gonna help us at all it would because I know I feel like if I tell you which one I mean I did already say you said conglomerate Yeah, that kind of makes it a little easy. But that's the question. That's just the question. We'll be right back after the break. What?
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31:57Oh, yeah. Waveform after dark. Whose voice is that? It's always Ellis' voice. I like the tone at the end. It's nice. Bravo. Is that the PS3 startup music?
32:18What do you think I'm doing in the audio room all day, man? Making that. All right. So Instagram launched a new app. Yeah. But only on Fire TV. It's for TV, but it's not Instagram TV. Correct. It's for Fire TV. Fire TV. So I'm assuming this just lets me doom scroll on my TV now? Yes. Sick. I've been waiting for that but worse you know what's crazy I have the YouTube app on my Samsung TV at home and you can doom scroll shorts on it and I've done it that's all no me too wait did you do it on purpose no well I didn't enter the carousel on purpose but once I entered the carousel I was like I wonder if I can oh no hold on and you're like yeah YouTube I have a feature idea let you rotate 90 degrees so you can lay down on the couch use all of your landscape screen reel estate and do scroll that way whoa yeah really efficient so new instagram tv app it's not the igtv though we might be too old for this you might be too young for this if you're listening but instagram did launch a thing called igtv before reels were a thing um that failed spectacularly but it was also like you had to turn your phone sideways It was around the Quibi days, if you know what that means.
33:33Remember when we asked the question? It was just vertical video. Yeah. Well, people sometimes, like me, uploaded horizontal video on IGTV. But remember when we used to ask the question, is this like a product or a feature? Yes. In hindsight, it was so obvious. That vertical video was just a feature of Instagram and they should have built it in. Yeah. But it really, to them, was so vastly different that it was an entirely separate product. Yeah. Which is crazy. Am I crazy? because you guys have talked about this a few times and I feel like I'm having like a Mandela effect because I only remember IGTV as being a button in the bottom of the Instagram app.
34:09They put a button in the Instagram app that launched the other app. That's what that button did? And it launched the IGTV app. I never pressed it. They eventually obviously moved it in to just be a section of Instagram, but there was probably a couple months there where it was a whole separate thing. Yeah, they had a crazy launch party for that too. It was a whole thing. The logo was kind of fire. Yeah. Well, now, yeah, it kind of looks like MTV. Oh, that's the other. I think that's the fake logo. Okay, so this app is currently only launching on Amazon Fire TV devices, which is a very niche collaboration.
34:46Look, I think that short form video is a scourge on humanity and is melting our brains. However. Whoa. This is my like. Hey, subscribe to Waveform Shorts. Yeah. Well. Well, you can't subscribe to the shorts. You can only... You can try. You can subscribe to Clips, but that's not... That's right. We haven't done a shorts channel in a year. Vertical short front content. Well, that was embarrassing for me. Yeah, so, however, and this is only like a 2%, however. This is a like, I still think this is bad, but, you know. If you're watching it on TV, there's a much higher chance that you're watching it with somebody else.
35:26and I think that considering people send reels to each other so much because they want like we have a whole reels channel in Instagram where we just send it it's a studio channel where we just send it to each other the social aspect of watching video together is very strong and considering the content quality of many reels has gotten very high I think having your friend your partner, your dog on the couch with you your cat to watch your reels with you there could be two percent value in that you know this is social video watching experience yeah yeah you're saying lane and i should sit on the couch and watch reels together i mean there is obviously to an extent people already do this with every other form of video it's just adding short form vertical video to the list of things that you're watching yeah i mean which fine if i'm gonna be forced to watch reels i'd rather watching my TV with somebody than with then on my phone with I was just gonna say we're already forced to watch reels so would you rather have this split off into its own IGTV app that has reels yes right they'll never do that yeah at this point yeah it's better for us because we're less likely to open it and therefore less likely to get addicted and we can go over there intentionally when we want that brain rot and then we come back but obviously that's the opposite of what they want they want us to just stumble into short form video and just start scrolling yeah which is hilarious because you used to just swipe over on Instagram and that would be your inbox now you swipe over it's just reels yeah convenient I mean if they swap them into separate apps I would download Instagram again but I undownloaded it because I was so tired of reels and like looking through it so does your brain feel better hell yeah for a lot of reasons wrinklier much wrinkler again yeah well anyway um open ai has also launched a new image generator model which is best for enterprise use they say and i think the only reason that they're saying that is because they just did a one billion dollar deal with disney um if you remember we didn't talk about this last week but open ai struck a one billion dollar investment deal with disney where Disney now gets to use Sora very extensively.
37:43And there will be Disney characters in Sora. And I've already seen what some people are doing with it. And it's not good. It's pretty bad. The last thing I would want is my children's-based animated characters to the heathens of the internet. The reason that Disney said they want to do this is because they are going to add short form generative video feeds to Disney Plus. What does that even mean? They're going to do the Sora app to Disney Plus? They're going to have generated Disney videos on the Disney Plus app that are generated with Sora. User generated? I don't think so. I think by Disney people.
38:27Yeah, it's really bad. So instead of hiring animators to do that, they're just going to have Sora do it. They're a lean team over there. They're a lean team over at Disney. Really weird. This is a company that's known for, A, bespoke making everything by hand, with armies of artists and engineers and imagineers and animators. And B, suing the bejesus out of anyone who uses any of their IP. Yeah. And now they've gone and done this. Yeah. So I think that OpenAI needed to make the new image model to compete with Gemini because Gemini 3's image model was really, really, really good. And that's the reason they did it.
39:06But the reason that they're saying it's best for enterprise use, I think, is just because they made this deal with Disney. And we also did not talk about this, but last week, the day after they announced the$1 billion investment deal with Disney, they also sued Google for massive copyright infringement on a massive scale. Oh, I thought it was the same day. It was the day after. Oh, okay. Basically, yeah, they're just trying to get everyone to pay them, you know or to work with them in different ways disney pay like they're trying to get google to receive a billion dollars like what's the well what's to work with them in some way i don't know i think they're like these companies are just going to steal our ip no matter you can go on gemini right now and just generate disney characters so i think that they're like all these companies are stealing our our ip no matter what we should figure out a way for this to work for both of us because otherwise you know it's just gonna happen yeah sorry to depress you on a Tuesday night, Wednesday night.
40:01This kind of stuff hits way worse at 6 p.m. Yeah.
40:07Well, in more positive news that happens in the morning, Google has launched a new CC feature in Labs. See, that's the kind of high-quality segues I'm looking for. Thank you. You're welcome, Adam. And effectively, I think you would actually like this a lot, Marques. I am on the wait list. oh you're on the waitlist yeah well you do like it a lot um it plugs into your calendar your gmail and your google drive to basically give you a morning briefing of everything you've got going on during the day things that you might want to schedule that you might want to take a look at it's basically a gemini sort of uh butler assistant thing but in your email i have a theory about this that's going to be extremely niche and only apply to a few people do it so for those of you who are like me who every morning ask hey g how's my day or what's my day like and then google assistant goes through and does the normal routine of like here's your a here's your b here's your commute or whatever whatever you put in for it to tell you it does that this is that and i think when the teams that make these two separate products realize like they meet each other when these teams meet each other on google campus one day they're going to combine them and they will give me like an AI like good version of this at some point but they have to meet first so hopefully one of them is watching this podcast and they realize that they exist it's almost like they have a video conferencing app that's called the exact thing starling hangouts yeah um yeah so I don't know I mean I'm curious how it might use like your google drive to let you know what you need to do that day.
41:52I can see the calendar making sense. I can see your email making sense. Google Drive seems strange. Unless there's some enterprise Google Drive feature with like due dates that I don't know about. It can be fun if it knows like which video script Google Doc I've been working on and it's like oh, you're going to need a link to this doc today. Yeah, it'd be cool. If it just like opened all the tabs you needed at once. That'd be fire. Starline is what I meant to say. Because I'm an idiot. I was like Starlink. I remember Starline. Yeah. So it is in beta right now in Google Labs for Gemini Ultra and paid users in the US and Canada.
42:31I think Google is just trying to put Gemini in every little aspect of people's lives. Even people who live in their email inbox, which is a lot of people. It's me. Well, you also live inside a camera. You also don't use Gmail. I don't use Gmail.com, but I use Gmail. I thought you used Superhuman. well yeah yes which syncs Gmail yeah but I mean like well you you wouldn't get this feature would you unless you're using I think you get it as an email I think it arrives as an email oh I thought it was like a pop up in the email app or something I mean ideally it's reading all the emails or whatever from my account and then just shows up as another email yeah maybe what's interesting if you want to talk to CC you can email CC or you can reply to one of the emails that sends you and it'll send you an email back so it's kind of like and then it turns into a chatbot and then it's Gemini and then suddenly you're in the Gemini app.
43:22Yeah. Yeah. And now I'm confused. The AI's name is CC or you CC it in an email? The product name is called CC as a play on words to the fact that it's through your email. Okay, but you're not actually CCing. You're not carbon copying anything, yeah. I thought it was closed caption. No. I thought it was the famous Yankees closed caption. That's just so bad. He gets it. I don't know what that is. F1 driver. Anyway. Speaking of things that are former You said former Yeah that's sad The Ford F-150 Lightning Is discontinued What? Isn't that crazy? Only as we know it though As we know it So the Ford F-150 Lightning Was one of the original Like competitor EVs to Tesla Tesla was doing their thing for a while And then we got a couple big Like new EV competitors There was like the Mach-E there was oh what was the other i'm gonna remember them actually f-150 lightning was the pickup truck and then rivian r1t came along and uh jaguar ipace i remember this era there was every new ev got compared to the tesla f-150 was one of them where we went ah that's good that's one of the things that tesla doesn't have and that people are going to want and they basically just made an f-150 with all the same benefits and accessories and every module would fit it's just with an electric powertrain instead of gas and it's okay i see them on the road once but it didn't sell to the rate that ford was hoping that they would and so despite their best efforts and their refreshes and their special matte black version that they brought to the studio here uh not enough sales so they're discontinuing it that said they are still going to continue to do like hybrid stuff with f-150 platform yeah there's lots of versions of f-150 obviously and they're going to do i guess they're trying to do a version that drives on electric motors as the powertrain but is fueled by a gas generator that fills battery and then powers the powertrain yeah so it's more of like a fisker type setup car rivero yeah yeah exactly they said they can get up to 700 miles on that yeah i was confused by that because there's like no information but 700 got thrown around in like every article that i saw but i guess believe it's i'm assuming there's still battery involved into it and the gasoline engine is a is a generator is a generator that's extending range in quick scenarios um sounds like a really cool way to have two things to go wrong in your car the gas engine that's what people say about hybrids it's more complicated but it is you do have the upside of more range so yeah i see it as a pickup truck especially at f-150 range of you know the most popular vehicle in america this making way more sense i mean you get the torque of an electric car which is great.
46:07It's weird though because that torque's not always the same kind of torque they want when it comes to towing, right? Yeah, I don't know how this will do with towing. I'm not a towing expert but I kind of feel like the F-150 lighting was weak with towing and that was one reason why a lot of F-150 owners wouldn't have wanted it as much but it was really good at a lot of other stuff. Obviously not as much range when you're towing or in general. Grocery is tough to tow. Yeah, that's the thing. There's two types of F-150 owners. There's the ones that buy an F-150 because they need an F-150, and then there's the people who buy an F-150 just because that's what I want.
46:41Or that everyone else has a truck. I want a truck, too, and it's a popular, here's the truck you get. I might have to help my friend move one day. Yeah. I had multiple people in my life that were excited for this truck just because of the giant battery that they could use in case, like, the power goes out in the house. That was another nice feature. Yeah. That was a really nice feature. Everyone was excited about that. Yeah, so vehicle-to-grid power is still sort of a niche feature that a couple big battery EVs will do. I don't know. I'm going to mess up the list if I try to name them. But there are a couple that also still do this where they can be your house's battery backup in a pinch.
47:14Pretty sick. It'll be like 150 kilowatt hours, lasts you for days. But yeah, now that this truck is discontinued, that's one less option. That's not really good for anyone. Yeah, agreed. Can I say there's a quote from Jim Farley that I really dislike. CEO of Ford. CEO of Ford. What do you say? This is a customer-driven shift to create a stronger, more resilient, and more profitable Ford. Is he implying that the customers are driving a more profitable Ford like we want that? No, I think it's just I don't care about any of you. We're going to make as much profit, which every company ever, but just like.
47:49I'm trying to read into this because it's a CEO statement. Customer-driven shift implies people weren't buying the electric ones, so this is customer-driven. You guys are doing this. to create a stronger, more resilient, and more profitable Ford. So the EVs were smaller margins and less profitable, and what we're going to switch to and pivot to will be more profitable for Ford. Do we all care that Ford is more profitable? Well, it's the CEO. He's talking to shareholders. And to be clear, customers were not driving the F-150 Lightning. But it was a great truck. Customer-driven truck. Companies don't care about you.
48:24So the EU also this week just announced like a plan to stop doing electric vehicles and stuff like that. Well, no, to stop the plan to stop gasoline. They removed their mandate for all new vehicle sales to be electric by, I believe, 2035. Thank you for putting into words my incoherent thought. I got you. But my question is, is this more of a trend now? Are we like reversing the whole EV thing? Well, I think the bigger thing is right now is we're losing or have lost the US EV tax credit. And I think everybody understands that that is, for EVs in general, hurting sales pretty hard. It's interesting.
49:07Just to be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with the F-150 thing because it's really hard to buy an F-150 in Europe, period. I think he's just saying the trend. Like we're seeing all these 2030 promises are probably just going to be that there were promises three or four years ago. If you're paying enough attention to this industry, there is definitely a trend. It's kind of like reading between the lines. I remember we saw Porsche promise that the 718 Cayman was going to be EV in its next refresh. And then they kind of went, and also a gas one. And oh, I was expecting that to be fully electric.
49:41But we see stuff like that happening. We see companies who are going, ah, we're going to have all these electric cars and we're going to go fully electric by this year. And then quietly, they're just not doing it. Yeah. So customer driven, probably. And also just being realistic. Like I'm reading up on this. And by reading up, I mean I Googled EU electric mandate and the AI overview is telling me that the recent change removes the hard 2035 ban on new cars that are gas powered. But they are still allowing up to 10 % of sales to be combustion engines. So it's like instead of 100, it'll be 90. Just slowly walking it back to be more realistic and more in line with everything.
50:1810 %? Yeah. versus zero over that yeah so i i agree that it's a trend it's a slow iceberg movement type of trend where it doesn't look like a disaster but it just feels like we're calibrating to what's realistic and customer trends and profit well yeah but the realism is based on company profits profit well if you're not if nobody's buying evs and the the government incentives go away and sales drop it's like you can't make people buy evs if they don't want them well that's why we You were incentivizing people to buy EVs. We were incentivizing them because they were more expensive per car. Yeah.
50:54So it's like if I want someone to choose the EV, it needs to be the correct choice for them. They don't get to just force people into buying EVs. So if it was, oh,$7 ,000 less, well, now it makes it a better buy. I'm going to choose the EV. But now that that incentive goes away, in this specific case in the U.S., it's like now the gas car is a better buy. I'm going to buy the gas car in the hybrid. And Toyota's sitting there going, yes, more Prius buyers for us. It's true. So, yeah. That's true. Toyota sitting in the middle ground forever with the Prius was probably their best call. Because they just knew that no one was ever going to fully switch one way or the other.
51:26They're hybrid kings. They are. I'll throw one more thing out there. Yeah. Because I already can feel all the truck people yelling at me. I figured, why not have all the Tesla people yell at me also? Let's go. All in. Even though the F-150 Lightning literally is a car that Ford says, this isn't worth producing anymore, and still outsold the Cybertruck in 2025. Woo. Yeah. Yeah, but have you tried version 14, Andrew? Have you tried version 14, bro? Yeah, it's funny that Tesla sells. Well, Tesla only has - There's a lot of nuance to that, and I don't care. Yeah, the joke is funny. They have four or five models.
52:03Ford F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America, so the fact that one of the trims didn't sell well and got discontinued is kind of not huge news, but it is what it is. Speaking of EV trucks, so easy. There we go. Because I wrote it in the outline. Oh, you did? I didn't even see that. I saw Rivian in bold, and I was like, I got this. But yes, speaking of EV trucks, Rivian had an event this past week. And it was really interesting because I couldn't tell who the event was for. The first part of it was this really engaging and interesting, like, AI chat from RJ, who's the CEO, talking about how they're going to be making their own silicon, and their Generation 3 platform of vehicles is going to be fully self-driving on millions of miles of roads.
52:47And I was like, whoa, that's really interesting. But this is also their autonomy day event. So then it transferred into this really, really long, very detailed and honestly complex, but explanations of how they're doing these things and the neural nets and the advantages of their approach, mixing in LiDAR with radar with cameras, why they believe this is the right solution for the future. And it feels like they were talking to shareholders, shareholders, engineers types. Yeah, you know who they were talking to. Yeah, and the comments section was people watching a live stream on twitter.com or YouTube.
53:20So it was like people who are terminally online and maybe a little bit too in the bubble and they were like, this isn't close to what Tesla's doing. And then they had hands-on after, which was allowing people to ride in these new self-driving Rivians. And so there's some footage online of these rides and some of them look okay. Some of them looked like they had some errors and misses, which is normal. They didn't do like a closed course thing. So there's a lot going on. My takeaway, which is very much just from my own perspective because I own a Generation 1 Rivian, was I'm glad I didn't buy a Gen 2 Rivian because none of those are going to get the new silicon.
54:00It's the Gen 3, which is basically R2. Wait, so they announced new silicon? Sorry. Yeah, you kind of have to be in the lingo. Rivian has R1, which is the first generation of their vehicles. And then they have R2, which is the SUV, like second generation thing. And then they have R3, which is even smaller. But they also have Generation 1, which is Rivian R1T and R1S. And then Generation 2, which is also Rivian 2, R1S and R1T. Yeah. And then Generation 3, which is R2. And presumably there'll be an R1 Gen 3. An R3. And probably an R1 Gen 3. An R3 will be Gen 3. So the takeaway here is R2 is the first Gen 3 vehicle that will have the silicon in it that will have all the full self-driving that they're talking about, all these new capabilities.
54:51It'll have LiDAR up at the top, and they talk about how smoothly integrated that LiDAR box is. And the Gen 2 vehicles now that are like a slight update to my Gen 1 R1 are not going to get all of that. Dang, sad for those people. Yeah, they might get some of that, but they won't have the silicon, obviously. They're already shipping. Anyway, it's interesting. They're promising a lot. It's kind of hard to take all their word for it because we see these types of events. I did not love how much they promised. Yeah, they promise a lot. But really Tesla-y. Yeah, and I feel like that's a combo of maybe a little bit of fundraising and talking to the public about, like, oh, yeah, we are super AI first and self-driving and all that stuff.
55:30And then people who invest and have lots of money to give Rivian might go, oh, seems about right. and be more down, whatever. I don't think it's going to sell them any R1s though because it doesn't have the stuff that they're talking about. To Tesla's credit, them going all in on the cameras, it was like now for their customers, their customers get to theoretically use more of the self-driving features as they get updated because all of the Teslas for a very long time have cameras. Yeah. And so they're not going to need like new sensors and stuff. There's like, yeah, they've switched out the boxes.
56:09They've changed the sensors, the cameras. Yeah. But they're not, there's no like hard limit on like your Model 3 can do it. Yeah, there is. No, I think there is. I think it's like a joke. Right. But haven't they not updated the hardware versions in like a while? There was at least one statement on stage that Elon sort of skirted around. He'd said, oh yeah, all Model 3s are going to have full self-driving. and then you hear someone in the crowd go like, what about hardware three? And he kind of just goes, let's not pay attention to nuance. Like he literally says like, let's not get nuanced because he knows that this is for a certain X date and forward version of Tesla.
56:44And it's not actually all Model 3s that are going to get all these features. Got it. But if you just kind of avoid nuance, it seems like a nice thing to say. I don't know if there's a lawsuit about that, but it's like the same thing is going to happen with everyone who has updated hardware in their cars. They build new capabilities around the updated hardware. And so everyone who's on previous gens, like me, a first-gen Rivian buyer who spent tons of money on a truck to support this earlier thing, I'm not getting any of these features. So, oh well. Too bad they can't just update the box. What features did they announce, though?
57:13So Rivian's main thing was their current driver assist feature. I'm not going to try to name them because they all have different pilot auto type names or whatever. But the current driver assist feature is something like 100 ,000 fully lined highways. 135 ,000 miles of roads that is getting updated to 3.5 million miles of roads. I think the quote the one guy said later was if it has clearly marked painted lines, you can drive on it. To which every comment I saw from that is like, well, where I live does have that. I'm not coming to work. Yeah, there's a lot more roads in the US, but it's like the current driver assist that I try to use doesn't work on neighborhood streets, doesn't work on lots of regular roads that you think it should work on.
57:57It works okay on a lot of highways, but it's like just a regular road with lines on it, it wouldn't work. So this theoretically multiplies by several orders of magnitude how many roads it can drive hands-free on. Whether you choose to use that or not, or if you were planning on using it for everything, there's still a long way to go for them. And then the next level of things they're doing for the Gen 3. Gen Sen Wang. That's a different company. um but yeah in 2026 they're claiming point to point so like put it address to address and i'll drive you the whole way um and then gen 3 architecture is eyes off so he's claiming you can like read a book and do stuff like that and then after that would be personal level four this is the level of promising where i was like i don't like this yeah this is way too much that's also just out of rivian's hands for quite a bit of it in terms of regulations yeah and that's a lot to promise um yeah there are laws my question is if you're doing eyes off but you also can only do it on marked roads if you are eyes off and the gps doesn't know the road has lines or not and you get to a unlined road what happens i guess it'll just beep at you beeps at you and says take over yeah because it it's probably not like you can sit in the back seat no no you can't be in the back but like if you're reading a book like he said and in a split sec if you're going 60 and now the road doesn't have lines on it anymore.
59:24What is your ditching the book and grabbing the wheel? Doesn't Tesla just like slow down? Does it slow? It slowly slows down until it basically pulls. Does it pull over? Okay. That sounds unsafe for other people driving on the roads to just have a car slowing down. Better than barreling down a road that you don't have. So that's also true. Hey, listen, I'm not the one who made the problem here. What happens? It accelerates. Goes even faster. I think one of the most interesting battlegrounds on the internet, which has been hilarious, and this may just be comment farming, but I think it's hilarious, is the LiDAR versus no LiDAR battle in the self-driving world.
59:58And really it's just people who listen to what Tesla slash Elon says, which is LiDAR is stupid, you don't need it. Or what a lot of others like Jaguar with the I-Pace and Waymo and obviously with Rivian now are doing, which is adding LiDAR to the suite of sensors to help augment the downsides of vision only. And the argument is like, vision only can do a lot if your systems are really good if your ai is really good but there's this really really really really really long tail of edge cases yeah of things that are kind of weird to solve for with vision fog fog and and rain and all that other stuff but also just weird stuff that happens on the road and lidar can see further and has obviously a better long distance vision than just the cameras and so i guess what rj was saying on stage with the Rivian's event, is LiDAR has come down enough in price that this is not prohibitively expensive.
1:00:55We're going to do this. We're going to build this into all of our data. And so the camps are people who say, this is doomed. You're just adding noise to your neural nets, or this is actually better than not having it. Of course you should add it. They fight a lot on Twitter. Marques, people have been driving cars for millions of years without LiDAR in their eyes. I don't know what you need LiDAR for. Well, that goes to my humanoid robot argument too, which is people going that robots should be human shaped. I'm like, you just inherited all of the blind spots and all of the downsides of humans, including drivers.
1:01:25Of course, human drivers are worse than robot drivers. We have no eyes in the back of our head. Do you know what the best part about this episode is? What? We get to leave for two weeks and not read any of the comments because it's going to be a brutal - It's going to have the worst comments of every episode. Can some machine learning engineer please explain to me why all the AI companies were like, no, we need to steal everything because the more information we have to give to the models, the smarter they're going to be. And that somehow doesn't apply to cars. Like, oh, no, that's too much information.
1:01:55Get the LIDAR out of here. No radar. Just cameras. That's too much. It's like, how does that make any goddamn sense? Well, to be fair, they are working on ways to not just feed more data to the language models. They're working on ways around that. After they stole everything? Yeah. Yeah, after they stole everything. One other thing they did announce, Rivian Assistant. This is interesting. Which was kind of like, yeah, exactly what you would imagine, your own in-car assistant. But one thing I thought that was interesting is RJ shows a way that you can, like obviously you can do vehicular commands in terms of with your car.
1:02:30That definitely sounds like breaking a lot, like a charge. Manslaughter. But you said vehicular commands. Yeah. Like turn on my heated seat. I didn't say that out loud. Vehicular. But it also could make changes to Google Calendar and other Google things, which if you're partnering with Google somehow or connecting with Google, give me Android Auto. You can do it. Coward. Just do it. It makes no sense to not do it. Wait, I'm trying to think, okay, what their logic would be. Like if I asked them right now, what would they say? Because they're a lot, okay, I use Rivian software. Rivian gets all the data about how I use the car.
1:03:05If I have Android Auto, I will just use that. And so I won't put all my navigation data or anything else like that into Rivian's system. So Rivian's system can't learn and get better. So what they do is they plug in certain parts of Google's ecosystem so that I keep using Rivian software, but that I can still interact with Google services. That's probably what they would say. I don't f***ing care. But yeah, I will definitely use it to do things in the car and I will definitely not use it to change my calendar. I do not trust that. Do you trust that? Would you ask your car to change your calendar?
1:03:44Absolutely not. I feel like I wouldn't trust that. No, no way. I like having my calendar in my car. Yeah, but on like something I can see and like do with my hands. I guess theoretically. You have a big touchscreen. Theoretically, it's self-driving. Yeah, is it going to show me my calendar? We're just old. Yeah. I need to physically see myself moving it. I don't know if I would trust like some automated system to do it just for me. I don't even trust Google Assistant to do that. The automated system, no. But if it showed like a little calendar widget on your screen and I could see the box move, I guess I'd trust it then.
1:04:12Yeah. I'm a very visual learner. I don't want my car to have any thoughts. I don't want my car to have to think about where to turn. I don't want my car to have to think about my calendar. I don't want my car to think at all. It's just APIs. I want it to go pedal down and go. Go forward. I want car to go. I want car to go go and beep beep. And that's good enough for me. No brakes. Just horn. Oh, yes. I think we need an ad break Let's trivia Wait, I'm really curious what's the last No, it's okay, this is a trivia question I'm just really curious what the last trivia question of the year is going to be, better be good Don't you want to know Alright, so this is a bit of a teaser for this next segment coming up, but I'm looking at Ellis as I say this question number two of this episode last one of the year what is the Scoville rating of Da Bomb.
1:05:06Oh, super hot questions. Closest without going over it. Scoville. I think we should just do Delta. We've all watched Hot Ones enough we should notice. I've not. Everyone but David has watched Hot Ones enough that we should all notice. The only Hot Ones episode I watched was the one where what's his name? You better be careful. David is right there. Marquez has been on it twice. I think I watched that one. Wait, twice? I watched one. I didn't know you went on again. David, just leave. Just leave. Unbelievable. I talked so much about you on that episode. That's crazy. He was like, my good friend David.
1:05:46There was a whole section where Sean is like, I heard you're friends with David. You should totally watch it. It was so good. All right. That's cool. I'll queue it up. Anyway. I'll queue it up on one of my three screens. Well, we'll think about this one. Answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back.
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1:09:10oh yeah after dark oh yeah and we're back that was petting zuri okay sorry she's just sitting right here next to me. My shirt's back on now. So 2025, how do we end the last episode of this calendar year of our regularly scheduled programming? How should we end this? Well, Adam was nice enough to go back and look at all the predictions we made at the start of the year and kind of has a little recap going on too. So I think we just jumped straight into what we predicted. Is this waveform wrapped? Kind of. Kind of, sort of. I hope I got everything right. You didn't. I did not. Damn. all right what did we say do you want to go through these adam you wrote them all down and we'll just react to them yeah also quick note this is the last regularly scheduled program of this year we will have a bonus episode next week at the time of you listening to this so if you're traveling for the holidays yeah next tuesday there there will be an episode yes uh okay 23rd yeah 23rd random 2025 predictions the first one was will the s25 have q2 wireless charging David said yes Chi 2 meaning with the magnets yeah with the magnets because I was Chi 2 as we knew it before Chi 2 ready the first two episodes of the year were us debating this Chi 2 got out of us like five times and they kept changing the spec as we predicted Chi 2 ready Andrew also said yes Marquez said no I said no Ellis said yes so I got that right so Marquez and I got it correct Whatever.
1:10:49The only phones that had Qi 2 were just the Pixel and the iPhone. Speaking of Pixel, that was the next one. Marques. Was it only the Pixel? Pixel Snap. Oh, well, then the Skylar. HMG Skylar. Yeah, whatever. Well, yeah, that's it. Marques, you said that 2025 would be the year of the Pixel 10. Oh. Oh, no. How do you feel about that? You shut me down last week with my hot take. I remember what I was thinking when I said that, and it had a lot to do with Tensor. and that did not happen. Yeah. Damn. You were saying that this year it would take a big leap and then next year in the 11 we would get a big visual refresh.
1:11:28I don't know why I have that much faith. That might be true. Because it's 10. Yeah, I mean, this would have been a great year to do it. Well, that was the question, David. You said, because it's the 10, do you think they're going to do something big? And Marquez was like, nah. But... Oh, wait, he said nah or he said yeah? He said they wouldn't do anything big to the hardware. It would be the same hardware and Tensor's gonna be a huge leap and it's gonna be the year of the Pixel 10. It should have been. It ended up being that Pixel Snap was a bigger deal than any of the rest of the stuff. Yeah, yeah.
1:11:57It's true. Unfortunately. We like Pixel Snap. Yeah. It's called Tensor, right? And then it's the 10th. It's Pixel 10. Come on, guys. Tensor with the 10. How many hot dogs would you like? Tensor. Exactly. Why is it hot dogs? Like how many? It's always hot dogs. I told you. It's always hot dogs. Yeah, it's always hot dogs. Okay. Then we had our hot takes predictions Which, alright, mine I'm just gonna get it out the way now You can all laugh at me We only had two predictions? Well, no, that was the Those are just like random ones that he We had a bunch that episode But those were the ones I felt like were worth Retalking about Random hot take predictions Mine was that someone will get the AI wearable right this year How do you feel about that one?
1:12:40The pebble The what? It's not out yet It's not AI It's not AI When does anything ever come out anymore? Okay, like, come on. Yeah, I don't feel great about that one, but it's in 2026. I don't know, Mark. I said, like, three different AI wearables on the testing desk. I do. No, I might have to open those. Because I cannot confirm or deny this about the Pocket one that I got or the Friend one that I got. I got to try those things out. I can confirm. They did not get it right. I've seen the Subway ads. Friend definitely did not get it right. I've seen those Subway ads. Subway ads? Oh, my God. It was like everywhere on the subway.
1:13:15Which one? Friend. They booked out the entire New York subway. Did they spend any money on the hardware or just a website domain and a subway ad? It's the size of an air. It's just an air tag. That's all it is. Kind of looks like it. Yeah. Did they go out of business yet? No. No, he was whining on Twitter the other day, though. I mean, it turns out when you're just like a ChatGPT rapper, you don't have to spend a lot of money. That was the tweet I saw. Hey, 20 % of the people on this podcast are paying customers. Of ChatGPT? For Friend? You bought the Friend. You pay for it? You can buy the friend?
1:13:44You pay for it. It's sitting on my desk. And you're paying for this version? You know what's funny? I don't think that's a different AI necklace. I'm pretty sure. Oh, the one that I have? Yeah. Whoops. There's another one that kind of looks like that. Oh, God. All right. Well, I'll test them all later. That just shows that Adam was especially wrong. I want to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure it's something else. I'll go back and find that. I cannot confirm or deny. Well, the next one was Andrew's. rabbit will survive and release the rabbit r2 i was close you're close they've teased survive they are not out of business yet well yeah because they didn't have to pay any of their employees if they haven't paid any of their employees are they still technically still alive and teased a new one exactly okay oh my god are we gonna i got closer than that another ces where a bunch of influencers like talk about how cool it is and ends up being yeah they afford a plane ticket to CES?
1:14:38They'll get flown out there. Fighting words, Andrew. David, you said, this is a little crazy, you said I think Humane gets sold in 2025. Correct. But you also said probably not to HP. No way! How did you do that? Did you really say that? It did seem a little obvious because like HP, Humane, pin, you know, a little on the nose. Did I really say that? You did. I think it was because it was around the time that rumors first started popping up. It hadn't happened yet, but it was like around the time that there were rumors. I think I was just thinking that would just be, that would be too funny. It would be too depressing and funny.
1:15:17Wow. Andrew also asked if when it inevitably sold, if it would be more or less than Juan Soto's contract. Not even close. Player of the Mets, which was$765 million. They sold for about$116 million. So not close. That's still too much. Although his contract was for 15 years. So, you know, they made that in like, what, three? Are they making the AI for the printers better over there? Do you have an HP printer? Yeah, what's going on over there at HP? Who? They're just printing money. HP decided to buy Humane. I have so many questions. Yeah, I know, right? That are not yet answered about that. It's probably the, they did invent some sort of projector technology.
1:15:54Hey, printer. Hey, printer. Connect to Wi-Fi again, please, for the love of God. HP makes laptops still. Dragonfly. Yeah. They make a lot of them. They make Chromebooks. the next hot take was Marquez you said the browser wars are back true I got that right yep I think you were correct but there are so many browsers useless he also didn't expect the main browser war to be the company killing their own browser and starting another one and causing a giant rift between their faces we got side plots we got main plots we got chat GPT threatening Google threatening well existing enough for a little code red action I thought you meant like Atlas no well I mean that's one of the things yeah the browser wars are back I thought you meant they sent a threat to the other yeah and that's it oh wait no there's one more Ellis you said last year that Microsoft will not be adding live translation to any of their products in 2025 you also said that if they do you will sit at the big table and apologize while eating the bomb sorry the bomb did microsoft technically microsoft teams team but did they really interpreter mode well i don't i haven't heard anything about we've joked about the live translation thing all year thing where like i'm pretty sure i'm wrong like even if i did just say microsoft like my whole thing was like this is this is not real and as the reason i say i'm pretty sure i'm i'm wrong is because like earlier we were talking about this and I was like, yeah, because now the Pixel Buds and the AirPods both have live translation.
1:17:37And everyone was like, but do they? And I was like, no, they do, right? Who's used it? And no one in the office had used it. And it's still like - It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. No, I agree. I feel like it got added to everything and I haven't heard a peep about any of it. But now I - The Pixel has it for phone calls. Have you heard a single person - That doesn't mean it doesn't work. I'm just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. I use it in my demo. I just thought if it would be like real, like life-changing, we would have heard about it a little more. Anyway, this is all to say. Well, how much do you speak a different language?
1:18:07Yeah, we don't use it. Because I don't have a lot of users. But that doesn't mean it's not good for people who do speak another language. Like I use it, I remember when the Pixel came out, everyone was trying this demo in all of our first hands-on in our reviews. And they literally would call us and have someone in another room speak another language to us. And we would hear the translation in English. We'd speak back, it would translate, and it would work. and I haven't used it since then because I don't need to make phone calls to people who I don't speak to in different languages but it works.
1:18:32I am a man of my word. After we finish the next part of Waveform Wrapped I will take a seat at the big table. I will issue my apology. And I will da bomb. You should do the bomb and then do the readout. But you gotta let it simmer. I was gonna do da bomb and then read you guys a trivia question. I like that better, yeah. because, man, that waiting music is going to feel a little long. Are you going to do a spoonful? I don't know. I think a dab is plenty. I'm going to do a dab. I also, it's dinner time and I haven't eaten, so I'm probably going to put it on a Pringle. We do have milk in the office.
1:19:10Can you scar your stomach lining? No, it's just going to sit there for a while until you cover it with other food. No, we're going to, yeah. I did hot ones on an empty stomach. It was bad. You did hot ones?
1:19:24I feel like every time I say it, I'm like, maybe I'm flexing. Maybe this is just unnecessary. Yeah. I did watch one of them. Yeah. Did you? I did. Okay. Which one? I don't know. One of the two. I think it was the first one. Anyway, yeah, so. I've been here a long time. I think it's safe to say that while some of us were kind of right, I was the most wrong. It's okay, Ellis. I think you had a fair data, you know, because they have announced live translation like 50 times over the last 10 years. I had 11 years to make this bet. And the one year I made it is the year I... Probably not best to guess the year that like all the LLMs actually started working.
1:20:14Well, that was our predictions. so now looking back at this past year what do you think was the story of the year if you had to pick one what's the theme tech story of the year I like your list and just liquid asses in the middle of it damn there was actually a lot of stuff this year do you want to just read this list Adam it's a pretty solid list these are all things that happened this year it's all stuff that happened in 2025 okay Nintendo Switch 2 let's go Nintendo Switch 2 Nintendo Switch 2 TikTok got sold question mark sort of kind of maybe yeah uh the first waveform live stream which ellis added i think i think another one of those has to happen in 2026 somehow at least one uh the galaxy s25 happened i feel like galaxy and iphone just by themselves are big things of the year in tech i guess i would argue s lineup basically not news this didn't do anything is that news okay uh next apple vision pro turned one I don't know don't remember Deep Seek remember that?
1:21:16yeah the whole industry shook that was this year yeah that was crazy did we ever find out if that was tap or not? like I don't I don't think it was they just released some new stuff last week then there was the iPhone E which confused us all woof and got best of the year yeah I forgot about that Sigma BF camera remember that? oh the Sigma boyfriend yeah that was this year coolest thing for two weeks and all metal, baby. Hey, two weeks is longer than a lot of stories last. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Live at South By. That was fun. That was sick. That was cool. The Dodge EV Charger. Vroom, vroom.
1:21:51That was this year? That was this year with its face sound. The loudest EV of all time. That Marquez really hated. The Fratsonic chamber exhaust, man. You could hear us pull up from outside the studio. That was the muscle car that was too heavy to do burnouts. Yeah, not enough power. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, unfortunate. Damn. iPhone Air. that happened big story and iPhone are getting discontinued allegedly illegibly liquid ass of course yeah an orange iPhone that might be the story that might be what liquid glass yeah it's one of them well there was also the Jimmy Fallon pixel 10 event that's the one this is the year meta AI glasses part two or three whatever humanoid robots coming back didn't see that coming Yeah, that was a lot, yeah.
1:22:40Steam Machine and Steam Frame announced, which everyone yelled at me because they said people were actually excited for the Steam Frames. Oh, the frame. Yeah, I think people are excited for the frame. I don't care that much, but I'm excited for the Steam Machine. I had a lot of normies hit me up and say they were stoked on the Steam Machine. Yeah. It was kind of surprising, yeah. I think VR people - Kind of surprising, kind of surprising that normies care about Steam hardware? Really? Yes. Yeah. Was I not just saying this? Elliot's grandma has never heard of Steam Deck he's in our Discord server he's the guy whose grandma thought that the fold was AI someone doesn't watch the video airdrop coming to Android come on Titanic news we'd know more about it if they got Jimmy Fallon to announce it Xiaomi 17 Pro Max that did happen.
1:23:37I don't think I pronounced that correctly. Xiaomi? That was right. Xiaomi. Xiaomi. The Xiaomi Su7 that happened this year. I'm pretty sure it's Su7. So I made a Su7 joke once around the office and no one has referred it as the Su7. Well, that's why. It's the Su7. It's so perfect. I mean, I'm sure it's not pronounced that way in every market, but it's literally Su7. Like, how else would you pronounce it? Maybe you're not supposed to ever pronounce it. It's Su7. But I naturally just started saying Su. Su7. Or was it today's episode with the trifold is that the story trifold is pretty crazy no no I like the story of the top three I have a Mount Rushmore I have a top three I'll take that I have a Mount Rushmore for this year there are four heads on Mount Rushmore yes I have a top four I was adjusting sorry I had three and now I have four so I have a Mount Rushmore for this year the last one George Washington my Mount Rushmore for waveform and for stories of 2025 number one is liquid glass okay it's liquid glass not even necessarily number one it's just on the mountain liquid glass number two live at South by Southwest oh I have to throw that on the Mount Rushmore that was pretty bomb it was pretty bomb number three Sue Seven Sue Seven I knew you didn't do that let's kick it off we're too old for this dude shouldn't be and number four let's throw let's throw meta AI glasses on there hot take Switch 2 I think that was really interesting Switch 2 did kind of make a repeating I could make an argument for that alright, throw the Switch 2 in there Switch 2 is in there over the meta AI glasses but I did find I got more people asking me in real life about the AI glasses I'm not going to do a Mount Rushmore but I think the cool full circle thing is we got Project Muhan in like January and we went to that event and they like teased the trifold in that little timeline and we got it right at the end of the year.
1:25:36Yeah. Which is kind of cool. Just barely slipped it in by the end. Yeah. It's sick. I think that Liquid Ass being such a story that was just so prevalent throughout the entire year. People still are talking about this. And now a lot of the normies are updating their phones and they're all like, what the f*** is this? Nobody likes it. notably a lot of the Apple executives have moved on to other companies the design chief that made Liquid Glass left for Meta so he's going to make it, you know, everything over there is going to be horrible now even worse than it already is so I feel like yeah, I feel like Liquid Glass has been the most like it's been a story all year you know, I mean it got announced in June of was that this year?
1:26:25No, last year No, this year. No, this year. This summer. This year. They showed it off. This summer. This. They showed it off. This summer. Coming to an iPhone near you. Now it's coming to every phone. Maybe, but we're going to change it a few times. Yeah. So, and considering all the other companies, like, copied liquid glass for their UIs in China, I would say that's one of the big ones. I do have a. Sorry. I can't say this one more, I guess. What? I'll just believe it. it'll just be one yeah just bleep it yeah so
1:27:02bleep is still going just bleep it
1:27:12when TikTok got like banned for the night that's so true right I remember exactly when I forgot about that I do too wow I can picture and you had
1:27:27And then we started scrolling like, no! Like, I know this is a finite scroll right now. Damn, that did happen. I remember reaching the end. That was January? It crashed, and I was like, oh my God. That was January. I remember walking out of a bar with, like, my friend, and he opens his phone, and he goes, oh my God. TikTok is gone. Yeah, it was like a... Yeah, it kind of staggered, because I remember I was still scrolling, but my friend stopped scrolling, so they came over and watched me for a little bit until that stuff. That was January, yeah. That was January. Give me my dopamine. All the video content was like, this could be gone.
1:28:02It was basically people saying like, goodbye and where else to find me. Follow me on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah, on Red Note. And then totally out. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. 12 hours later, it was back. It was all back. Yeah, the next day. Did it cross any of your minds? Because it crossed my mind because I'm like logged into TikTok and all that stuff on my phone for like the waveform podcast did it cross your minds that we should say goodbye on tiktok no no it didn't cross we're not like tiktok needed i think it was the tiktok creators those who have no other channels anywhere who were like i need to like take these people with me somewhere like the panic in the strategy of i'm just gonna spam like please go follow me on instagram now was very real we have a diversified audience on a couple platforms our tiktok going away would kind of suck but wouldn't be the end of the world so we didn't feel it needs to say goodbye yeah but it would have been pretty wild if it went away yeah do a leap at interviewing tim cook was last year right yeah i guess that won't be on my mind that's on my mount rushmore period this year i interviewed tim cook and he just didn't answer any of the questions so that was this year yeah really i was like you want to do a blind ranking with some apple stuff and he was like what's that i was like this is not the magic mouse yeah yeah i forgot that that moment is on my mount rushmore this year yeah where i could see the clip as it was happening the ergonomics ergonomics yeah this year just felt like a bunch of nonsense to me i don't know like yeah i it's hard for you to make my mount rushmore you know i like like samsung put out some really great stuff.
1:29:45Orange iPhone was great. What did the Samsung put out? It was good. Well, we don't know if it's good yet. But they did it. You know, they said they were going to do it and then they did it. Yeah, they did do it. And Android XR goggles too. Yeah, you know, even Meta said they were going to do a thing and they did it. I have a hot take. They also... It's cooking. Yeah. Honestly, my Mount Rushmore is all of the unsealed documents from the Meta lawsuit that Roy Nassim has reported on. I don't know if there's four of them, but man. There's definitely at least four. That's good. Yeah. And the Nintendo Switch 2.
1:30:19And the Nintendo Switch 2, a device I don't own and I've never played. Yeah. Wow. But there was a lot of hype for a lot of months. Marquez, what's your hot take? We're also going to start the next year with predictions again. Yeah. But we'll do that next episode in a couple weeks. Well, not next episode, the week. Oh, yeah, you're right. Another episode. Next regularly scheduled episode. Yeah, in the new year. I was just gonna say Samsung ships a car in three years. Whoa, whoa, where did that come from? What? Xiaomi just shipped a car. Do you know something we don't? Yeah, but Xiaomi is Chinese.
1:30:51Yeah. And China like pumps money into car companies. Yeah, Samsung's gonna show up. Samsung like owns South Korea. They're also gonna like collab. Yeah, they have a lot of funding. Yeah. And they're gonna collab. They're gonna scrap a bunch of stuff together, a bunch of metal, a bunch of collaborative companies, and they're gonna make a car. Didn't they just gonna collab with Kia? Yeah, pick it. I want insert Korean. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But it'll have a Samsung logo somewhere in there. Samsung sold their car division to Renault a bunch of years ago, and it got rebranded to just Renault Korea. They still have a minority stake in it, but it seems like Samsung's auto business is now mostly a Renault thing, and Geely also has a minority stake in it.
1:31:30Did the twerking hamster in the... Dude! Did that happen this year? No, that was last year. Really? Yeah. I think that might have been two years ago. I think that might have been two years ago. That would have been on my rush mark for me for sure. I'm really hoping I get one more trivia point this year. It's been so long since I got a point in trivia. It might have been before Thanksgiving. It might have been when the corgi was twerking on the makeover. I say we do trivia. Trivia, dude. Trivia, dude. But first, Ellis has to... It's what's... Okay. It's us, us. Sorry, Ellis was just shaking the...
1:32:10You're holding a computer with two hands, Marques. Wait, where'd your computer go? It's in my hand. Alex, he's a phone. It's in my pocket now. Where'd you... Sorry. Sorry. It's time for Ellis to eat the bomb. Guys, okay, so as promised at the beginning of the year, I said live translation wasn't going to be a thing because every tech company had been announcing it every year for the past decade. And lo and behold, the year I place my bet is the year it all comes out. And so, as promised, I will be doing Da Bomb on a Spoon. I have with me some AIDS, a glass of milk, some extra toasty Cheez-Its, and string cheese.
1:32:50This is just what I ran and got from the... I can't save you. There's some solidified stuff at the top, so I'm just going to get that out of the way, because I feel like that's going to be extra concentrated. My heart is, like, already racing. I'm nervous for you. I've had Da Bomb before. Have I had it raw on an empty stomach? No. No. It's like maybe an ulcer. Probably. The smell is horrible. It smells like battery acid. Yeah. It tastes like... I'll just let you experience it. You know what battery acid tastes like? It tastes like what you imagine battery acid tastes like. I don't have to taste battery acid to tell people, this tastes like battery acid.
1:33:28Fair enough. Fair enough. That is a whole dab. Ladies and gentlemen, Ellis is being very brave right now. I'm worried. I'm worried. am I allowed to coat my palate with cheese at first? it's not going to help I need a safe word for you is there something where if you actually need an ambulance I don't know what am I supposed to do if you are going to die they don't come after 7pm I'm nervous I will say I am a spicy food expert and something I do know about spicy food is that the trick is small bites and that is impossible on a spoon. So I'm just going to touch this chopstick to my tongue a few times as a ramp up and then we're going to dive in.
1:34:11No, the trick is a glass of water. Oh, I never apologized. I never apologized. It was the whole thing. I never apologized. Computer programmers of the world, software developers, machine learning engineers, AI, venture capitalists, Apple, Google, Microsoft executives, Mag7 employees. I'm sorry. I thought y 'all were full of s***. I thought y 'all were mad full of s*** and taking billions of dollars from people who are also full of shit to sell people stuff that didn't work. And I still think that's what's going on. Welcome to America. I was wrong. And now I'm going to pay the price. So let's get a little warm up going.
1:34:49Do it. It doesn't work that way. It's just like getting stabbed by a thousand tiny knives, basically. I thought I was smart. Yeah, baby. All right. Give him the first question. Did you do it? No. You should prepare exactly what you plan to say because I know it's going to be hard to say. You can back out, Ellis. No. Man of my word. Thank you, Marquez. You're in. I wrote down the answer already. Oh, I forget the question. What was it? Oh, you're going to say it? Is that the whole amount? Yep. That's enough. He did it. He took a spoonful. Careful around the eyes. Marquez Brownlee. Andrew Mangadeli.
1:35:28Yeah. David Mill. It gets worse when you talk. Oh, yeah. Yep. What three letters? represent both a Chinese tech conglomerate. Oh, no. Chinese tech conglomerate and an American blues guitar legend. Oh, I... I don't usually do trivia from here. I can see Marquez's board. I was never going to guess that, so I'm just not going to guess. I'm so sorry. We've never done this before. Alice is at the big table, and Andrew is next to me at the producer table, which has a great view of Marquez's board, so that didn't work out. Didn't think about that one. I kind of thought that bomb was going to be too old, but...
1:36:14It did say refrigerate after oak, and it has been on our table unrefrigerated for like two years. It seems like it's getting pretty good, though. Okay. Marquez, what did you put? I put E-C-L. And what American Blues legend has let the initials up?
1:36:34I don't know. Tom. I don't know. I hadn't thought that far ahead.
1:36:49David, what'd you put? I put BBK. Okay, that's right. David, what? David gets the point. What? Jeez. What? Blues guitar legend? BB King. BB King is correct. Good job. Thanks. Can you play the After Dark music or something?
1:37:12Reform After Dark. Yeah, baby. I'm ready for the next one. Next question. Okay. What is the Scoville rating of the bomb that Ellis just inhaled? And it's Delta? Wait, Andrew didn't answer. He's not going to answer because he saw Marquez's board Oh Actually I'm changing Are we doing Price is right or delta? Oh we are doing delta I prefer United Just kidding I don't Alright we'll go
1:37:52Wait real quick Before we flip Quick update on the score Marquez has 10 David after that correct question well after that correct answer with 12 Andrew with 14 I need alright slip him and read what do you got please be oh my goodness Andrew what'd you say big range 2.3 million Marquez 835 ,000 835 ,000 10 ,000 y 'all really gonna make me do some crazy math yeah is it like one point something It's 135k. That's what I wrote the first time. So Marquez is closest. Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, I'm first. No, he's not. I'm closest. David tells us. David gets the point. You can even kind of see it. I wrote, I thought it was 135 ,000.
1:38:40And I was right. And then I erased it and wrote 835 ,000. I doubted myself. I almost nailed that. Never doubt yourself, Marquez. Never doubt yourself. It's going to be a whole year before I get a point. This is tough. Ellis, how are you doing over there? actually pretty good it's just my lips at this point I mean I say that and then I'm sure it's gonna come back it also like it will on the toilet later it somehow regardless is in my nose didn't touch my nose but wow that's a wrap that's hot man congrats on on keeping it to your word hopefully hopefully the bets that we make next year no I already know next year none of those f***ing humanoid robots are coming out and if if one of them does I'm doing this s*** again baby I love it.
1:39:26Do two of them next time. If one of them comes out. Okay. That's perfect. I like that. That's a great place to end it. A humanoid robot can serve you the spoonful of last death. Yeah. That's actually, that's what we'll do. If one of these humanoid robots actually comes out and it actually works, that robot can come on the show and spoon me another. Man. From the same bottle. It smells so bad, even from here. Please take us out. Yep. Thanks for watching. thanks for listening for all of 2025 see you on the other side 2026 is going to be sick do it except for next week's episode we'll also be here one more bonus episode next week yeah play After Dark 3 there's a third one Waveform was produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network where Vane still wrote the music this has been 2025 on Waveform let's get it
1:40:22Whoops. Just fade to black.
1:40:32All right, for this Clips outro, Ellis is going to be taking another hit of Da Bomb. Ellis, where'd you go?
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1:41:16Right now is the AI gold rush. And that means everybody who builds an app, a platform, a piece of software, a gizmo that somebody, anything, everybody is trying to put AI everywhere. And for two weeks in a series on the Vergecast, we are talking through what that looks like. We're talking to developers about what they're building and how they're building it. And whether AI actually does make sense everywhere or is just going to ruin everything in the process. That's the AI miniseries on the Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. This series is presented by MongoDB.
From the publisher
It's the. last regularly scheduled episode of the year and the gadgets just keep coming! Marques, Andrew, and David get right into the Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold before talking about a new Instagram app and a new AI feature coming soon to a Gmail near you! After that, it's all about the EV world with discussion turning to the discontinuation of the Ford F-150 Lightning and then a quick recap on Rivian's Autonomy day. We close it out by recapping some of our best and worst predictions from last year. It's a chaotic one this week. Enjoy!
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