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Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

You Can’t Sell Your Cybertruck and Nikon Buys RED

15 Mar 2024 · 1 h 21 min
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In short

Podcast Summary: Waveform - Episode: You Can’t Sell Your Cybertruck and Nikon Buys RED

Episode Overview In this episode of the Waveform Podcast, hosts Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, and David Imel discuss a variety of recent tech news, including the implications of Tesla's Cybertruck resale policies, Nikon's acquisition of RED cameras, Spotify's new feature adding music videos, and the competitive landscape involving TikTok and Instagram. The episode wraps up with trivia and a light-hearted discussion about various tech topics.

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Key Topics Covered

  1. Tesla Cybertruck Resale Issues
  2. Resale Restrictions: Tesla has implemented a policy preventing Cybertruck owners from reselling their vehicles within the first year. If breached, owners may face significant financial penalties or blacklisting.
  3. Market Context: Currently, there is high demand for Cybertrucks, leading to inflated resale values. Tesla's goal is to combat flipping and maintain brand integrity.
  4. Case Study: A Cybertruck owner listed their vehicle for sale and faced cancellation of future orders due to Tesla's monitoring policies.
  1. Nikon Acquires RED Cameras
  2. Background: Nikon's acquisition of RED comes after a complex history, including lawsuits related to video compression technology.
  3. Market Position: Nikon aims to enhance its presence in the high-end cinematography space. The integration of RED is seen as an opportunity for Nikon to innovate and possibly improve the quality of both brands' products.
  4. Discussion: The hosts critique the implications of this acquisition for the camera industry, with a focus on Nikon's historical struggles and RED's niche status in filmmaking.
  1. Spotify's New Music Video Feature
  2. Feature Launch: Spotify is rolling out a feature allowing premium users to watch music videos associated with songs, akin to YouTube's model.
  3. User Experience: The hosts express concern that Spotify is shifting towards a more visual-centric experience, which may detract from its core audio functionality.
  4. Monetization Perspective: Discussion centers on how Spotify is attempting to keep users engaged in the app, possibly for ad revenue or promotional opportunities.
  1. TikTok's Potential Instagram Rival
  2. New App Development: TikTok is reportedly working on a new app focused on photo sharing, aiming to cater to users who prefer static images over videos.
  3. Market Competition: The ongoing competition between TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms is highlighted, emphasizing the cyclical nature of social media features.

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Key Takeaways

  • Tesla's Cybertruck Policy: Tesla's resale restrictions aim to prevent flipping, reflecting broader concerns about market integrity.
  • Nikon and RED: The acquisition represents a significant shift in the camera industry, with potential benefits and risks for both companies.
  • Spotify's Strategy: The introduction of music videos indicates Spotify's effort to enhance user engagement but raises questions about its long-term identity as primarily an audio platform.
  • TikTok's Expansion: The potential new app from TikTok highlights the competitive landscape of social media, where platforms continually adapt by borrowing features from one another.

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Trivia Segment

  • Trivia Question: What propulsion technology powered over half of automobiles registered in the U.S. in 1902?
  • Correct Answer: Steam Engine (Host's guesses included electric motors and pedometers).
  • Additional Trivia Note: There were 909 new automobiles registered in 1902, with 485 using steam power.

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Final Thoughts The episode is a rich exploration of current trends in technology and media, emphasizing how companies adapt to market demands and user preferences. The lively discussions among the hosts reflect their expertise and passion for technology, making it an engaging listen for tech enthusiasts.

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Links & Social Media

  • Follow the podcast and hosts on their respective social media platforms for updates and discussions:
  • [Waveform Podcast Twitter](https://twitter.com/WVFRM)
  • [Marques Brownlee Twitter](https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd)
  • [Andrew Manganelli Twitter](https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli)
  • [David Imel Twitter](https://www.threads.net/@davidimel)

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Transcript

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0:00I'm NFL linebacker TJ Watt and this is my personal best. YPB by Abercrombie is the activewear I'm always wearing. That's why I reached out to co-design their latest drop. I worked with designers to create high-performance activewear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in-store, online, and in the app, because your personal best is greater than anything.

0:33Yo, what is 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. This week, in this episode, we've got a bunch of stuff. We have Red being acquired by Nikon. Nikon? Nikon is actually how it's said. Theoretically, anyway. Cybertruck resellers being punished by Tesla. TikTok competing with Instagram. Spotify adding another feature we're not too sure about. And a whole bunch of other random stuff probably in between. but first but first i want to show you something okay both of you and yes it's a keyboard fair warning okay but i built this keyboard last night it was specialty made for the studio so this is a one-of-one i have the case i'm gonna hand it to you oh my gosh okay it's in a jesus that's a little heavy it's uh it's in a yeah it's in a really nice case well this is not the case for it but i just put it in there for the effect it's just a lame other case i guess well it's for another cool keyboard but this was specialty made for uh geez oh god keyboard so this is a keyboard from a company called geist machine and they make this really wild super heavy beautiful german made keyboard and they're fans of the channel and they made a matte black version is this time yep that's cool with an incredible set of keycaps that are red and black and with our red keycap on the escape that is super cool i think looks beautiful well let me just put it down real quick while you're doing that can we settle something right now a dispute that ellis and i have been having for weeks what do you want knobs on your keyboard yes yes yes and yes yes or no well isn't ellis's argument knob versus rotary dial or something like that.

2:27My argument is that people think they want knobs. They live in this fantasy world. But actually, they don't use their knobs. I use my volume knob all the time. Volume knob is maybe one of the few acceptable answers. But when people are like, I want some knobs on my desk so I can map to my go-to parameters in Photoshop. Maybe brush size. Maybe. But all that stuff, look, if you really want rotary encoding, get a jog wheel. If you want to control a parameter, get a fader. Get out of my face, frankly. That sounds nice. Does it feel nice? It feels really nice, right? When I was in the mechanical keyboards in 2013, none of this stuff existed.

3:11There were not companies. It's the ultra hobbyist. This is art at this point. There were not all these companies that were making these steel keyboards. That just did not exist. I just want you to hold this. Yeah, David needs to see this. I'm scared. It is 60%, so you probably wouldn't actually use it because you don't have function keys. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. But this is custom. It's all custom matte black. It's usually like a silver and a copper, like rose gold color. This is straight copper, and they painted it. And then it has this cool see-through. They made us custom red gaskets for it, and then this keycap set is wild.

3:44We're looking at the website now, and it is gorgeous. Yeah, I'm worried you're going to tell me the price is like... Oh, it's like$800 plus. No way! For the regular version, and not including keycaps or stabilizers or switches. Wait, just for the body? Yeah. What? You get a keyless keyboard for$800? Not just keyless. No switches, no stabilizers. It's a piece of metal. When you guys are typing tests, something like trying out a keyboard, what do you type? Andrew Manganielli is the best. I'm not even kidding. I usually type the alphabet. Or like something Andrew Manganielli is the best in the world.

4:21And then I just start like riffing off that, which usually just means like, and he is so cool. And this keyboard is pretty awesome. Or this keyboard sucks. I started typing like I am typing so fast right now. I started typing about how I'm typing. I always write or I type the cat is so very meow. That's what I always type. Type it right now. I usually say this is very cool over and over again. Now rate your typing experience of the cat is very meow. One out of ten. Very high. The main thing with these mechanical keyboards is... I want a number, David. Need a review. 7. Ooh. 7.8. There it is. Tough critic.

5:03Actually, maybe higher. Maybe 8.1. This is every hobby, by the way. Where someone goes, isn't it gorgeous? By the way, it's seven times as much as the normal ones. I mean, but it's not even... Okay, my main thing is that these cases are always so tall. that unless I have a wrist rest true I don't like typing with my fingers like this people do like wrist rest he did send there's another version of this that has an adjustable bracket on the back so you don't use this wheel and you use it so it will change the typing angle but it is taller I love the angle I just want a wrist rest to be able to make it you want a solid copper wrist rest that's also 7 pounds you could eat caviar off of it or wait you could not eat caviar off of it which one is the caviar hurt someone oh i don't know this wheel is epic though it's really nice i i agree with you though it is like i compare the keyboard space to like the sneaker space a lot it's similar it's like the sneaker space you could compare it to sports hobbies you can compare it to cars hobbies where you get past a certain point and it's theoretically actually worse for the everyday person but you like appreciate things about it that other people haven't and there's like rarities of some that were like this i don't believe there's many people in the company making this they're from germany and they're like doing an incredible job at making these like as high quality as possible so you're describing a porsche yeah or or like a pair of jordans that have like a certain type of leather or collabed with travis scott or whatever something like that like it is the same jordan but you're paying seven times the price for it oh my gosh It's just heavy.

6:40But yeah, I just wanted to, sorry, I didn't want to totally sidetrack this, but I wanted to show it. I built it last night. It was super fun to build and it is a beautiful - You're trying to pick it up. Okay, hold on. Speaking of things that are extraordinarily high quality, RED. We use RED cameras. Nice. And a lot of things that we do, especially on the MKBHD channel. Yeah. Out of nowhere. Well, somewhere. Well, yeah, out of somewhere. but kind of out of nowhere. Red gets acquired by Nikon. Nikon. Nikon. I'm just going to keep saying it both ways every time because people say both. Can't upset anyone that way.

7:19Yeah. What could go wrong? No, so I've never used a Nikon camera. Actually, that's not true. I've used a couple, but I've never shot mainly on any channel with Nikon. I always used to rag on Austin Evans because he shot on Nikon cameras for a while. We'd go to CES, and he'd be the only one using a Nikon camera. and you all picked on him yeah we're like you're still using him what is this camera why are you using this one and he loved it and it was great but like he eventually switched and there's just not that many nikon video cameras out there so to an extent i see why nikon is getting into the high-end cinematography space with red yeah but there is also some history to nikon and red isn't there there is you want to get into that sure yeah so there was a lawsuit that has been going on since 2022 in my opinion one of the stupidest lawsuits of all time it's like a petty lawsuit yeah dumber than no the mcdonald's hot coffee i sidetracked that no that's real that's legit just kidding keep going yes one's yeah closer to real yeah sure so for a very long period of time people have been trying to shoot compressed internal raw on their cameras which basically means like if you took a raw photo versus a jpeg it's it's compressing it slightly but it's still raw so it's it's storing a ton of dynamic range and all this information color information so it's super flexible in post now normally when you shoot video you have the option of like uh h.264 h.265 which are compression algorithms which basically take intra-frame compression it's this whole thing but over time a lot of camera companies have been trying to figure out ways to basically like up the quality of their video so apparently raw has had a patent on compressed internal raw video nikon's had a patent on it red or red redhead yeah you said raw head red redhead red okay redhead raw yeah yeah red patented compressed raw internal recording okay so that no other video camera yeah could do compressed internal raw recording yeah and i remember this because i remember when the nikon z7 and z6 came out or z9 yeah z7 and z6 came out like a number of years ago they didn't have it but if you used an atomos ninja which is like this external monitor that is also a recorder that goes on top of your camera you could record raw yeah and so i was always like I wonder why they're doing that.

9:51It must be a buffer speed thing or something like that. Turns out it was just because of this lawsuit. So when the Z9 came out, which is Nikon's highest end, super fast camera that doesn't even have a shutter, I think. It's just all just like, reading. Yeah. It's the noise it makes. Reading. Do you remember that Sony camera with the boost button and we found that at an artificial sound? Now that's what I'm imagining. You hold the Z9 and it goes, reading. yeah that'd be great yeah so the z9 came out uh in 2022 i think and it it had internal compressed raw built in and nikon was just like yeah we think that that is a stupid patent that should never even have been granted and i think at this point they were just like we are going to like take this on and if you sue us then maybe we can get your patent removed because it's stupid in general and i i agree like i think you should not be able to patent something like that because then you're just controlling the entire camera market it's too broad it also feels and maybe you can explain this better but there's already raw photos which does not have a patent correct i presume so like all you're doing is taking the new version of it's just doing raw on something else so yeah so i guess what could is their patent it's the idea of compressed raw yeah compressed specifically so you could do because uncompressed raw is gigantic and ridiculous anyway but they had all these compression ratios and so i'm sure they wanted to just patent that but they ended up patenting something so broad that it just applied to all compressed raw yeah okay so we used to shoot like remember the ratios would be like five to one or 22 to one now they've simplified it to just lq mq hq okay those are the compression ratios of how lossy is the raw it's kind of a weird way of saying it so they essentially just tried to compress their compression or sorry they applied their compression into their compression but it just covered compressed raw which is super okay in my opinion that makes sense but it wasn't just like red's like we did it first no one else gets also compressed raw is a little bit of an oxymoron it sounds like it because the whole point of raw but i assume what they're doing is like uh in raw photos at least if you have completely uncompressed raw it's taking like everything that the sensor is capturing most of which are human eyes cannot even perceive.

12:13It's like frequencies of light that we can't even see. All this redundant information. So compressed RAW is pretty much like the HQ in red. It's like everything up to the stuff that doesn't matter at all. So it's still huge amounts of data except for a little bit of stuff. So is it just a different codec basically? Or not codec, like format? Like how when you would compress a picture, a RAW photo to like a JPEG. They're compressing a raw video into whatever they made that's their red thing yeah and that's what they tried to yeah they patented the idea the whole idea it's like if you patented like if you had a special fishing rod that had a certain mechanism to catch more fish and then you just patented good fishing rod it's like okay you did have a cool idea there but like that's too broad and now anyone else who has that a similar but slightly different good idea can't use it it It sounds like they just took two things that were already things and when put them together and they were like, we did this.

13:15They were the first people to Google search compress raw. So no one searched it and then tried to patent. What they should have been able to patent is the specific compression algorithm that they were using for Red Raw. Exactly. That's what they should have been granted a patent for. And R3Ds are dope and I love them. Yeah. I was going to say, is that specifically Red's fault or is that just like the patent office not having any idea? Okay. I'm sure Red wasn't upset about it. Yeah. Okay. I'm sure Red tried their luck. It's like when, what was that YouTube group that tried to patent the idea? They tried to patent the word React.

13:47The Fine Bros. The Fine Bros. Trademark or patent. Oh, was it? They tried to trademark reactions. Yeah, React. React. The word React. So that you couldn't make a YouTube video without paying them. You couldn't make a video with like, you couldn't make a, they had this whole series that was React. React. Yeah. So they wanted to just like own that. and they figured that the best way to do that was to make sure other youtubers couldn't do it boy did that go well yeah yeah super well sony tried to get the trademark on let's play like way back just not good so dumb don't do that guys so yeah so okay so back to the story so red was suing nikon in 2022 over oh sorry nikon was suing red in 2022 over this really stupid patent and And then randomly in April of 2023 last year, I remember this happening randomly.

14:41They just dropped the lawsuit and they didn't disclose why they dropped the lawsuit. So yesterday when I was doing research on this, I was reading a bunch of articles from when they dropped the lawsuit and everyone was like, yeah, they probably settled some like internal thing that like they came to some agreement. Well, they did. and I'm like oh so then this news comes out of nowhere on I think Monday morning that Nikon had just this was Thursday because we had finished editing the broadcast and everyone was expecting it last right but you were already in Japan yeah yeah so uh that Nikon has just acquired red which seems insane to me because Nikon theoretically everyone has kind of been like like Nikon's on their deathbed for like years.

15:25Yeah. Because the Z6 and Z7 and Z8 and Z9, as good of cameras as they are, they're just not very popular. And almost every camera manufacturer actually doesn't make most of their money from their like consumer cameras, to be fair. Like Fujifilm makes almost all of its money from medical devices. And then of their consumer cameras, like 80 % of their margin is in stacks, which is the like little instant film cameras. Wow. So they make almost no money from actual consumer digital cameras. And I assume Nikon is similar. But I don't know specifically what categories Nikon makes all their money. Either way, it seems pretty crazy because Red is like a very well-known camera company in the industry.

16:07But they're also super niche as well. Like I'm assuming their sales numbers. I don't know what their profit margins are, but like neither of those seem like companies that are selling. Red is the underdog in the cinema industry. they have to like consistently kind of like showcase like these movies are shot on red i promise these movies are shot in red yeah yeah and whenever you i always like that you can see like what cameras certain films or award-winning movies are shot on yeah and red sneaks in there like lots of re lots of canon but there's a bunch that are shot on red so they make it known and red does have this reputation at this point i think when people hear red camera they think oh expensive cinema camera uh guardians of the galaxy yeah i know red yeah so yeah they're out there i kind of they strike me as like the well-known but like the lotus of of camera manufacturers like you know who they are but you realize they really don't actually sell that many cameras even though they're used by a bunch of studios yeah so i'm not shocked that nikon has the money or whatever to acquire them i'm just i mean they don't they haven't detailed how much it was for or any of the terms or whatever but yeah i don't know whenever whenever i see something like this i wonder what are they going to do now and now that they own it are they going to change a bunch of stuff are we going to have nikon logos on the rest of the red cameras that come out from here on out like what is happening they're a subsidiary so i don't think they're going to change anything continue to operate like fully independently i would guess that possibly nikon and or uh red probably was like yeah we're gonna lose this lawsuit and we should just take a deal or something like that something that I've always noticed is if you go on like red's shot on red page all the movies that have been shot on red generally have like really really heavy color grading like very very intense color grading um and I don't know if that's just like there's a reason that people shoot on red because they want to be able to color grade like that but um that's just something I always notice versus like Ari Ari's usually a lot a little more like subtle yeah yeah I I know that I shoot on red because the color science is so good.

18:12It's so good. It's so stupidly good. Now some Nikons might have that. Honestly, that would be nice. That would be really nice because we shoot Canon for a lot of the same reasons, like good color science, easy, good autofocus. If we suddenly had a bunch of Nikon cameras that had red level color science, I'd be pretty happy. The most annoying thing about Nikon is that their mount and their focus and zoom are all backwards. Yeah from everyone else something about that strikes me also as lawsuit related I think it's just petty you think yeah because like every other camera Manufacturer just does the same direction as as can like mounting lenses is always this It's like slightly different for every mount like Canon is like 12 o 'clock 3 o 'clock and then like RF mount is 3 o 'clock 5 o 'clock or whatever and Nikon is like a different direction.

19:00Yeah, it's just they're all slightly different Is PL an open standard? I don't know. Because it's kind of just locking it in. I feel like, yeah. It must be open because it's not really a mount. Yeah, I don't know who would own it. But yeah, a lot of people make PL glass, so. Yeah. Anyway, I should have brought my Nikon. I did buy my first RED camera while I was in Japan. Okay. I bought a Nikon FM2 titanium because I love titanium. Sick. Anyway. Is it film? Yeah, it's film. Of course it's film. Of course it's check. Of course it's film. do you think they're gonna still be so against the patent now that they own it nope i hope not because nikon was aggressively arguing that red should have never even have been granted the patent and so if they turned around bought red and then started enforcing on other people it would be the dumbest that would be hilarious i wouldn't put it past them yeah that's the greatest business especially if you're just saying they're not doing that great that sounds like a great way to That's like politics where you like debate the person over and over.

20:00And by the end, you're like, I endorse this person to be the president. That's like, that's exactly how it goes. They're the worst person I've ever met. They're terrible for democracy. But you need to vote for them. Vote for them now. Yeah. Well, we'll see how red operates. I'm very curious. If we get better Nikon cameras, that's a win. If we get better red cameras somehow, that's also a win. Yeah. I don't think that the red logo or anything is going to have Nikon on it. but I guess you would worry if the biggest worry would be if red stuff starts declining in quality because like Nikon starts taking over a little more we love random tech takeovers of course we're Nikon boys now well not in the pod, we're Canon boys in the pod that's true speaking of I tried to stall that as long as I could for you to get that one speaking of random tech speaking of great colors Blue Sky let its users pick their own moderation photos.

20:56Red. What do you mean? Oh, that's good. Oh, I was talking about color science. Oh. It works either way. I like them both. It's like a double entendre. Wait, what shut down last week? What was it? Rooster Teeth. Rooster Teeth got shut down by Warner Brothers, I think, because they bought them. Warner Brothers Discovery. Get it right. Oh my gosh. Which will soon be Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery Max. Which will soon be warner brothers paramount discovery max red nikon which will then be netflix here at dr pepper here at dr pepper okay i get one good segue and y 'all gotta take over no that was good so what happened to blue sky yeah i don't know oh okay okay all right we almost had it uh okay so so blue sky just uh opened up a new open source tool called ozone that is allowing users to set their own moderation filters.

21:48Wait, is this a pun? The ozone thing? Yeah. Oh. Yeah, it is. Solid. Because it's a blue sky. That's the thing that blue sky's ever done. You didn't notice that? No. Did blue sky change their logo yet? Yeah, they did. It's a butterfly now. That app icon was so bad. I don't know why it's a butterfly now, though. That doesn't make any sense. It's still better than the just, like, photo of the clouds. I don't know. I liked that. I liked that too. It did not, yeah, it did not match inside of, yeah, at least use a vector. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. Anyway, yeah, they're letting users customize their own moderation filters with this open source tool.

22:20So effectively, you have this feed, this social media feed. And the biggest issue in social media consistently is how to do content moderation, right? Because X has now gone on this direction of like, we're going to do less content moderation. So you just kind of get everything. You get people yelling at you. You get random porn bots in your comments nonstop. But that's the way they want it to be. So that's the way it's going to be. Can I jump in on X real quick? Do you guys get Liver King ads? Yes. No. I started getting it yesterday. I get full on ads of just Liver King. Yeah. Promoting what?

22:53Himself. Or Liver King. Oh. Himself. It's wild. I haven't gotten that at all. Weird. Sorry. That just seems like the state of Twitter ads right now is porn mobile games or Liver King. It's all repeat ads. I'm like, oh, that's kind of annoying. And then the next 700 times I open Twitter, that ad is in the same place every time. Yeah. But yeah, okay. Yeah, so their approach is like less moderation, kind of just let it go, even though Linda Yoccarino would not say that's the case. That's the case. And then Threads, which is runaway meta, is like, we don't want politics on Threads. So they specifically downrank political content, which is very annoying for like journalists that use social media to get news, all of this stuff.

23:38And they, you know, they are going to be fetterizing, which means that you're going to be able to have threads on other platforms. You could make like a, their API is going to be open. So you're theoretically going to be able to have your own app that runs its own social media content moderation. But Blue Sky is basically letting users create their own content moderation platforms that other people can use. And it's sort of like Reddit where you can have basically moderators that are able to go through a queue that users that are using that content moderation version can like report things that slip through the cracks and then you'll have people that can like you know do that it's like a little more community focus i am a little confused about this because like are they like it's just letting a bunch of users i guess become a moderator and then moderate things what's stopping that from enough of a group taking control of what they want to moderate or you have to join theirs.

24:40You get to pick, you join a moderator. So ultimately it's completely unmoderated and then the users moderate some things and you can decide to go into that. Blue Sky itself, like bluesky.social, the main Blue Sky, regular Blue Sky website, they have their own content moderation team. Like Blue Sky has its own policies that moderate content in a very specific way. And then this is adding on top of that. I was adding on top of that. Okay. Yeah. So it's like there's a default level of content moderation. And then this is like additional content moderation if you want to do that. Okay. Yeah. It stacks on top.

25:12Yeah. Stacks on top. Stacks on top. The main thing I was worried about there is that the base of this was totally unmoderated. Just completely nothing. Yeah. No, that would be worse. My main observation is that they should rename it. Yeah. Because ozone is technically bad for blue sky. No. No, the ozone layer is good. Oh the hole in the ozone is bad. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we got rid of the hole. No, you didn't. Yeah, we did. Yeah, we did. We fully got rid of the hole. Yeah, we fully healed it. When did we do that? Do whatever you want. Burn those leaves in your backyard. Whoa. Because everything that was causing the hole was like the aerosol spray cans in the in the hairspray.

25:49Okay, so we just hope that no more hole develops in the ozone. No, we're just like not doing that stuff. We like full this is back when we actually cared about climate change and we could make like meaningful changes fast yeah but i guess the analogy here is the hole in the ozone would be a hole in moderation yeah so we hope that they're the ozone layer is like a layer that protects the like harmful radiation from coming into earth and warming the earth exactly so the ozone is a is is not the ozone is not the hole it was a hole in the ozone layer right the ozone itself is like a protective i'm exposing my lack of science i thought the atmosphere was keeping things in and the hole was letting it out.

26:30No. No, the hole was the opposite. Radiation is too much carbon dioxide buildup. No, no, the ozone's not about carbon. Yeah, it's separate. It's totally separate. But what if we did put a hole in the ozone and then all the carbon could leak out? Neil deGrasse Tyson's watching this. Bring the aerosol back. God, make it stop. I don't know enough about climate change to dispute you, so maybe we should... Raleigh! But what you were saying proves that the term ozone is perfect. It is, yes. It is. totally fair all right good call blue sky good name good name a little bit of trivia that will quick trivia that will make it make more sense okay ozone is o3 you know how h2o there's like two oxygens ozone has three oxygens gotcha when you put it all together it's a pale blue gas that's more confusing pale blue blue sky blue blue gas so is there just a bunch of pale blue gas in the atmosphere that stops the radiation from warming the earth and it there's a cycle too, right?

27:25Like I believe that it loses an oxygen and then it rebonds with the radiation and we need Raleigh back here. There is a cycle involved. I'm going to preempt this that we are not scientists and please do not take it. That should be painfully obvious by now. They knew. I thought I was smart. Yeah, I think this is a very interesting idea. We were considering doing something around all of these different protocols that are opening up for these social media platforms because i think ever since twitter got purchased and turned into x there's just been this rat race for like what's the next big social media platform gonna be and everyone's doing things a little differently like blue sky has the app protocol which is like if you own your own domain then your handle is just like at david ml.com is my handle and it can go everywhere whereas threads is trying to fetterize so that you can just like have one account on one website but then those posts will also show up on other websites and then x is just doing nothing i mean so actually just trying to burn slower than the other ones yeah yeah it is crazy because people if you asked us like eight months ago we all would have thought x would be dead by now but it's still it's significantly worse to be on but it still just has the user base which is why yeah that's the thing that matters i still don't know i mean they're still cash flow negative so I don't really understand how they're still making any money or how they're still alive.

28:51Liver King ads. Liver King. He's funding them. Anyway. I found the best new social media app recently. Oh no. Best. Best one. Strava. None of them can compete. Strava. It's called Bird Buddy. And what you do is it pairs with a piece of hardware. You put this birdhouse with a webcam in it in your yard and every time a bird comes and hangs out at your birdhouse it takes a picture of it. but then with this product there's this app and it's like a tiktok style swipe for you feed of just birds that are showing up at people's houses all over the world there's only one engagement button it's an applause if you like the bird you applaud the bird there's no negativity there's not even other people no moderation so it's not moderation it's not social media it's really wholesome what would stop you from tiktok for doing a musical dance in front of the bird feeder or way worse things that's a great question what would stop you is that it actually has really good let's start content moderation vision what if I dressed as a bird it's good enough to know like what people are and to not show people and what's really funny is that it'll publish other animals that'll show up so it'll be like oh there's a robin oh there's like a parrot from someone in the tropics squirrel yeah a squirrel like right against the camera he told me about this a couple weeks ago and I want it so bad We should get such a good idea.

30:16What's a bird buddy's content moderation, Paul? This sounds like a social media app that you would make up for a trivia question. I know, but it's real. But I guess I believe you. It's real, and it's solar power too, so you never have to charge your bird house. It's only a photo or a video? It's a video. Okay, it's video, right? It's a video. Yeah, and it's a good video. I had to get my father-in-law. The name Twitter is available now. Is it available? Well, no. But I'm just saying it's not being... I'm just saying it's not being used. Don't get rid of the name Bird Buddy quite yet. Yeah, I'm just saying it's not being used.

30:51You know, okay, before I round this out, you know what was a great social media app that I really like? Strava. I love Strava. Yeah, biking. But you know what's weird about Strava? I have like 100 followers and I don't know any of them. That's same. And this weird thing happened where I signed up for Strava and I just like, I guess, reserved the MKBHC username and then the next morning I woke up to like a couple hundred and I'm like what what do you yeah why yeah because it's literally just gonna GPS tag where I am yeah you can like turn it off or you can also like hide your start and end points so they know generally where you're anyway it's like yeah I went on this I went on a run on Sunday and I had like 20 people give me kudos on my run and I don't know any of them.

31:39But I do like checking in and seeing like when and where Adam ran, and then I can be like, we ran the same amount. I don't know. He just texted me, he's like, look behind you. I think that's healthy social media, besides the stocking part of Strava. But the rest of it, I think it's pretty healthy. Fair. I like the bird one. Yeah, I like the bird one too. You should get one. You got the house for it. Bird app, what are they called? Bird Buddies. Bird Buddies. Bird app. If you wanna send us some, I'll definitely use it. the logo should be a twitter logo it's available hey we should take a quick break and we should do trivia oh yeah I hope this is bird related trivia or Nikon related trivia or both lots of people take bird photos with Nikons that's a great point I would argue that most bird photos that's absolutely true I will say concert photographers and nature photographers always Nikon I do always see people at parks with Nikons and lenses that are taller than they are Yes.

32:37There are always 600 millimeter lenses every time. But then when it gets to sports, they go back to Canon. Really? There's a lot of Nikon sports photography, but there's a lot of Canon. I bet Canon's taken over recently. I feel like the 1DX was like the Olympics camera. Yeah. Anyway, it's not a bird question, but it is a Nikon question. Oh, God, I'm going to fail. Earlier this episode, we talked about Nikon's camera business being smaller than we expected, but they are actually the second largest manufacturer of a device called a stepper. A stepper is an essential piece of equipment for manufacturing.

33:12What? Ouch, Ellis. Hint, it's in all of your phones. And it's not a camera. It's not. What else is it not? It's not a birdhouse that watches your birds. It's not a part of a camera? They're in cameras. The thing it makes is in a camera. Stepper. Oh, I know the answer. Wow. Oh, I know the answer. That's crazy. Wow. Way to go. Okay. Wait, let me write that down. I don't want to forget. But they're going to think about it too, and the answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back. Is it patented? I don't think so.

33:59support for this show comes from shopify when you're starting a new business there's so much to do sometimes it can feel like you're playing in a super bowl but you're the only one on your team shopify says they can help shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world offering tools to help your one-man band play like a champion shopify says they can help your business grow with sales, design, marketing, and more. Can't design a website? No problem. Shopify offers beautiful, ready-to-use templates that fit your brand's style. Need extra support? Their AI-powered commerce tools can assist with everyday tasks like enhancing product photos, writing product descriptions, or generating discount codes.

34:34And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. You can turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash waveform. So just go to shopify.com slash waveform, shopify.com slash waveform. Okay. Welcome back. We are going to talk about selling your Cybertruck. Hmm. Time already. All right. All right. Okay. So we had our first case of somebody getting punished by selling their Cybertruck or so be it.

35:17We'll get back to that later in the story. But if you're unaware, Tesla has a kind of confusing stipulation about purchasing a Cybertruck right now, where if you remember back when the F-150 first came out, there was this clause in it that you couldn't sell it for a year. Do you remember that? The lightning. Yeah, sorry. The F-150 lightning. And that whole thing stemmed from essentially people wanted it and they were going to resell it. So in order to combat reselling, dealerships were marking it up horribly and then that got in the press and that was terrible so then ford was like if we put this no selling for one year clause maybe dealerships will not mark it up as bad that didn't work at all they still marked it up but that was the idea behind it and people weren't very happy about this i just bought something i should be able to do whatever i want with it yeah um so then now tesla the reason they're doing something very similar um the reason it's a more confusing is because when you're first placing orders this clause was there then they removed it now it's back in so if you are buying a cyber truck right now pretty much you cannot sell it within the first year um if you try to sell it within that first year you can ask tesla for approval to resell it um and if they approve it they get first dibs at buying it um at the final price sheet plus 25 cents per mile reasonable wear and tear minus 25 minus 25 yeah sorry minus 25 cents per mile reasonable wear and tear and the cost to repair the vehicle to tesla's standards if they approve you but decline to buy it then you can resell it but if you breach the terms they tesla says they can seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of the title of the vehicle or demand liquidated damages from you in the amount of fifty thousand dollars or the value received as consideration for the sale or transfer, whichever is greater.

37:06They'll just take your money if you sell it. It sounds like they're trying to get either the amount of money you made on top of it or$50 ,000. Just wait the year. If you resell it. Yeah, I mean, they're trying to make, I assume, a consequence that's high enough to where it's going to prevent people from reselling. I feel like people could still, if they just didn't really drive it for a year, could still flip it in a year for more. Well, the thing about the Cybertruck is it is currently extremely rare. Yeah. And they're aiming for it to be mass produced. So in the window between now and when it is mass produced is when you can make the most money flipping in.

37:47So as of right now, we just took delivery of Cybertruck. It's very, very hard to get a Cybertruck. And there are a very, very small number of auctions of people actually like selling Cybertrucks. and they're going for$200 ,000,$300 ,000 because it's almost impossible to get one otherwise. Super, super high demand, super low supply. When supply matches demand, nobody can sell these things for over sticker anymore. So everyone who gets one is like a little bit tempted, like, oh, I have this super rare thing. I kind of would like to flip it. But everyone hates flipping and flippers. And so in order to combat flippers, this is the thing that Tesla's decided to do, which is just make it against the rules to flip it.

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38:28But then the other half of that is, yeah, I own it. I should be able to do whatever I want. If someone wants to spend$300 ,000 for it, I should be able to just let them do it. So, yeah, it is kind of a weird place that they're in. I don't know if there's a much better idea, though. No, yeah. I mean, when the Ford F-150 lighting happened, it was similar. People were flipping them. Dealerships were marking them up. This was their attempt at combating it. they did a similar thing where you're not supposed to sell it for one year i don't know what their punishments were if we remember the hummer ev people were reselling that there was no clause like this but didn't we meet someone who's like i bought a drawer for two weeks and then made like forty thousand dollars on selling it and to people that's totally worthy here's the thing about this though uh there's one more piece in the agreement as well after what you read which is tesla can also blacklist you from ever buying another tesla ever again perfect and the thing about people who buy Cybertrucks is they love Tesla, especially in this early stage.

39:25So they really want to be able to get the Roadster and whatever future Cybertruck, whatever they're going to buy. So they really don't want to take the risk. So do you see Doug DeMuro's video? No, I have that in here. That's saying he... So he wants to review the Cybertruck and the way he wants to operate is, you know, cars and bids. He has this website where you can sell cars. So typically his method is when he reviews a car, he reviews a car that's literally going to be sold on cars and bids. So if he reviews the new Lamborghini Starato, it's because that one is being sold. And here's the listing, you can buy the car he just reviewed.

39:59So his strategy is okay. I'm not going to review a Cybertruck until I get one listed on cars and bids. But the thing about the Cybertruck is you can't sell it for a year. So everyone who's thinking about selling it, I mean, you should watch this video. It's really interesting, but like, they're like, can you like hide the VIN number and like make sure Tesla doesn't know that it's me and like maybe my username is like not my name so hopefully Tesla doesn't find out and kind of like these skittish sellers like thinking maybe I'll sell it and then backing out like never mind I sold someone else a private party never mind I'm not gonna do it so he hasn't been able to get his hands on one I'm sure he will soon but the the the blacklisting part is is what I think is getting to people is they want to keep getting well and so that's what we see here is we have the first case of that happening um somebody posted on the tesla cybertruck owners club forum that uh moving forward any future orders placed by you will be canceled without a refund of the hundred dollar reservation or the 250 order fee as official notification has been provided to you regarding this matter so this person had a cybertruck they i don't know what they said they were just feeling it out on selling it and it was up on CarGurus with the VIN number, which is where I don't know if CarGurus just finds local sales and puts it all up there, but he had it listed for$242 ,069.

41:23So it was$2 ,420 ,69. So like kind of meme-y, I guess. But he also claims there were like 20 other Cybertruck listings on CarGurus, but he did have two other Cybertrucks reserved that got canceled. And he did get the reservation fees back for that because that was before they told him any future ones will be canceled without being refunded. So he did get that back. And I'm assuming he's not facing this$50 ,000 because it never actually sold. So he didn't actually sell it. But now someone who has two other Cybertruck reservations are now canceled. Yeah, so before I took delivery, I read the agreement.

41:57It's literally if Tesla thinks you're thinking about selling it. What? Yeah, if you list it anywhere, if you scout buyers, that's enough for them to totally blacklist you. I totally think even though he's just memeing around and I think it's kind of funny that he memed a little too close to the sun and got a... I think his excuse is his memeing around, but he had one and he was like, I wonder if I could sell it. Let's see who bites. That's enough for Tesla. If they both, they would. Yeah, for sure. I think this breaks the agreement, for sure. Whether or not you agree about the agreement, this breaks the agreement.

42:26But yeah, we did see an actual guy get blacklisted now because he put it up for a meme price and probably would have taken it. So now everyone else who thought that maybe they could get away with it is now like, maybe I don't want to publicly flip this or list it on a site that Tesla could find it. Even if you change hands in the app, Tesla can find out. Obviously, your app is attached to your account. So yeah, there's a lot of that going on. If you sell privately, the VIN number gets transferred in the reservation or the registration, right? So they could figure that out no matter. You would have to basically be like, I'm selling this to you, but it's going to stay under my name for a year.

43:06which seems sketch super super sketchy yeah there was a ton of backlash when ford tried to do this but i think it was more around for dealerships having like really terrible market prices and being in the bad spotlight i guess i guess my take is as much as i hate flipping if you're a company that doesn't have dealerships this is probably the most effective way to prevent flipping i can't think of any other way and this is new to cybertruck and maybe there's like some image that they're trying to uphold but with the cybertruck specifically but like lots of other companies do things just like this ford gt all of ferrari yeah uh porsche does this with like their high-end gt cars like they don't want you to flip it but a lot of those also have dealerships which will sell you the car plus a markup which is basically what you would have to pay if you're buying a flipped one so that it's sort yes so yeah with with tesla you can only buy one for sticker period which i guess is a good thing but then you can't flip it yeah i i totally get the argument of like i own it i shouldn't be able to do it i hate flipping though like with a passion and yeah i would like to see it stop i wish people just didn't solely do this so people who just want to enjoy something can enjoy it for the real price and not have to pay a lot but that's what i was I don't totally hate the the clause I mean yeah I don't like to yeah I can't think of it yeah I just I just dislike flipping so much I think when Ford did it I was like I didn't really love it but I thought it was a necessary attempt or like an attempt and I didn't mind it that much but did you see what the Ford GT story was no back in the day so they made a new Ford GT which is like this half million dollar supercar and in order to even buy one you had to be invited by Ford.

44:56So that first of all was like almost no one's going to even get a chance to buy one of these special cars. But in the off chance that you are such a high on the list Ford VIP, they'll let you buy one, but you're not allowed to sell it for I think a year or something. And I think there's a famous story about like John Cena getting invited to buy one. And he's like, all right, awesome, great. And he buys it and he can't fit in it. And he's like, well, I need to sell it now. And they didn't want to let him sell it. And it was a whole story. It was a whole thing. Wow. So anytime a company tries to prevent you from selling a thing that you own, it feels wrong because you own it.

45:31Of course, you should be able to sell your property. But yeah, it's been a car thing for a long time. I'm a fan of it. I think it's a great idea. Maybe we should just all buy things that we need and let people buy things at regular price. I don't know. I hate flipping so much. So much. How do you feel about dealership markups? I hate dealership markups also. I think that's a little different, though, because a dealership markup, I don't know the ins and out of it, but it's a whole company running on things. To me, it's just as bad as flipping. I don't think it's just as bad as flipping. It is.

46:05I think it is. I mean, you go to the grocery store and you buy a box of cereal that they're paying a lesser price for. Right, but that has an MSRP. Yeah. So that has a manufacturer's suggested retail price. And you know going in that the grocery store paid wholesale and you're paying MSRP. And the sticker price is the sticker price. I guess it's like there's mark markup markups. Like we're talking like egregious markups. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's like there's always going to be some sort of like delivery fee and some stupid fees at a dealership, which is, I don't like them, but I don't think they're as bad as flipping.

46:37I'll try to find the link. There's a YouTuber who did like a whole three part series talking about what it's like to try to buy a Porsche 911 GT3 RS right now. It is basically impossible to buy one at sticker. There's only two ways to get one. One is if you are a Porsche VIP and the other is buying one like third party with a huge markup because they flipped it. But the thing about becoming a Porsche VIP is the only way to do that is to buy a bunch of other cars from that specific Porsche dealership over time. So you spent so much money with them and then sold the cars back to them for a loss that you basically have lost the amount of money that you would have made if you flipped the car.

47:21So let's say it's a$200 ,000 car. You need to buy a million dollars worth of cars and sell them all back to that dealership and lose$100 ,000 so that you can buy that car for sticker. So you basically paid$300 ,000 even though it's a$200 ,000 sticker. That make sense? So the dealerships get their money out of this super rare car. Yeah. And that's kind of the way it's been. I dislike dealerships a lot. I want to make that clear. Yeah. And some of the insane markups we've seen lately are really stupid. And dealerships, I would rather do direct-to-consumer on everything with an MSRP. I also feel like it's a little different with cars like that, though.

48:01Like those supercars that are selling for that amount of money, it's almost like predatory behavior. And Tesla isn't really, like they're trying to be more about the common person selling to people that actually want it. I agree. this car's sticker is only 2.5x the tesla which is like yeah it's it's expensive it's a supercar but it's not like a it's not like a four gt or like a million dollar car the porsche yeah how much is the msr the porsche it might be 250 sticker okay but the only way to get one new today would be to spend literally four hundred thousand dollars on a on a flipped one or to somehow become i mean this guy in his youtube series gets on the phone and they're like yeah you can buy three porsche ticans right now and we'll give it to you for sticker no that's actually what they offer here's a question and it might not be exactly like you might not be able to tell this easily but is there are these people straight up buying and flipping or are they buying and it's just appreciating after they've actually used it for a while technically yes both like this is a car that is so rare that the only way to get one is to pay way over sticker because it's hard to get but it's not like buy it garage immediately start trying to sell it no yeah that's what people are doing that they're getting blacklisted because porsche hates that so you know the bodega is uh the entire business model of the bodega is to flip grocery store products for a much higher margin just for pure convenience yeah because they're open like almost 24 like i have a bunch around me they're open 24 7 but if i go to the cheap grocery store that's only open until 8 p.m i can buy a box of honey nut cheerios for 250 if i go to the bodega it's seven dollars and they usually have a cat but they're not flipping it like they're also buying from distributors just in lower quantities so they have narrower margins i don't know if they are no no the bodega guy is not going to the grocery store by disagree i've seen it happen i'm pretty sure they're Are B-Shure guys going to Costco and just reselling that?

50:08I can confirm, like, bodegas use proper distribution chains. Probably not every one. Maybe not every one. I don't know. But I think there's other reasons the bodega margins are. Well, their margins are high because it's convenience. Like, they charge higher prices because of convenience. Even if they buy from the distributor, you could say that that's flipping, right? Because it's above MSRP. Isn't that the same thing? No, because you're not taking supply out of the general pool for consumers. That's what I, yeah, I get the difference now. My least favorite thing is like - Unless it's two in the morning.

50:42Then you are the supply. People who find like really good sales where someone who maybe has been looking for a product and it's like, oh, I couldn't afford that. Now it's on sale. I'd love to grab that. And someone buys all of it and then sells it for like its normal price on Amazon and flips it for like, that infuriates me. Yeah. There's a whole shoe conversation in there too. Yeah. That's, I hear you guys like talk and Alex, I'll talk about that all the time. It's like, you just, you get lucky enough. You win the sneakers app thing. You never even expect to wear it, sell it immediately. Cause when you win, I've never done this, but when you win, you get to buy it at sticker, right?

51:15Yeah. Just MSRP. I believe so. And that's the lottery ticket to like buy it at sticker and then immediately turn around and sell it for way more than sticker. Cause very few people have it. You can go like on eBay immediately after a really impressive shoe drops and you'll just see like screenshots of got them yeah it's like i'm getting yeah guaranteed sale yeah it happens with every new product if like the when the um what's that little new game boy thing that came out the limited edition not the play at the analog pocket they do a limited edition drops all the time of different colors and if you go on ebay it's always like uh like guaranteed pre-order like locked in pre-order and they sell it for like over the amount that they bought it for keyboards do it a ton Garrett from Omnitype was telling me how they only made 500 of the Bauer 2 and he said immediately after the raffle went out because 8 ,000 people applied like half of them were on sale do you think if someone like that said if I find out you flipped my keyboard I will never let you buy one of my keyboards again do you think that that would work I have no idea I think most people flipping those things aren't that interested in the keyboard anymore and they just just how do I make money that's why I think some of these cyber truck people the$50 ,000 fine is more in there to be like well we'll come after you for for whatever you whatever because if it's just like we'll blacklist you I'm sure there's people will just be like did I get in the res it's a hundred dollar refundable reservation why not take that gamble of trying to make some money but you can never flip another Tesla again yeah bro if you can make like$50 ,000 off of literally nothing yeah a hundred dollar like for a lot of people it's worth it five-year gamble but That your salary just like boom.

52:51Yeah, somehow every tech story comes back to Taylor Swift But didn't Taylor Swift do this with her ticket sales where like if you tried to get a ticket for the tour You had to like answer questions that only fans would know or something like that. I'm merch You had to buy like X dollars of not the most recent tour for two tours ago Before her and Ticketmaster were were angry at each other back when they were still homies there was a thing where like before the tour got announced she did a merch drop and then everyone who bought x dollars worth of merch got the link first to buy tickets to the tour that kind of reminds me i think tesla is literally doing that with stockholders in taylor's defense she has like the craziest scalper problem in the world like yeah it's wild yeah the stockholder thing just got announced this morning right yeah or yesterday literally tesla's giving early dibs on cyber truck deliveries to people who have owned the stock for a certain amount of time or something oh yeah it was like before a certain date yeah owned it before a certain date you were able to so kind of similar to taylor swift like oh oh you've been a fan for a while huh okay yeah you'll get first dibs you probably aren't going to flip it you probably actually will like and enjoy that's the thing is they just want you to own and enjoy the thing instead of flipping it that's maybe a good filter for them yeah that's funny early cyber truck delivery for verified long-term tesla shareholders if you're an eligible long-term Tesla holder and you made a Cybertruck reservation prior to March 1st 2024 you can get your Foundation Series Cybertruck early that's only like and you need 500 shares people have had reservations for like 4 years at this point right so someone who has a lot of stock and only made the reservation a month ago not even 2 weeks ago can get up and skip the line there's other requirements there's like 5 of them I think but that's like the gist of it.

54:41You have to have 500 trucks. I almost, so I guess Tesla's problem is they have a giant list of 3 million people and they're trying to decide who should get the cars first when they know that hidden within these 3 million people is lots of flippers. So how do we filter through, hopefully in chronological order, how to deliver these trucks to people who will not flip it? Somebody with 500 shares is going to get their early Cybertruck, sell their shares, sell their Cybertruck and just retire. you have to have you have to have at least 85 500 worth of tesla stock yeah to be able to be eligible oh that's a fan well they could have gotten that way less but that means they also yeah i could see tesla eventually just doing the ticket master throw in the towel and just be like we know you're gonna flip these trucks we're gonna create a platform for you to flip them where we can take a cut that's damn yeah because it's like i mean tesla x live nation it's like when ticketmaster started doing that i was like this is the worst possible solution but i i don't have any better ones you know like how do because i'm with you edward it's like if you're gonna buy something just own it yeah like don't take it away from someone who would really want it yeah that's what makes me the most mad is it's taking it away from someone who would have actually like enjoyed it.

56:05Well, the bodegas, you know. But it's okay with the bodegas because there's a cat there. It helps a lot. I will tell you that. It helps a lot. But I still am not happy paying$7 for some milk. That's just any convenience store, too. I've had to do it, too. Like, run to a 7-Eleven for just, like, something like that, and you're paying 30 % more. I would not buy milk at a 7-Eleven. That's not true, Andrew. That's not true. Tell me where else you're gonna get a taquito for$1.89, okay you eat those 30 % up from where big taquito fan I still go to 7-Eleven where do they have taquitos every 7-Eleven ever well that's a good place to take a break I think we got a bunch more to talk about with Spotify and with TikTok so let us take that break and let's also do a do some trivia yeah you didn't do that the first time around no no no Well, it's variable.

57:01You never know. I'm just keeping you on your toes. You're not awake. So that was a whole section about cars. And beds. We got a car question. I don't like cars. Oh, boy. Where's the 7-Eleven question? In 1902. No, it's not a car question. There were 909 new automobiles registered in the United States. 485 of which, that's more than half, were powered by what now uncommon propulsion technology? The MediaTek Dimensity 9000. Pro. Pro. I actually have a guess on that one. Wait, powered by the what? Powered by what now? Uncommon propulsion technology. Uncommon. I think it's, is it growing in commonality?

57:45Well-worded question. I'm not. I plead the fifth. We'll think about it, and we'll be right back.

58:01Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sails professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. welcome back everybody if you're like me and you have never used tiktok in your life well are you in for a treat because uh tiktok wait in your life i do not have a tiktok account but you've never even used it i've seen tiktoks in a web browser when people send me tiktok links but i've never used the app before that's crazy that's like not having summer child for however what do you do yeah what do you do with your time this is why i don't have Holy smokes.

58:59Okay, yeah. Okay, go on. Sorry. Because I know, because Instagram already does this to my brain, right? And they've, you know, I was telling Adam this the other day. Instagram now is like 80 % videos. Yeah, three days after TikTok. Yeah, sure. Yeah, but it's just, I just don't want that. I just don't want that. I don't want to get into those like, I wake up, I look at my phone, and then it's 45 minutes later, and I'm like, I feel like I just woke up, you know, again. That's what TikTok is, yeah. It's bad. I don't want that. Anyway. I love it. So I do have Instagram. I use it like as a portfolio for my photo things.

59:32And unfortunately, it's turning into a video service now, which I don't do. But I do, but not anyway. It's fine. TikTok is allegedly working on an Instagram like app, which I find hilarious because this happens in every single category of every single thing. It's the lobster. It's the crab. The crab. The carcinization. The carcinization, yeah. I like how lobster we were confused, but crab we were like, oh, you're right. Wait, can you explain it for people that don't know what the crab situation is? So evolution always turns things into crabs. Is that the idea? That's what I vaguely remember it as.

1:00:14All roads point to crab evolution. We're all crawling towards crab. TikTok added longer videos and then longer videos, and then now it's just like full-length videos just like YouTube. while YouTube added shorts and it's just like you guys are doing this. Yeah, towards the crab. Yeah, towards the crab. Same with Instagram. Instagram has been adding, they added reels and then it's like TikTok, TikTok and then all of their content is moving towards TikTok and it reminds me of the, we used the meta Rayman glasses versus the Oculus Quest video that we did where they're sort of, they're racing towards each other and like whichever one wins first is gonna be interesting.

1:00:53But it's the same thing. It's like, well, Instagram is trying to copy TikTok. TikTok's trying to copy Instagram. But now TikTok's really trying to copy Instagram by just making an Instagram app. Because I think that they're trying to take advantage of this hole in the market where all of these actual like photographer people who just want to see photos and are really annoyed at the fact that you cannot turn off like these videos on Instagram are complaining constantly about how there's no just like video feed version of Instagram anymore. And I think TikTok. Yeah, photo. Sorry, photo. They just want straight photos.

1:01:26Yeah, I just want straight photos. Yeah. Because I don't want to wake up 25 minutes after looking at my Instagram app and realize I've been watching reels, you know? So, yeah, theoretically, somebody found in an APK breakdown of TikTok, they found a bunch of code references to TikTok photos, which also referenced reaching other like-minded people who enjoy photo posts, which is a very, you know, marketing way to talk to photographers. and it also references syncing posts to TikTok photos which I assume means it's gonna be photo-focused but has TikToks in it sort of how Instagram is theoretically supposed to be photo-focused with reels in it.

1:02:10We'll also see if that happens because right now we're in the midst of the US attempting to ban TikTok. Again. Again. Oh, again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, again, it's been brought up before. It didn't happen. It's almost impossible to talk about this without getting into super politics. So we prefer not to do that. But it ultimately feels like the goal is less of a full ban and more of it to be owned by a U.S.-based company. And I think this morning they actually passed a bill in the House to push it forward. So who knows what's going to happen with TikTok, even by the time this video comes out.

1:02:43Yeah. Biden said he would sign the bill if it got passed in the House and Senate. It got passed in the House. So now it has to pass in the Senate. there's like a low chance it will pass in the senate i have no idea yeah there's theoretically a low chance it would pass in the senate if it did though uh they would basically try to force to sell it to like away from bite away from bite dance yeah um anyway yeah so the idea of of tiktok working on instagram app really frustrates me because i don't it's sort of like this it feels exactly like the Twitter blue sky threads thing where now I feel like compelled to post the same content on every single social media platform just so I can get it out there like when I published my X106 video I like put it on Twitter and I was like cool and I was like I should really put this on threads so I put it on threads and then while I went by I was like there's a niche group of users on blue sky so I put it on blue sky but I don't want to have to do that with my photo posts too you know and I also don't want a TikTok account and I feel like this is going to push me to get a TikTok account.

1:03:49It might be time. You don't have to. I don't have to. David, what if TikTok photos allows for super panoramas in high res quality? Okay. I have a small short story. I bought a new camera in Japan that was not the Nikon. I bought two new cameras. I bought the Nikon FM2 titanium. Do you guys remember how I made the video on the 6x17 camera? Yeah. 3D printed one? Yep. I bought a 6x24 camera. It's just going to be like a string of spaghetti by the end. Like how, this is the widest, narrowest stock ticker. So the 6x17 is about 2.9 to 1. This is 4 to 1. Nice. 4 to 1. Don't tell Brandon.

1:04:35I have no idea how I'm going to show these on the internet. It all is just like your eyes and like everything around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. so um anyway yeah i that was just a small aside i have no idea how i'm going to show them on the internet instagram i always have to you have to fit it in a square so i always use the white box and people hate that but for threads they natively let you do panoramas um it just shows up on the whole thing but that's what i'm saying what if tiktok photos is like a great photos app would you not want to use it just because it's better at doing these things No, I'd probably use it.

1:05:12That's what I'm saying. Competition is good, David. Competition is good, and Instagram doesn't have competition. And also, I don't see why all of these social media companies wouldn't just try and basically steal other things when Instagram essentially took everything from Snapchat and is thriving in it now. Yeah, and TikTok. Don't love it, but it's working for them, so why would they ever stop? Instagram is Snapchat. Instagram is YouTube. Instagram is TikTok. Instagram is Instagram. Wait, can I? You can't pause a reel in Instagram. Right? You can? Am I the other way around? You hold it. You can pause it in every app.

1:05:54TikTok, you tap it. Am I that dumb? It mutes. No, no, no. Andrew, no. It mutes, though. No, no, no, no. No, tap it, mutes it. Hold it, pauses it. Holding it pauses it. I think so. Wait, should I? I'll try right now. It should say that somewhere. It just keeps muting for me. Tap it. I'm fine being an idiot here. You got a kid. You got other stuff to worry about. I don't like that you have to hold it. It's frustrating. Oh, when it's in the feed? Yeah, then holding it doesn't do anything. But once you're there, holding it pauses it. So you have to jump into the carousel first. Okay, so once it comes here, then that just unmuted.

1:06:25Yeah. I did not know that. Holding is a terrible... I hope there's one other person who does not know that. Holding is a terrible UX decision. Because it's invisible? No, because... Well, already. But it's more a terrible decision because you have to keep... Yeah, what if you want to pause it because you have to go do something? It's a 60-second video. Just watch it again. Or if you want to take a screenshot of it to send to your friend, you have to do this weird finagled thing where you press power and hold it at the same time. It's very difficult. You should try TikTok. You can just pause it.

1:06:59I want to keep my life. Are you downloading TikTok behind your computer right now? No. Here, I'll sign up with your username right now. Stop. No. Well, speaking of crabs. No, this works, guys. Trust me. That was good. Spotify. Are you sure? Oh, no, fair. Spotify adding music videos. Yeah. So they're becoming YouTube. Sort of. Kind of. Is that what's happening? I just wanted to quickly talk about this. So Spotify is adding music videos for premium users. It's rolling out in a bunch of different countries, none of them the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya.

1:07:38If you play a song that has an associated music video, there will be a button that says switch to video. You can watch it full screen in landscape. And this is different than these like weird loops that we have in Spotify right now. Like the background. Yeah. I just wanted to bring this up because it really feels like all the weird features we've covered that we've never liked over the past two years all just seem to be like, hey, I want you to look at our app. Because Spotify is definitely the app that I use a lot and never am inside of the app. Yeah, background. That's a good point. Right? So yeah, Spotify's algorithm's really solid.

1:08:14So I can play one song at the start of my car ride and it'll just play music that I'm interested in until the rest. I never look at the app again. It is never open for more than a minute. Yeah. So all of these things are very, remember the old TikTok scrolling thing? It all felt like it was trying to get you inside the app. Do they have ads inside Spotify besides audio ads? I'm a premium user, so I don't know. Yeah, I'm a premium user too. What's the point of keeping you in the app if you're listening to it anyway don't know sell ads sell visual ads maybe sell scrolling data like what you scroll on could be it could be i guess like outside of ads is it possible that artists can pay for or like audio can pay for uh like specific spots or like premium like showing up on your page essentially yeah like integrated ads almost i don't know if that's possible but Spotify does have other things.

1:09:08I mean it's possible. I don't know if they're doing it. Well yeah that's what I mean. I'm pretty sure that Spotify has other sections of the app like the merchandise and the concert section. The concert ticket one is one where it can be like. Yeah like they want you to look at it for that. I like that feature. I actually do like that feature. I have gone to two concerts because of that. Actually I have found concerts because of that. So Spotify's Ticketmaster? It just alerts you to concerts that are happening. Oh you don't buy it inside? No you don't buy it. Oh they're so close to doing it. I'm sure there's some sort of affiliation where if you click through that and like...

1:09:37Yeah, they probably get a kickback. Yeah, I'm sure. Affiliate revenue. But yeah, I don't know why they're trying to keep you in their app. I mean, every app is trying to keep you in their app, so that makes sense, but... I mean, if every app wants to be the everything app, they got to start somewhere and then just expand slowly what they're good at into things that they're okay at until they get good at that too. And then just keep branching out. So Spotify, good at audio, songs. then they did podcasts because that's like right next to the whole song thing. It's background audio. Great. And then they started having audio books.

1:10:12Yeah. Audio books are in there. And then like there's lyrics also next to songs. And maybe if we can get you in the app a little more visually, there's like that little background video that plays with the album art. And then maybe you can get music videos if you want to watch the music video. And then suddenly you scroll. And then the next music video pops up and suddenly you're scrolling. And then now we have visual ads. And then they just get more and more branched out until they're TikTok. and here we are so there are crap and then tiktok adds audiobooks and then we all just have tiktok is adding podcasts really really yeah we i believe we've talked about it on this before yeah see yeah they're doing the same thing yeah i don't know i just thought that was kind of interesting and they have shopping and they have live like shopping tiktok shopping is the worst it is like 90 of my videos now yeah they have they have this really no there was a really great New York Times thing that they did where they were like how much is TikTok pushing shopping so they tried to have one of their writers sell a mechanical pencil that he just had sitting on his desk so he set up a shopping account like and it kicks you into like a live video feed where you like can go on and do this QVC thing and he was like I have this used mechanical pencil and he had like hundreds of viewers Jesus because TikTok just like juices the hell out of it trying to get people to use the speech.

1:11:32I mean, yeah, hundreds of viewers is pretty easy on TikTok. It was a brand new account for a mechanical pencil. I also, we do think that new TikTok accounts get good views off the start, or okay views off the start. But no, like, it's pretty much you can make a link to sell something on TikTok, and then, like, you just make a video, and it says, like, earns commission in the bottom, or there's, like, a link to it. So people just make dumb TikTok videos that might have this water bottle in it or something, and then you can click. So now every post is just like sponsored, earns commission, earns commission, earns commission.

1:12:04One kind of funny one, sponsored, earns commission. It's terrible. And that's actually a huge part of the Google circle to search integration push thing. Like all of their ads now that show circle to search, it's always like you're watching a YouTube video. You pause it. You circle on some shirt that some person's wearing in a YouTube video. And then it brings up Google Shopping. And then you buy it. Yeah. I've seen like three Google ads that are specifically targeted towards that. Yeah, it's always like a piece of, like a jacket or something. Yeah. Like, what's that purse? And you just circle.

1:12:33I want the exact same one. Yeah. Yeah. What if Spotify just did music? Well, then they'd just be SoundCloud. Okay, so then audio. All audio. What if they just like became the YouTube of audio? I think they got that already. Bro, you're never going to 10X. But then what are the investors going to do? It's a publicly traded company, Adam. You can't stop 10Xing. Growth. Infinite growth. infinite growth they're gonna be a bank next infinitely grow into a crab but yeah i ultimately it kind of feels like a bank sorry that's what everything does kind of feel like i was just gonna say like spotify has a solid algorithm to just let me play music and never look at it is that backfiring now because they want more people inside of their app no no because spotify has a really serious financial interest in playing certain music over certain other music.

1:13:27And so that's what I was thinking about this whole time is like, why would they want you in the app? Because seemingly every time you click through their app, you are earning them less money. Like if you can let them decide exactly what songs to play for you, they can always choose the ones that have the lowest payout rates. They can do that inside the app as well. Not if you're choosing a song. They can feed you like if it's a TikTok type like carousel, like why not feed you the music videos of the lower paying ones like that? Or it's true. Why not? They start feeding you selling things that rather than paying less, it makes them more money.

1:14:02That's true. And the songs that will have music videos ready to go are the major label releases, which do have the lower payouts. Sad. It is sad. Glad it's totally consumer focused. It's all for us. It's all a good app for us. What a bummer. But at least we can listen to music. Ha ha. This is true. Yay. I do use it to listen to music. That's why I only listen to old school RuneScape music. Well, speaking of listening to music, play the trivia. Trivia. See what I did there? Ellis was on. I'm very impressed that Ellis was right there. Thank you. Thank you for being on the same page. Always. Always.

1:14:40All right. Also, just want to say I got distracted because not that literally anyone outside of this room would know this but we had a little numbering error last week where or two weeks ago we wrote episode 215 in our like internal docs as 216 and then we accidentally did like another episode 216 and this is 217 but i wanted to bring it up because episode 116 was my first episode was it really which means i have done 100 waveform episodes that's wild happy to be here i know isn't it time flies it really really does wow anyway to honor my 100th episode this episode we talked about nikon's camera business being smaller than expected but they are currently the second largest manufacturer of a device called a stepper which is an essential piece of equipment for the manufacturing of what what do you make with a stepper wait can i have a eraser please eraser wait so the thing that you make is we're a component that gets put in a phone yeah we're listing the thing that it makes not like the process of how it gets made if you name the process i will be seriously impressed okay i'm gonna be wrong on this but that's the only guess i have and it's more of the process okay that's fine let's see it

1:16:09we're all very i wrote motor all right that is that's so generic incorrect so my thought process on stepper is like stepping different levels of like cnc machine i see what you're thinking yeah but cnc is wrong incorrect unfortunately david you wrote i wrote pedometer okay so i see how you took the stepper. I see. Who is the closest? Frankly. Dang. So the full name of a stepper is a wafer stepper because it is a central piece of machinery to build chips and semiconductors. You could have said wafer stepper and I would have been wrong still. Does it get put in the ASML lithography machines? It is the lithography machines.

1:16:58wait but asml makes those uh asml is the largest manufacturer of them with nikon being the second largest wait really fact check is that true according to wikipedia quick update on the score oh yeah marquez with four andrew with one two carry the one two david the one's doing a lot of carrying Burying the one all by yourself, just one. I was in Japan. Yep. Next question. In 1902, there were 909 new automobiles registered in the United States. 485 of which, that's more than half, were powered by what now uncommon propulsion technology?

1:17:50The power of love. Nitrogen. Is not it. It's a curious thing. Makes one man weak. Another man sing. Sure. You don't know. The Muffin Man. The Muffin Man. I think we're all going to have the same answer. Yes, I know. The Muffin Man. Oh, what do you guys got? We don't all have. Marquez and I have the same answer. I have the electric motor. I have steam engine. Okay. Wow. Steam engine. Half of all cars in 1902 were steam cars. That's nuts. What were the other half? I thought that made perfect sense. The other half were gasoline. What? There might have been a few experimental electric cars out there.

1:18:43A few years after that, the electric starter motor was finished, which made gasoline cars much easier to own than steam cars. and then by the time 1920 came around steam cars were pretty much not a thing anymore and they all have very funny names like Stanley Steamer and stuff wait really? I'm realizing there was a there was a Stanley Steam Car company but maybe the Stanley Steamer is separate think that's separate? anyway we learned something new today about crabs about cars about Nikon about Nikon about TikTok about Spotify Nikon and if you put all that information together in your head surely you got something out of this podcast don't call me Shirley sorry anyway thanks for watching thanks for listening catch you guys next week peace Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Rovin we're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our trotter music is created by Vein's Silk bingo

1:20:03Lemon pepper stepper Lemon pepper stepper

From the publisher

This week, Marques, Andrew, and David talk about all of the news of the week and a few from last week as well. They go over everything from not being able to resell Tesla Cybertrucks to Nikon buying RED cameras. Plus, they talk about Spotify adding music videos to its app and TikTok potentially making an Instagram competitor. Of course, we wrap it all up with some fun trivia. Enjoy!

Links:
Reselling a Tesla: https://bit.ly/3wPiiNs
Mark McCann tries to Buy a Porsche: https://bit.ly/3wXvAru
TikTok Photo App: https://bit.ly/3IDvVlv
NY Mag Sells Mechanical Pencil on TikTok: https://bit.ly/49bsNbH

Shop the merch:
https://shop.mkbhd.com

Instagram/Threads/Twitter:
Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM
Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast
Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd
Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli
David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel
Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17
Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin

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