Does Marques Hate OnePlus?

Summary

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Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: "Does Marques Hate OnePlus?"

Date: February 13, 2026
Host: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD)
Co-hosts: Andrew Manganelli, David Imel, Adam, Christian, Shen (guest)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into a whirlwind of hot-button tech topics and personal pet peeves, living up to its tongue-in-cheek temporary rename, "The Crashout Podcast." MKBHD and the crew cover recent updates in weather apps, the controversial YouTube Music lyrics paywall, corporate Twitter beefs in the AI space, privacy-laden Super Bowl ads, and in-depth battery tech debates—capped by an insightful interview with HTC’s Shen. The show also embraces offbeat topics like customer service nightmares and hidden car Easter eggs, wrapping it all in the team's trademark banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Weather App Saga & Community Recommendations

• [02:16 – 05:51]

  • Andrew revisits the ridiculousness of inaccurate weather apps, especially Google’s, sparking a segment on alternative app recommendations from listeners.
  • Breezy (via F-Droid) and OverMoro (built by a 14-year-old, available on Play Store/App Store) stand out for their design and feature set.
  • Lighthearted debate over the disappearance of Google’s beloved frog mascot, frozen Northeast cold snaps, and cultural acclimatization to weather.

  “Thank you for all the weather suggestions. Now I just need the weather to not suck so I can look at the apps more happily.” – Andrew [04:32]

2. YouTube Music Lyrics—Now Premium?

• [06:09 – 11:46]

  • The crew reacts to Google’s controversial move: requiring a YouTube Premium subscription to view song lyrics.
  • Poll results: Nearly 28% of users would pay for this feature, shocking the team (“Way more than I expected.” – Andrew [07:35]).
  • Most admit they just Google lyrics and aren’t personally bothered, but recognize it’s a popular in-app feature, especially for impromptu karaoke.
  • Broader conversation about the growing trend of paywalls—“everything is going premium”—and the nature of music discovery.

  “I kind of like just pretending like I know what the lyrics are and mumbling through.” – Andrew [07:54]

3. YouTube Apps: Vision Pro & Platform Expansion

• [12:02 – 13:20]
  • YouTube finally launches a native app for Apple Vision Pro, easing previous hurdles with browser-only access.
  • Brief debate: Is it a big deal? Probably not for most, but some see the potential of “ultimate flight theater.”
  • Noted: Vision Pro’s tiny market, the demise of indie Vision Pro YouTube clients, and playful wish-listing of crazy features.

4. Super Bowl: AI & Surveillance Ads that ‘Crash Out’ the Internet

• [14:25 – 37:18]

a) AI Ads & Corporate Twitter Beef

• Anthropic runs Super Bowl ads mocking the concept of ads in ChatGPT, featuring darkly comedic therapy/AI exchanges devolving into awkward “sponsored suggestions.”
• Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) responds with an “11-paragraph Twitter essay,” fueling ridicule and the so-called Streisand Effect:

  “He pooped 11 paragraphs of poop.” – Christian [16:32]

• Discussion veers into companies publicly taunting each other in ads (Samsung’s “Notch” campaigns), the trend for AI CEOs to be extremely online, and the danger of giving opponents free publicity.

b) Ads in ChatGPT—What’s Really Happening?

• [19:00+]

• Contradictory messaging: OpenAI claims user data is not shared with advertisers, but press releases (e.g., from Target and Williams Sonoma) boast about 'reaching customers in their decision-making moments' by matching ads to chat context.
• Marques explains the likely “firewall” system, akin to Google AdWords—not direct data sharing, but still deeply targeted based on prompts.
• Christian is sharply critical of Sam Altman, calling him "the biggest liar of all," expressing deep skepticism for corporate promises about privacy.

5. Surveillance Tech Goes Mainstream: Ring, Amazon, Discord

• [29:29 – 45:07]

a) Ring & Flock Cameras: Pet Search or Privacy Invasion?

• Amazon’s Super Bowl ad celebrates pet-finding via networked Ring/Flock cameras, sparking heated critique.
• The real concern: it’s a surveillance network by another name, with default-on 'neighborhood' features and troubling data-sharing with law enforcement.
• Jokes about Seinfeld technology tests: “If it ruins a Seinfeld plot, it’s good tech. If it creates a Seinfeld plot, it’s bad tech.”
• Counterpoint: Tech is sold via emotionally resonant features (finding pets), making people ignore or not understand privacy implications.

“This is an Amazon...that just has security cameras all over the country.” – David [35:12]

b) Discord’s Age-Gating via Face Scan

• Upcoming requirement: “If we think you’re a child, scan your face or upload ID for age verification.”
• Retro-gamer joke: “If you know Teamspeak, you probably won’t have to do age verification.” (Andrew [41:29])
• Everyone agrees: the move is unpopular, likely ineffective, and raises concerns over privacy and potential circumvention via 3D models.
• Teamspeak and other retro alternatives may temporarily benefit from ‘mass exodus’ threats.

6. "Does Marques Hate OnePlus?" – The Silicon Carbon Battery Debate

• [52:04 – 78:41]

a) Why Aren’t All Smartphone Companies Using Silicon Carbon Batteries?

• Marques addresses accusations of being anti-OnePlus, clarifies that he loves silicon carbon batteries (and uses a OnePlus phone), but made a video explaining corporate risk assessments stalling adoption at giants like Samsung and Apple.
• Criticisms of the video (spicy thumbnail, no direct company attributions) are tackled; intent was to inform, not campaign against new battery tech.

b) Interview: Shen from HTC on Batteries and Corporate Risk

• [55:32 – 70:07]

  • Shen explains complexities: safety testing, risk of “thermal runaway,” charge cycle trade-offs, and vendor sourcing issues for new battery technologies.

  • Not all companies are equally risk-tolerant—market leaders have more to lose and prioritize reliability and risk management.

  • Key trade-off levers: capacity, charging speed, longevity. Every choice impacts the others.

    “Every lever is just a trade-off with something else.” – Marques [68:29]

  • Longevity and safety are non-negotiable for mainstream vendors; emerging tech requires time, data, and multi-sourcing before mass adoption.

c) Aftermath and Evolution

• Improvements in silicon carbon chemistry have happened even in the past two years—once long-term data is available, wider adoption will follow.

• The shadow of the Note 7 battery recalls still haunts manufacturers and narrows their risk appetite.

  “If 1% of Samsung phones have battery issues, that's a way bigger story than 1% of Google phones.” – David [73:15]

7. EV Segment: Rivian R2 Unveiled, Ferrari’s EV Interior, and Easter Eggs

• [81:30 – 97:02]

a) Rivian R2 First Impressions

• The much-anticipated R2 brings R1 performance and personality to a lower price; team praises nimbleness, build, and Easter eggs (hidden maze, smiley faces, fun molding).
• Unclear pricing for top trims spurs speculation.
• Hilarity ensues: the team laments not being shown ALL the Easter eggs.

b) Ferrari’s Electric Interior: Designed by Jony Ive’s Firm

• Gorgeous individual components, but questionable overall interior design—retro-futuristic, Apple Watch-like screens, and lots of buttons divide the team.

• Discussion on “nostalgia poisoning design choices”; skepticism on how well these retro-inspired EVs will actually sell.

  “Each individual piece is sick...I hate the whole thing, though.” – Marques [96:19]

c) The Small SUV Wars: Excitement for Rivian R3

• Adam and David voice anticipation for the Rivian R3 (even smaller, more city-friendly), despite multi-year waiting lists.

8. BONUS: Internet/Customer Service Crash Out

• [97:07 – 112:28]

  • Andrew chronicles his multi-day ordeal with Xfinity after wind/ice knocks down neighborhood cables during the coldest weekend of the year.

  • Universal agreement: Customer service at big ISPs is infuriating, unaccountable, and a shining example of why competition is desperately needed in U.S. broadband markets.

  • Peak absurdity: being told you didn’t get an important email “because your Internet is out,” or promised technician visits for days on end with no-shows and no recourse.

    “Every large company is a bunch of cowards...they use customer service to just deal with all of it.” – Andrew [101:08]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On YouTube Music:
  "I think a lot of people didn't make it all the way through the video and just left with that impression." – Marques [53:12]

• On AI CEO Twitter Crash-Outs:
  "He pooped 11 paragraphs of poop." – Christian [16:32]
  "If I made a joke about one of you guys and you tweeted that long about it, I'd be like, damn I got him." – Andrew [26:25]

• On Batteries and Silicon Carbon Risk:
  “As a big company, whenever you look at new tech you’re going to want to try and second source everything… Sometimes it’s also more malicious. You have competitors in the space that will attack your supply chain.” – Shen [65:27]

• On Surveillance Tech:
  "If you can watch pets, what else can you find through this?" – Marques [31:01]

• On Xfinity:
  "What I would give for Verizon FiOS, who are probably almost just as bad." – Andrew [106:44]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:16] – Weather apps rant & recommendations
• [06:09] – YouTube Music lyrics go premium; user poll
• [12:02] – YouTube app launches for Apple Vision Pro
• [14:25] – Anthropic vs. OpenAI: Super Bowl ad beef
• [19:00] – ChatGPT ads and privacy/debate over AI advertising
• [29:29] – Amazon Ring/Flock cameras & privacy
• [41:29] – Discord’s face scan age verification
• [52:04] – “Does Marques Hate OnePlus?”: battery video uproar
• [55:32] – Interview: Shen from HTC on batteries and risk
• [81:30] – EVs: Rivian R2 review, Ferrari’s new electric interior
• [97:07] – Andrew’s rant: Xfinity/customer service hell
• [112:28] – Listener trivia and scoring

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Episode Tone

Casual, bantering, and irreverent, the hosts oscillate between deep technical breakdowns and comedic takes, tackling internet debates and corporate shenanigans with candor. The mood is unapologetically “crashing out” (venting or going on rants), with gracious doses of self-awareness, playful jabs, and thoughtful dives into why tech products and companies frustrate—and sometimes delight—users and reviewers alike.

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Summary in One Line

An episode loaded with personal rants, privacy debates, battery tech mythbusting, and corporate gotchas—plus a crash course in why being a tech customer (or reviewer) is never, ever boring.

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Transcript

[Adam]

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[Marques]

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[Christian]

The dynamic clock dude that like you

[David]

can our all clocks dynamic.

[Marques]

Yo, what is up people of the Internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques.

[Andrew]

I'm Andrew.

[David]

And I'm David.

[Marques]

We're actually renaming the podcast this week to the Crashout podcast because we've realized that everything we're talking about this week someone is going to crash out about.

[David]

We'll get there.

[Marques]

Today we're talking about TV ads. You might have seen some if you watched like a big bowl event or something recently. Big Bowl. We got chatgpt ads. We've got car ads, teasers. We've also got our friend Shen on to explain batteries a little bit better. And we're going to wrap out with just Andrew crashing out.

[Andrew]

That's it. Just wait.

[Marques]

Crashing out. It's going to be great. But first, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you follow on whatever podcast player you use. We're aware that many of you use Apple podcasts or Spotify, but there are others. I use Pocket Casts on Android and there are even others yet others that if you're using them you should rate our podcast on because that helps us out a lot. So we appreciate that.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Okay. It says here first thing is weather apps and usually I crash out about

[Andrew]

that if you don't mind. This is not crashing out.

[Marques]

Oh, okay.

[Andrew]

I'm just going really fast.

[David]

Crashing out.

[Christian]

Nice.

[Adam]

Shout out.

[Andrew]

Do you remember like two weeks ago we were talking about weather apps and I said the Google one is like literally the worst and wrong. All the time.

[David]

But it does have the frog and I do like the frog.

[Andrew]

What's the frog?

[David]

Wait, it does not have the frog anymore.

[Marques]

The little corner animated frog. I think that's if you Google the weather. What? Not like it.

[Andrew]

Oh, I think you're right.

[David]

In the Google weather app, though I

[Andrew]

don't think it was well or maybe well.

[David]

Rip frog.

[Andrew]

Lots of people, tons of great suggestions. Here's the two I landed on and I'll let you guys check them out. One is called why it just says whether. I think it's called breezy. Right, Adam? Breezy. You have to download it on F Droid, which is something that I learned about.

[Marques]

Wait, this is not on the Play Store?

[Adam]

No, no, you have to download F droid from the Play Store and then in F Droid, search for Breezy.

[Andrew]

Here, I'll let you look at this.

[Marques]

That looks nice.

[Andrew]

Solid ui. You know, it does have kind of the.

[Marques]

Looks like the Google weather.

[Andrew]

The Google Weather app on the bottom. But I believe you can change source. Source. I'm not 100% sure about Source, but it does tell me where the source is coming from at the bottom one that you can change the source is actually an email we got from somebody who I believe is 14 years old and created this app that is on the Play Store and I think the app Store.

[David]

What am I doing with my life?

[Marques]

Overcast.

[Andrew]

This is. No, it is overcast. It's called. It's called Over Moro.

[Marques]

Got it. I've been using, which looks great.

[Andrew]

It's super simple. It's like material u based, like in terms of the design and everything. But it looks great. It's been working well. I have multiple different sources right at the bottom that I can pull from. The only thing is if you are in the US and go to it, just remember it's in Celsius and it's just been so cold here. It took me like three days before I. No, no, no, no. You can switch to Fahrenheit, but it defaults to Celsius. But it's been so cold here. Seeing single digit numbers to me was like, yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Marques]

Yeah, three.

[David]

It's been three because it was zero the other night.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

For everyone else in the world, that is negative 17.8 Celsius.

[Andrew]

It's 40 degrees Fahrenheit right now. And it feels like I could wear shorts outside because I'm so outside.

[Marques]

That's how cooked we've been. That's three degrees is the normal.

[David]

It's literally freezing. And I'm like, yes. Nice.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Thank you for all the weather suggestions. Now I just need the weather to not suck so I can look at the apps more happily.

[David]

It's getting better. The groundhog Paxutaw, which we didn't talk about last week and everyone was mad because we're the New Jersey podcast.

[Marques]

Oh, it didn't really matter to us.

[Andrew]

I thought he was Pennsylvania.

[Adam]

He's in Pennsylvania.

[Marques]

Did shout out six more weeks of winter for those who are wondering.

[David]

But he lied about that though.

[Adam]

Yeah, that lying, freaking.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

What you mean?

[David]

Cuz it instantly is 40 and it got warmer.

[Marques]

Yeah, but that's winter weather.

[David]

Nah, man. Compared to what we have.

[Marques]

If it was spring, you'd be like, it's still only 40.

[David]

Yeah, I don't know, man.

[Adam]

But it isn't spring. It's early February.

[Marques]

That's what I'm saying. You would either say it's about to be spring, or we got six more weeks of winter, then it's spring. This was spring and it was 39. We'd be though.

[David]

Ellis and I will both take every opportunity to remind people that we are from California. We have finally been accustomed to this kind of weather.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

And now that 0 is the norm, 40 feels pretty damn good. I'm feeling good about it.

[Christian]

I took my gloves off this morning, like on my walk, and I was

[Andrew]

like, oh, I was at a PG podcast. Let's calm down.

[David]

I was in a T shirt this morning. I went to my outdoor building, went inside the building, got a coffee, and everyone was like, you're in a T shirt. Are you getting an iced drink too? And I was like, yeah, I will.

[Marques]

Nice.

[David]

We love talking about the weather. You know what's related to the weather?

[Christian]

No, we can do better than that.

[Marques]

Oh, you know, a lot of weather apps make you pay extra for premium features.

[David]

That's what I was just about to do.

[Marques]

You know what else does?

[Andrew]

Pretty much everything?

[Marques]

Everything.

[David]

Every single thing in your life.

[Marques]

But the headline we have to react to is that YouTube music now requires premium for lyric. Yeah, I don't care. But do you guys care about lyrics in your music app?

[David]

It's about the principle. Okay? I did a poll about this on social media because I was curious. Cause I was like, I don't really care. And when I look up lyrics, I usually just easy lyrics.

[Marques]

Google them. Easy lyrics.

[Adam]

Google them.

[David]

Yeah, but apparently a lot of people use lyrics in the app. I have many friends who, when we are driving, listening to music, they will grab my phone and look at the lyrics.

[Marques]

In the app on the phone.

[David]

It is popular for people. So, okay, here are the results of my poll. And I said, is this a lucrative. Are lyrics a lucrative feature for you and something that you would pay for in a music app? Out of 691 votes, 71 people said they would not pay for it. But 18.8 said that they would pay for it specifically just for lyrics. And 19.6 said that they would pay at the right price.

[Adam]

Just to clarify, you're talking about percentages, not people.

[David]

Sorry. Percent.

[Adam]

19.6 people.

[Marques]

Oh, sorry.

[Andrew]

This is 9.6.

[David]

Yeah, 9.69.

[Andrew]

Yes.

[David]

Yeah. 18.8% said yes. 9.6 said yes at the right price. Honestly, 28% of people being willing to pay for lyrics in their music app was more than I thought it.

[Andrew]

Way more than I expected.

[Marques]

I'm holstering so many panels jokes about being free on Google. Okay. I mean, sometimes I open Spotify and I scroll down and I see the lyrics and I'm like, oh, that's what he was saying. I'm like, oh, cool. But I guess I'm not someone who looks up lyrics that much, but when I do, my instinct is to Google it.

[David]

Yeah. So I guess it might be because we're old, though.

[Marques]

Oh, interesting.

[Andrew]

I mean, we've been doing it for a long time. I kind of like just pretending like I know what the lyrics are and mumbling through.

[Marques]

That's usually how it goes. I just.

[David]

Did you say Zuckerberg? Zuckerberg.

[Andrew]

I don't know.

[Marques]

That's the words, right? That's probably the worst.

[Andrew]

Eventually I'm even second guessing my mumbling. Right?

[David]

Yeah. I mean, I also just, like, fake it till I make it. And then eventually I get annoyed enough that I look them up.

[Andrew]

That's fair.

[David]

And then I'm usually disappointed because they're not as good as I envisioned they'd be.

[Marques]

Yeah. Most of the music I listen to, I'm not, like, listening to the words specifically. Usually it's the beat and then the lyrics or words like happen to sound nice. But I'm not like, really?

[David]

I'm a lyrics guy, for sure.

[Andrew]

I have kind of a funny story about that. It'll be really quick. Do you know the song Wonderful by.

[Marques]

I'm going to go out on a

[Andrew]

limb and say Everclear.

[David]

Haven't heard of Everclear.

[Andrew]

Okay. There's a song called Wonderful by Everclear.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And the chorus just like, everything is wonderful now. But the whole song is really sad. And him, like, trying to convince himself and I used to listen to it all the time because I thought it was. I'm just listening. My mom took my car once and came out, she's like, are you okay, Andrew? Like, that song was, like, blasting in your car. Lyrics are pretty dark. Everything going good. I was like, yeah, I love.

[David]

Yeah. There's a word for when the music feels happy, but the lyrics are really depressing.

[Andrew]

That's this song.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

It opens with I close my eyes when I get too sad. I think thoughts that I know are bad and somehow none of that comprehended in my. I'm like, snapping to it.

[Adam]

That's like all salsa songs. They're all about really dark things. And then the band just makes you dance.

[David]

The story around this is that Google is making lyrics a premium feature where you have to pay for YouTube Premium. They're really. Well, you have to pay for YouTube Music Premium, but they're really trying to get people. They're really just trying to onboard people to YouTube Premium. Because YouTube Premium is barely more expensive than the YouTube Music subscription anyway. Users who don't pay will get five free lyrics before they're asked to subscribe. And it's not like, per month.

[Marques]

Songs.

[Andrew]

Words.

[Marques]

Yeah, Song. Can I get the second word? Oh, nice.

[David]

I wish you would step.

[Adam]

I'd like to buy a vowel.

[David]

Yeah. So they will get five free lyrics and then it'll be like, lyrics are premium and it's not per month. It is perfect. Is at all. Yeah.

[Andrew]

Not to side with YouTube here, but if in a month you are looking up the lyrics more than five times, it's probably worth paying for the lyrics. I just can't imagine. I have not looked up lyrics five times.

[Marques]

I guess there's more of the, like, passive discovery of the lyrics. Because if I ever want the lyrics, I can just look up a lyric video on YouTube. But if I'm in the song and I just happen to scroll back and be like, what did he actually say? And the lyrics are just right there. That's the convenience that you're paying for.

[David]

But, you know, Google made more money this quarter than they ever have, so I don't think it's a good excuse.

[Christian]

What if Spotify started doing this? But, like, for hearing, like, you paid for Spotify and you got all the, like, instrumentals of all the music, but then if you wanted to hear the lyrics, you had to pay an extra fee on top.

[Andrew]

Damn, cart.

[Adam]

You don't give up any ideas.

[Christian]

Exactly. That's what's next, I'm telling you.

[David]

Well, then everything would Just. It would just be a karaoke app for the free users.

[Andrew]

Well, now you have to pay for the lyrics though, which makes it way harder.

[Christian]

No, no, no. It'd be a karaoke. Oh my God.

[Andrew]

That's the only reason I assume people want lyrics is because they want a karaoke with the phone in their hand

[David]

or they just want to know the music.

[Marques]

I just want to know.

[Christian]

I like the spot on Spotify.

[Marques]

That's all I'm saying.

[Christian]

I like the lyrics because I sometimes like to jump to specific points in a song and I like being able to know like, oh, if I click this word, it'll take me to like as a transport feature.

[Andrew]

Take me.

[Marques]

It's kind of nice.

[Christian]

Interesting.

[Marques]

The segue I was thinking of was like, that's why a lot of weather apps are paid, is because the data you have to pay for. So a lot of people want like a free weather app, obviously. But if you have a bunch of sources and a lot of them are paid, you need to charge like a subscription to pay the subscription.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

But anyway. Yeah, just weather again, sorry.

[David]

So anyway, I don't. I was surprised by these results. I really just. I didn't think this many people would be willing to pay for lyrics, but apparently they are. So, you know, Google's going to make even more money, I guess.

[Marques]

Speaking of Google, speaking of YouTube.

[David]

YouTube, speaking of YouTube getting put on everybody's iPods.

[Marques]

There's now officially a YouTube app for Apple. Vision Pro. Wasn't there at launch, but it's.

[Adam]

There are dozens of them, honestly.

[Christian]

Brave.

[David]

Yeah, it was brave.

[Marques]

It's crazy because you had to. It almost felt like they were withholding it on purpose. Like you had to go to the browser, which wasn't the end of the world. You just have a browser tab open, but you had to go to the Browser to watch YouTube videos and you have to deal with all the stuff there. If you don't have premium blah blah, now you just have an app. All the discovery, all the doom scrolling native.

[David]

Well, didn't Apple also make some workarounds like in the Safari app for Vision

[Marques]

Pro, they would make full screen video.

[David]

Yeah, yeah, they would make it. So it basically just felt like YouTube.

[Marques]

Yes.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

But now it's. Yeah, you can have environments. You can have all the other fun stuff. Just.

[David]

Just YouTube rip to Christian sellers. Yeah, I was gonna say Junenow.

[Andrew]

Was it called Juneau?

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah, they killed.

[David]

It knocked while if it was not called Juno. I apologize, Christian. Well, that's exciting for the 12 people that use Vision Pro. And speaking of. I guess we're done with that pretty quick segment.

[Christian]

I guess we should. We'll try it and we'll get back to.

[David]

I don't know.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I mean, we definitely will not try it by next.

[David]

Maybe it's amazing.

[Christian]

Try it. I'll watch.

[David]

Maybe it's amazing. You know what if it's amazing?

[Adam]

It's just.

[Marques]

I'll try it.

[Adam]

I. I don't. Okay.

[David]

What if.

[Adam]

What could they possibly have added that

[David]

will make it uses Gemini?

[Marques]

If the Vision Pro is the ideal flight movie Watcher, then the YouTube app at Vision Pro with premium with a bunch of downloaded videos is the ultimate flight theater experience.

[Christian]

I have always wanted to watch Scott the Woz 30ft tall. Okay, let me have this.

[Marques]

There's good videos on YouTube you might want to watch. Yo. You might have an hour and a half video on a studio channel and you want to watch it on a flight and you have this big screen in front of you and it's fun.

[David]

It'd be very funny. If you don't have Google. Last week they released that world model where you can feed an image and it creates a video game, basically.

[Adam]

Oh, Project Genie.

[David]

Project Genie. Be very funny if they just had the feature in YouTube where you could just be in the video. But nobody used the app because nobody uses the Vision Pro, so nobody knew. Damn, that'd be funny.

[Marques]

I guess we'll find out what interesting features it has.

[David]

I guess we'll find out. It's probably fine. Yeah.

[Christian]

Anyway, we're gonna find out about

[David]

the ads in ChatGPT.

[Christian]

The ads in ChatGPT.

[David]

Okay, so anthropic, if you didn't know, big competitor to OpenAI recently released a bunch of super bowl ads. They released them before the super bowl, and they actually did tweak them slightly when they actually put them in the Super Bowl. The copy was worse in the official release, but I think that they probably just, I don't know, ran through their legal team and they were just concerned or something. Anyway, they ran four different ads. It was very funny. The ads were about OpenAI putting ads in ChatGPT, and this is something that OpenAI is now having to do. Sam Altman did eventually say it would be a last resort, so that's also funny. But Anthropic put these four different ads out that basically emulated what it is like to talk to an AI model,

[Marques]

and it did it very well.

[David]

So I'm going to give you an example. There was this ad where this guy is talking to a therapist and he says, I need help learning how to communicate better with my mom. And then the therapist is just kind of like this creepy, smiling, like, woman. And she pauses for like three seconds before she answers him. It's all very, like. You can tell that they're trying to emulate that. And she. She says, like, that's a great thing to do. You should maybe go on a nature walk with her or talk about things that you have in common. Or if you can't mend the relationship, go to Golden Encounters, where. Where cougars are matched with young cubs.

[Christian]

Where it's like, where you can spend quality time with other older women.

[David]

Other older women on Golden Encounters. And all of the ads just kind of devolve into this. And then the person that's talking to that model is like, what? Very funny. Very good ads. This elicited a extremely funny reaction from Sam Altman on Twitter. He decided to write an essay in a tweet, which is never a good idea. But the first thing that he said was first the good part of the anthropic ads. They are funny. I laughed. Very human thing to say.

[Marques]

Nice.

[David]

And then he wrote 11 paragraphs.

[Christian]

Rote is like an overstatement for like, this is poop. You don't write poop. You poop poop. And that's what he did. He pooped 11 paragraphs of poop.

[Adam]

Do you think he did. Chatgpt did it?

[Marques]

That's what I was gonna say. I assume everything he writes.

[Andrew]

I had not seen these ads. Actually, I think you posted it and your main thing was, why does this seems like it didn't get desqueezed properly for one of them? The one online before the Super Bowl.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

The only reason I watch these ads is because I saw Sam Altman crashing out on Twitter and I was like, these must be pretty good.

[Marques]

They did.

[David]

Yeah. The first ad. There was. There was one ad where a kid was trying to get jacked and whatever.

[Andrew]

Like, how do I get abs as fast as possible?

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

And first I just noticed, like, it started. It seemed like they used like a 1.5x anamorphic lens, but they de. Squeezed it to like 1.8.

[Marques]

Oh, no, that's all I.

[David]

Sorry. That's the first thing.

[Marques]

I know that would bother me a lot.

[David]

Yeah, it was. It was weird. Anyway, yeah, he crashed out with like 11 paragraphs, saying basically it was not what was going to happen and that it was. What was the word he was saying that it was kind of misrepresenting the way the ads were going to be shown. But Ellis is about to. Is about to chime in.

[Andrew]

Can I say one thing real quick? I miss. I like when companies use commercials to take shots at each other. It's so much more fun. I liked the, like, the Samsung Notch forehead, like, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fun. And it's. It's fun because they're in jest, but, man, it makes some people so mad, and that's hilarious.

[David]

Yeah, it's funny.

[Adam]

Anthropic typically does have really good ads, too. Like, they've been leaning into, like, the film look and the film esthetic and everything. Like, a little grain and everything. Like, it looks like they hire people that knew what they were doing for.

[David]

I mean, every company on Twitter now basically is just making commercials.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

That's like, their whole thing. They have shifted away from just releasing products, and now everything has to be a little, like, movie trailer, product launch. Yeah.

[Andrew]

I think also doing the film look feels more natural and human. And when you're doing. Creating a product that's as unnatural and unhuman as AI, you want to be as opposite.

[Adam]

Like, they thought about this. They know what.

[David]

Anthropic has a great color grader, by the way. It's all the same color, and it's

[Andrew]

very good, let's say. I.

[Marques]

Damn.

[David]

I don't know if I would mess up the 1.5x anamorphic squeeze.

[Marques]

I think that's exactly what it would mean.

[David]

Yeah, that's probably true.

[Andrew]

That's probably true. All right.

[David]

All right, Ellis, I'm ready for your crash out.

[Christian]

Before I crash out publicly about this, I do want to say. Yeah, longtime listeners of the show will know we have in the past done Anthropic ads. We. We. We have read ads that they have done. This has nothing to do with why we're reporting on this. Also, in case anyone was even wondering, none of us have any AI investments. Okay. We're not invested in these private companies.

[Andrew]

I don't use that at all.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Christian]

So this is not like, about. This is about. Oh, my God, dude, that stupid. 11. Okay, first of all. First of all, when Sam Allman, in that 11 paragraph screed, said, God, there was so much. When he called Claude an authority or anthropic and authoritarian company, I was like, brother, like, you need to look at who's on the OpenAI team right now.

[David]

He said, Anthropic makes software for rich people. When they're the same price.

[Christian]

They're the same price. Expensive software for rich people when they're the same. It's like, do you both offer a free tier? The difference in the pricing is that. And maybe when you're using it at a developer level, the tokens are cheaper. Yeah. Or whatever. But it's like you both offer a free and a $20 tier. So don't, don't go calling your competitor an expensive product for rich people. Don't go calling a company an authoritarian company when like all of the techno fascists are aligned with you, bro.

[David]

Okay. Yeah.

[Christian]

And then it's like he keeps going on and on about how like, you know, these ads are not going to appear in chat. They're not going to like, like companies are not going to have access to your chat, like all this stuff. The truth is we don't know how these ads are going to appear.

[David]

They started rolling out yesterday, by the way.

[Christian]

I haven't seen them. I haven't seen any. I keep looking for people reporting on how they're rolling out. I can't find them.

[David]

Yeah.

[Christian]

I can provide to you the press releases of the companies who are buying these ads. Target. This is an exact quote. I'm just going to read you the whole thing so that you can't be like Ellis, you're picking and choosing your words, man. You're an anti AI Luddite. But quote from Target. Ads are served based on keywords in a guest's chatgpt prompt, ensuring they're relevant to the conversation. For example, a guest asking what are some countertop cooking appliances that make everyday meals more convenient? May see an ad for an air fryer. Here's one from William Sonoma. As an early participant, Williams Sonoma Inc. Will explore how advertising and ChatGPT can reach customers at the decision making moments, helping surface relevant high quality products while preserving trusted and transparent user experiences.

[Andrew]

I don't want to be devil's advocate because I.

[Christian]

You are a devil's advocate. They're like your favorite team.

[Andrew]

They are.

[David]

That's true.

[Andrew]

I hate them. I hate them this season, by the way. Go USA Hockey. We destroyed Canada women's the other day.

[David]

Are they in that new TV show about hockey?

[Andrew]

Yeah, it's called the Olympics.

[David]

I'm saying that.

[Andrew]

Otherwise I don't.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

In terms of the way these are written. It does. None of this is saying that it will affect the responses. It's saying that it will show an ad that's potentially based on the responses.

[Christian]

Sure.

[Andrew]

But also, I'm just throwing that out there.

[Christian]

His thing. Like in the past, OpenAI and Tim Holman have said, when we run these ads, these companies will not have access to your chats. And the companies are saying we're not only going to know what you want, we're going to know when you're in the decision making process.

[Marques]

That's not exactly what it says. I think there's a firewall between. So that's the specific verbiage is the companies don't get that data. They get to buy access to the people who are searching certain ways. They don't get to know what you're searching. ChatGPT, OpenAI, they know all this stuff. But similar to the way you would buy Google AdWords, you'd buy ads for people who are googling certain things. Those ads will show up for those people. I never get to connect to those people directly or know who searched what. The same way Target's going to pay ChatGPT or OpenAI for a bunch of ads for whatever air fryers or whatever their products are and anytime those get served, that connection will be made. I don't know any of that is targeted.

[Christian]

I don't, I could be wrong, but I don't believe that's how Google AdSense works. I think there's a profile based on your credit cards and your IP address and all the other profiles that or data points that data brokers pick up on you and they know exactly what you, Marques Brownlee have been searching for and buying and are interested in.

[Marques]

That may be fair, but I don't see that language in either of these responses from we're going to use ChatGPT

[Andrew]

ads which is like, let's also just be real. This is total legalese and we don't know like what they actually want to do on the background of anything. And I don't trust them.

[Christian]

And yeah, and furthermore that's fair. The guy who is trying to convince us of all this is like, and this takes a lot of skill, man, because between like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, like we have some prolific liars among us these days. Like people who can just again poop out non truths. And Sam Altman is somehow the biggest liar of all of them. Like the list of lies that this guy has told over the course of his career are so huge and so crazy. And he still is just like, bro, just give me like all of the power in America, all the water in America, give me literally all of your most inside thoughts and feelings and I'll just like fix everything, bro, because I'm Sam motherfing Altman, go get another job. I don't know, I don't want this guy doing this job. And I get that. Like, I don't have, like, a say in that or whatever, but the guy whose job is to, like, take everything from everyone. I would like to be a truthful guy. That's my crash out. Okay, I'm sorry.

[David]

It's also just funny to me that every tech CEO decided that they have to have personality on Twitter. Like, I mean, Elon kind of started this. CEOs used to be pretty quiet.

[Marques]

They would maybe.

[Andrew]

I'm sure there's some.

[Marques]

There's a lot that don't say anything on Twitter. Yeah. But I like them.

[David]

A lot of the time.

[Marques]

You get, like, corporate savings from Sundar ever. He never says anything.

[David]

He sometimes does says stuff. I mean, it's not like. It's not like this. It's not like this. But pretty much every AI company CEO has, like, a very loud voice on Twitter and is very annoying and just

[Marques]

like, says, probably because that's where all of their customers are, like, as far as how competitive this environment is and how much of a connection you want to have to your potential customers, how else are you going to talk to them? It's kind of like when. How YouTube had that sort of. What is it called? Adpocalypse, where it's like all the YouTube, all the advertisers left YouTube and they realized that the only way to reach these people is to be advertising on YouTube. If you're an AI company CEO, how are you gonna reach the most aggressively enthusiastic AI people on the Internet? Probably by tweeting a lot at them and having them read what you're saying and not, you know, looking at the other things other people are saying. So I get why they're so loud on Twitter, but if you're annoyed by that, I don't think it's gonna make himself keep trying to reach those people.

[David]

Yeah, I mean, this kind of reaction, though, is very funny because, I mean, they just went. They went and said, like, we have more users in Texas than you have users total. And it's kind of like. I think the best thing to say was nothing. Or you could have just said that was funny and moved on. I'm gonna dub this the streisam effect, because, yeah, he.

[Andrew]

I was wondering why you typed it like that. Oh, I totally missed that.

[David]

Yeah, because he. He just kind of, like, drew more attention to the fact that he was crashing out about it. And then there were multiple articles written out about who he was crashing out.

[Andrew]

If I made a joke about one of you guys and you tweeted that long about it. Be like, damn, I got him. Like, that's right.

[David]

Andrew said something about me that was clearly dishonest.

[Andrew]

Anthropic is so happy right now that this guy is freaking out.

[David]

The amount of people that didn't even know Anthropic's name. That new chat GPT and then saw a bunch of Google, like, goog Google words articles on the side of their home feed being like, sam Altman crashes out a bit. Anthropic.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David]

I mean, the amount of marketing spend that they put into this was more

[Marques]

than free real estate.

[David]

The Super Bowl.

[Marques]

Yeah. It's free real estate.

[David]

Free real estate.

[Marques]

I will say Twitter is a very specific audience, and a lot of them are the silences complicit type. So if Sam Altman didn't say anything about those ads, it would also be really. It would be fodder for them to be like, ah, see, they got them. So no matter what you do, you lose. But he chose this path, so that's his choice.

[David]

I guess so.

[Andrew]

Screw you, Ellis, for making it seem like I was kind of defending it. I promise. That's not how I feel. I know, I know, I know.

[David]

Andrew loves open air.

[Christian]

It just feels to me like the entire premise of this company is like dog water. Like, seriously, like. Like what? Like you've made a trillion dollars in spending commitments and you genuinely are like, no, no, no. In the next, like, 10 years, we're going to 100x our revenue, despite the fact that we, like, won't tell anyone how we make any money right now. Despite, like. Despite the fact that we literally do not have enough electricity in the world to do what we're going to do.

[David]

It's all the trust me, bro economy.

[Andrew]

It's like, yeah, data centers in space.

[Christian]

Oh, yeah. Data centers in space.

[David]

By the way, killer, have you noticed Jensen Huang just, like, doing all these interviews on the streets of Taiwan?

[Christian]

Yeah.

[David]

I don't know why that keeps happening.

[Christian]

I don't know why that keeps happening, people.

[David]

He's just, like, walking down the street in Taiwan and someone. And then suddenly there's eight mics in his face to.

[Andrew]

In a press conference.

[Marques]

That's what happens. And if you don't say no to it, it's gonna keep happening. It's like that.

[David]

Why does he keep saying yes to it?

[Marques]

Well, it's not even saying yes to it. It's someone sprints up to you with a microphone and asks you a critical question about your company, and no matter what you Say it will be published. So do you, A, ignore them and get in the car? To which it looks like, ooh, he's avoiding it. He knows the answer's bad. Or B, do you try to answer because you think you have a good answer? And then suddenly seven more people with microfinance. I point ignoring you cannot win. If I had that much video, people are going to sprint up to you like, my life savings are in this. Tell me why you're going to win. Like, okay.

[David]

Well, it is funny, though, because he has been slowly walking back their commitments to OpenAI. At first it was like, Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI. And then throughout these on the street in Taiwan interviews, it's been like, we never actually signed a piece of paper. We just said that, you know, over a number of years, we might invest up to $100 billion.

[Christian]

Money isn't real. I mean, the money in my bank account is real, of course, but, like, your money isn't real.

[David]

And then randomly, Oracle put out a tweet that was like, we are committed to our investments. And was like, nobody asked you. Yeah. In other authoritative news. Yeah.

[Marques]

Mm.

[Andrew]

Mm.

[David]

That's right. Ring Co. Owned by Amazon.

[Marques]

This is funny. Okay, there's a couple.

[Adam]

I wasn't funny.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Yeah. Can you explain everything? Because I did not watch the super bowl, which you all will find out from my crash out later why I didn't. But.

[Marques]

Wow. Okay. Yeah.

[Andrew]

Yes. Some of these are super bowl things I've kind of seen people talk about online, but I would like the full explanation.

[David]

Okay.

[Adam]

I only watched that last time.

[Marques]

As you can imagine, during the Super bowl of 2026, people are all wondering which companies are gonna make a splash and make a big statement. Are there gonna be any crypto ads? Are they gonna be any AI ad Metaverse? CES is the same way. Or, like, who's going to have a. What's the theme?

[David]

Wait.

[Marques]

Right.

[David]

The super bowl, basically is CES.

[Marques]

Yes, yes. Exactly.

[David]

That's crazy. Exactly.

[Marques]

So 2026 Super bowl ads. There's a couple AI ads sprinkled in there, and people are analyzing them. Oh, this is their big moment. Okay. So each one of these companies challenge is to speak to the normies who don't pay attention to AI and paint a picture for them of why their AI is good. And it'll either hit your ear as a normie, or it'll hit your ear as a critic who's been looking at this stuff for a long time. So Amazon Ring decides, okay, we've got an idea. We're gonna show this really cool feature, this really cool thing that we've been doing, where if you lose your pet, then there's this neighborhood watch feature where you can go through everyone's feeds and it will recognize all of the ring neighborhoods in your neighborhood. Sorry, all the ring cameras in your neighborhood. You'll be able to find your pet through them, and you'll get reunited with your pet. Isn't that sick? A neighborhood watch feature from your ring camera that's turned on by default.

[Andrew]

It's neighborhood on.

[Marques]

Isn't that great?

[Andrew]

It's on by default.

[David]

You have to turn it off.

[Marques]

And I think for some people, it probably hit their ears like, wow, I've lost a pet. Wow, I have a pet. I hope I don't lose them. But if I do, this feature would really help. But for all of us, we're like, wait, if you can watch the pets through this feature.

[David]

And by the way, they're working with Flock, which is the company that makes those security cameras that are just placed everywhere and sold to government agencies and law enforcement.

[Marques]

And. And we would know that people aren't gonna know that. Yeah. If you can watch pets, what else can you find through this is the

[Andrew]

thing you, like, search for. Like, you say, I'm missing this dog, and then if it sees that dog you see or you, there's no way you can just go try to rewatch

[Marques]

the ad, because I don't know, I'm assuming it's like I can comb through my ring feed or whatever. But the idea is all of them are connected through this sort of database that lets you find it even though it's not on your camera.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Which means that there are other ways probably for other potentially authoritarian figures to pop in there and find things on people's ring cameras. Yeah.

[Christian]

Or like the big Flock scandal that just happened recently, where it turned out that none of them or not none of them, but a lot of them were not even password protected. And you could just go and look at any camera in a like.

[Andrew]

Yeah, one funny part I heard about. Or not funny, but it was like, didn't they say, like, 1 million dogs are lost a year? And then it said, like, we found one dog every day over the year. And it's like, the percentage on that is terrible.

[David]

300 million. I mean, rational.

[Marques]

This is a missing pet. This is a pet.

[Andrew]

No shirt. Listen, I'm all for 300 more dogs being found than something bad happening to

[Adam]

them, but, yeah, listen, this isn't about the dogs.

[David]

The ratios there are not now to

[Christian]

be clear really in dogs.

[Andrew]

I forget what ring.

[Christian]

That's crazy. One in 300 people in America lose a dog a year. That can't be right.

[David]

I'll find that Ring does deny that the search party feature is even able to track human faces and biometrics. And they say it is separate from the familiar faces facial recognition feature that they have on their.

[Adam]

That's amazing.

[Marques]

But.

[David]

Which is a made up fact. Even if a PR person would say

[Adam]

that they don't have access to the facial recognition thing, they have to know that people just don't trust this stuff.

[David]

No, of course. Like Ring is the company that just like gives this, like, has given this data to law enforcement before.

[Christian]

I think people do trust this stuff. I think that's, that's like, like I know so many people with Ring cameras.

[Adam]

No, I mean I'd say that the company is going to do what's in their best interest.

[Christian]

No, I, I think. And when I talk to people about the Ring cameras and I'm like, like, for example, like my neighbors had a Ring camera and I've made me really uncomfortable because it was pointed right at my door and I didn't like the idea that I was on camera every single time I was coming and going for my apartment. And I talked to them about it and they were just sort of like, what do you think's gonna happen? Like, like the footage is just, it's just footage. And I was like, where do you think that footage goes? And they literally like, I've never thought about it. I, I really, I don't think the average person like really understands.

[Andrew]

Like, I think it's. Maybe trust isn't the right word because I think a lot of people in general know, like most of these companies don't give a damn about me and like they don't trust them. But I think it's less of like the, the benefits for me are something that can make me not really think about the other things that could potentially.

[David]

Well, and it's Amazon, which makes these products as cheap as possible so that people just like buy them and make a bunch of, you know, put them on their house because they're so ridiculously cheap.

[Andrew]

I've got a bunch of cameras in my house. Mine's a little different because I'm not pointing it directly at like someone else's door.

[Christian]

And I live in a New York City apartment. Right. So it's like, it would be impossible. Yeah, I don't know.

[David]

Yeah, I just want to remind people like this is. This is Amazon. Same company that made the Melania movie, which had a total budget of $75 million.

[Adam]

They didn't make it.

[Marques]

They.

[Adam]

Well, they donated $35 million or whatever it was.

[David]

Yeah, $75 million budget, $40 million acquisition fee paid by Amazon to Melania Trump's production company, and then 28 million went directly to her for license. I think that it's pretty obvious, like, where a lot of this money is going. And I just. I would not trust a company that has security cameras all over the country.

[Christian]

The security camera company just gave a giant donation to the.

[David]

Yeah, anyway, I told you this. Marquette said this was the Crash out podcast.

[Marques]

I watched. I just rewatched the ad.

[Christian]

It's like, watch the Melania movie.

[Andrew]

I rewatched it 25x speed right now.

[David]

Oh, nothing happened. Wow.

[Andrew]

Nothing happened. It took my left ear.

[Marques]

No, I watched the ad. There's not a lot of official ui. There's just kind of like a Portal in the Ring app to be like, here's the pet's name, here's a picture, here's a description. And then the pet shows up at their door. So it's not like we know how this works at all. But I imagine from the advertising perspective, they're like, look, it's a great feature. Doesn't matter how it works. It's going to get you your pet back if you ever lose it in your neighborhood. And then if anyone asks any questions, we just deny, deny, deny.

[Andrew]

Can I throw something out there? Like, like, this happens if you're just in, like, the Facebook group for your town, or like the. What's the website neighbor next door or something. There's so many things like that people will just be like, hey, I lost my cat. Here's a picture of them. And someone will post and they're like, oh, I looked on my security. Like, people care about each other enough to just say, like, hey, I saw them out there. Or like, here's my security camera that saw what looks like your cat at Blah, blah, blah. I'm over here. This happens without one company needing to own all of it.

[David]

Most of these technology products are just like, don't talk to people. Just let the technology do it for you.

[Christian]

I saw something amazing on Twitter, which was a test to determine if a new technology is good or bad. And the test. And the test is if it would make the plot of a Seinfeld episode not work at all. It's a good piece of tech, like smartphones, Google Maps, like, think, like, things that, like, Would cause the central issue of a Seinfeld episode to, like, fall apart because the tech just solves the problem.

[Marques]

Fits.

[Shen]

Yeah.

[Marques]

This is a good feature.

[Christian]

Tech that would create the plot of a Seinfeld episode is bad tech. Think like Polymarket or like. Or Flock cameras or like.

[Marques]

I would say that there could easily. I've never seen Seinfeld, so I apologize.

[Adam]

No.

[David]

It's like the greatest show ever.

[Marques]

But I could imagine a show like that having an episode about losing their dog and taking a whole episode to find it. That crazy.

[Andrew]

I feel like the Seinfeld episode would be like.

[David]

That could totally work. Yeah.

[Marques]

And then this just ruins that because you just. Oh, I got a notification. Is three doors down or whatever.

[David]

Like the band.

[Marques]

The.

[Andrew]

The cool thing about.

[David]

Sorry, sorry. The. The. The. Okay little rant. The best thing about Seinfeld is that there's, like, three interlaced storylines that seem totally separate, and then they randomly come in contact with each other, like, through the episode, and they just not.

[Adam]

The best thing about it is the sneakers he wears on every episode. Straight Heat. Jerry Seinfeld's on it.

[David]

What are they?

[Adam]

Because he's a sneakerhead.

[Marques]

Wait, really? Yeah. Has he been on the sneaker shopping show?

[Adam]

I actually don't know. Maybe.

[Marques]

I would assume someone is known for that.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Interesting.

[Adam]

It might be.

[David]

All right.

[Marques]

Will be my introduction to Seinfeld. Look up his sneaker shop.

[David]

That show is so good.

[Christian]

You know what else is gonna scan your face? But this time be truthful about it.

[David]

Yeah. One more surveillance story and then we're done. I promise.

[Christian]

You know where it's gonna scan your child's face?

[David]

Yeah. Discord this week announced that they are going to be requiring face scanning or ID uploading for people that they think are probably children. So they. So they are going.

[Christian]

What a way to phrase that.

[David]

They're gonna be okay. Basically, they're trying to age gate. They're trying to get kids off of the, like, not safe for work Discord communities. Because there's.

[Andrew]

That's the.

[Christian]

Yeah, it's.

[David]

It's this weird back and forth thing where clearly there have been many, many problems with, like, there are many bad things about the Internet that kids just have access to. And that's sort of always been the case. And so there are bad things that occur there, obviously. And so there's sort of this weird tension between, like, how do we stop kids from accessing that without creating a surveillance state?

[Andrew]

I think the other thing is also people accessing kids that like that in the same Space is what's really bad.

[David]

Yeah, for sure.

[Marques]

Age gating.

[Christian]

The Roblox effect.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah. Is like a solution to this problem, but that is very difficult to implement without getting accused of.

[David]

Yeah, this for sure. Yeah. Famously, people that use Discord, gamers, you know, people that are very online not happy about having to scan their faces, which I'm not either. I don't think I would ever give. Anyway, here's what they say. They say that for most adults, age verification won't be required as they're using account information like the games that you play when you're online. All of these random account tenure too.

[Christian]

So if you've had a Discord account for like 16, I don't know how long.

[David]

Which I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're using a bunch of different metrics to determine whether or not you're in a. They think you're an adult. And if they think you're an adult, you won't have to do any of these things. If you, if you have your Discord hooked up to Steam and you play Roblox all the time, they probably are gonna make you, you know, jokes on you.

[Christian]

David. I don't think Roblox is on Steam.

[Marques]

Oh, damn.

[Christian]

I don't know though.

[David]

It might be. I don't know.

[Marques]

Is Minecraft like the most popular game on Steam? It's gonna be a lot of people getting that.

[Christian]

I don't think Minecraft is on Steam either.

[Marques]

It's not.

[David]

Oh, it's on the Windows Store.

[Marques]

What is on Steam?

[David]

Everything else.

[Andrew]

Everything else. Literally every other game you didn't just mention.

[David]

Fortnite is not on Steam.

[Marques]

I'm trying, guys.

[Adam]

If the game, I feel like if the game is big enough to have like its own following where it doesn't need to be on Steam, then it's not on Steam.

[David]

Unless it's every other game. Unless it's owned by Valve. Yeah, like Counter Strike and Dota. Yeah, got it. Just gotta mention Dota 2 again. So anyway, users who are not verified as adults will not have access to age restricted servers channels and they won't be able to speak in Discord stages. They will see content filters from friend requests and DMs from unknown sources will be filtered into another inbox. Discord says that the face scan uses an on device AI model to analyze and predict your age and never leaves the device. So that is something. If that is true, I think that we need security experts to actually try that out and dig into that. There was a lot of backlash to this and so Teamspeak, if you know that word, you will not get age verified on Discord. Yeah, if you don't know that word, you probably will.

[Andrew]

I was saying, what's the meme of, like, if you. If you recognize Ricky Martin at the halftime show, like, it's probably time to get your prostate checked. Like, if you know Teamspeak.

[Marques]

That was Ricky Martin.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Oh, my God.

[Marques]

That was Ricky Martin.

[David]

I just.

[Andrew]

Wow, you're good, Youngin.

[David]

Yeah.

[Christian]

So legit.

[David]

Teamspeak is like one of the OG voice chat gaming apps. I used to use it when we played. I played Starcraft in high school, and it's basically not been updated in the last, like, 15 years.

[Andrew]

That's way different.

[David]

Kind of sick. I mean, the website. Yeah, yeah, it looks a little bit more like Discord. The problem with Discord now is that it's trying to become the Everything app. Like every app, including Netflix, every app is trying to become the Everything app. Because in order to scale infinitely, you have to just adopt every possible market.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

That's why Netflix is becoming a podcast app and a games app now, because they kind of saturated the watching content app.

[Christian]

They're going to drop the flicks.

[David]

Yeah. There's going to be net. Give me the Internet.

[Marques]

Welcome to Net.

[David]

So, yeah, people are very angry about this. Discord knew that people were going to be very angry and they anticipated to lose some users and say that they are going to have to use other tactics to get users to come back. Whether or not this ends up being a mass exodus and people actually move over permanently or just flow back, which is what usually happens with the social graph effects. Not sure.

[Andrew]

So can I just. This is, I just think, funny. It doesn't take away from any of the worries people has in here. But there's something so funny about Discord being for gamers and them not wanting their face. But then they'll go start a new character in a game and spend like six hours making it look exactly like them.

[Christian]

That is very funny.

[Marques]

Damn.

[Christian]

Yeah, there's. There's going to be a really sad future where we look back on this errand, be like, damn, like Discord and like Sam Altman with Worldcoin. Like, they were so nice. Like they let us scan our own faces instead of just like walking into Baskin Robbins and getting our face scanned without our consent for our ice cream id.

[David]

Like, all the flock cameras are already. They already know where you are at all times. Anyway. Anyway, I did see a very funny thing. Do you guys know what Gary's Mod is. This is another one. This is another one of those things where if you do know what that is, you won't have to do the thing. But I saw some people who were using Garry's mod characters to fool the face scanning technology, and it actually worked.

[Marques]

That's crazy.

[David]

Well, it does. And that's the thing, because they were like. They were like streaming the screen. I mean, death and depth in terms of like, the character looks three dimensional and it was turning.

[Andrew]

Yeah, because it's not using like an IR sensor on your regular webcam.

[David]

Cameras are all 2D. You know, they just like.

[Marques]

Yeah, but like, I. Well, I didn't realize. I thought when I was doing. I don't remember what I was doing a face verification for, but I had to scan my ID and then do the thing where I look left and right. Yeah, I think that's using the iPhone's. Well, maybe it does.

[Andrew]

The iPhone's IR might be iPhone's IR, but it might also not be. But Discord is presumably probably using it from a webcam or I guess there is a mobile app, so maybe probably a webcam.

[David]

I doubt they're not gonna force you to use your phones.

[Marques]

That's just why I figured they would have to use real depth instead of just an image that rotates.

[David]

Well, they can't really. I mean, the iPhone, there's. That have ir.

[Christian]

Yeah, look, there's. There's also a non zero chance that this face scanning stuff literally does nothing. And Discord just needed to do something to like, make themselves not legally accountable for, like, exposing minors to. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it does, but, like, we're at the point now. We're like, who's to say everyone isn't lying all the time?

[David]

Mm.

[Andrew]

I've been lying this whole podcast.

[Marques]

I'm not.

[Christian]

Audio listeners would be shocked to find out I am like a seven foot lizard sitting at the mic and have been this whole time.

[David]

I'm 12.

[Christian]

But you know what demands truth and nothing but the truth.

[Marques]

What is that?

[Christian]

Waveform trivia.

[Marques]

That's facts.

[David]

Well, good thing we always get the truth wrong.

[Andrew]

I was gonna say when the correction comes next week, that segue is gonna hit.

[Christian]

Oh, yeah, maybe.

[David]

No, I scores.

[Christian]

Yeah, no, that is. Look, man, I strive for perfection.

[David]

I know it's been a weird episode,

[Christian]

but it's only going to get weirder.

[David]

Baby, it's only going to get weirder. It's only February.

[Christian]

Guys, you want to guess what this trivia question's about?

[Adam]

Because I think

[Christian]

Sam Altman has said in the past, specifically on his blog and several interviews, that with 10 gigawatts of computer, we would most likely have to choose between curing cancer or tutoring every child in America. We couldn't have both for 10 gigawatts of compute, the largest power plant by total possible capacity. Again, this power plant only runs at 30% capacity, according to my limited understanding of industrial scale power and this. Wikipedia.

[Andrew]

That's part of a trivia question.

[Christian]

Full hypothetical capacity. How many gigawatts can the largest power plant in America produce?

[David]

I don't even have to do with education.

[Marques]

Wait, I'm saying that the compute required.

[Christian]

The compute required to train the model that could do either of those things require 10 gigawatts.

[Marques]

I don't understand why these people ever make those. Like, sometimes you see people ask, like, Elon, like, well, what do you think it would, you know, solving world hunger. And he'll go, hmm. And he'll try to answer, like, why would you try to answer that? Don't say. Don't make a promise that you could solve cancer with enough power. That's an insane thing to say out loud.

[Christian]

Yeah, but you know, the thing is, is like, I've never been an evil villain, like a super villain, so I can't truly put myself.

[David]

What about when you were the Hamburglar for Halloween?

[Christian]

That's true. I was a super villain. Is the Hamburglar really a super villain? I've always thought of him as more of like a Robin Hood, man of the people type figure.

[Andrew]

No, that's.

[Marques]

If.

[David]

Is Ronald McDonald like Big Brother or something?

[Christian]

No, the Hamburglar's foil is Mayor McChees.

[Marques]

I'm so hungry.

[David]

Okay.

[Andrew]

I thought they were wrapped in paper.

[Christian]

Oh, that's good.

[David]

Anyway, what's the question?

[Andrew]

I think I literally don't know.

[David]

How many gigawatts.

[Christian]

How many gigawatts the hardiest, most powerful power plant in America?

[David]

How many gigawatts does it produce in America while it's running at 30% capacity?

[Christian]

I'm specifically referring to the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State.

[Andrew]

Many gigawatts did the car in. Back to the Future news.

[Christian]

Flux capacitor.

[Adam]

Seven parsecs.

[Andrew]

No, 100 gigawatts.

[Christian]

I have no idea. I don't remember.

[Marques]

That's is a thousand. How many?

[Christian]

A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts.

[Marques]

Okay. And a megawatt is a thousand.

[Andrew]

1.2 one thousand.

[David]

A thousand thousand.

[Marques]

A thousand watts.

[Christian]

A megawatt is a thousand watts. No, a million watts. It's A million watts.

[Marques]

A million watts? Yeah. Oh, okay.

[David]

1.21 gigawatts.

[Christian]

A gigawatt is a billion watts.

[Andrew]

The flux capacitor needed 1.21 gigawatts.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Damn. He could have cured cancer instead.

[Christian]

Dude.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[David]

Are you saying that that dam would let us travel back to the future?

[Andrew]

I'm saying that, like seven times.

[Christian]

I'm saying that musical comedian Reggie is one watt.

[Marques]

Damn it. Reggie Watts. That's good. We should take a break.

[Christian]

Yeah.

[Marques]

We're going insane.

[Andrew]

I think our audience needs a break more than we.

[David]

I'm sorry, guys.

[Marques]

But also. Well, we'll think about it. Answers will be at the end, like usual.

[Adam]

We'll be right back.

[Marques]

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Let's do a triangle formation.

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[Marques]

Everyone one fits in the shot.

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[Andrew]

all right, welcome back, Marques. Yeah, we've talked about a lot of deep stuff here, but I think I have potentially the biggest question possible for you. Sure. Why do you hate OnePlus so much?

[Marques]

It's a very valid question. You mean my daily driver that I've been. This has been a question I've seen.

[Andrew]

Keep your enemies closer.

[Marques]

Marques. No, we did a video on silicon carbon batteries and this video got a mixed reception and obviously I have thoughts on it, but I'll have all the details here. Basically, it's a story of corporate risk assessment, which is not the most interesting thing, but it's very connected to technology because there are companies out there using silicon carbon batteries. There are lots of companies out there not using silicon carbon batteries in smartphones. Specifically, and we talk a lot about smartphones. So after the year and a half of me making lots of videos on smartphones that have Silicon Carbon batteries and me raving about them and being like, why aren't these other guys doing that? Decided to dig a little bit more into why those other guys aren't doing that. And also have been getting lots of emails, as you can imagine, from people going, hey, we're not idiots. We have thought a lot about this, and there's a certain risk tolerance that this company has and a couple concerns that these companies have about potentially using Silicon Carbon batteries.

[Andrew]

I'd say it got to the point where over the past year, you would mention it and we would have comments that are like, hey, moron, they're not doing it because of blah, blah, blah.

[Marques]

It's come up a few times, even on this podcast we've mentioned. I think you mentioned it too. Yeah.

[David]

The Google engineer at Google I O last year pulled me aside and was like, you guys keep asking why we're not using it, and here are the reasons we're not using it. So I just was like, I just mentioned that. He mentioned that to me. Yeah, that's all I said.

[Marques]

Yeah. And also I had a bunch of versions of that over the last couple years. So I'm like, all right, let me just put all this together into one video. Because I imagine not everyone knows this stuff. Not everyone gets pulled aside by a Google engineer at I O to hear about this stuff. So essentially put together a video on what some of those companies are thinking about Silicon Carbon and why they're not using it so that we can have the whole picture. I'm still gonna love silicon Carbon batteries and praise them, and that's why I'm using this phone, and phones like it with incredible battery life. But there were a couple of things people didn't like about the video. Probably two main things. One was the thumbnail. Totally valid. It was, like, a little bit spicy. And I think this is an interesting enough topic without the debate about clickbait, So I just changed the thumbnail. But then two was that I didn't name drop the exact people who had been emailing me over the years or which companies who had pulled me aside and said these things. And it kind of felt like, oh, I'm like a mouthpiece for them. Like, I'm protecting them and justifying them. I'm actually like a secret silicon carbon hater or something like that. I think a lot of people didn't make it all the way through the Video and just left with that impression. So I figured it was valid to sort of explain it all with someone who's actually willing to join the podcast and put a their expertise in front of everyone and explain. So we have Shen joining us from htc. I don't know if he's been on the podcast. He's been on the podcast once before. Okay.

[David]

Because we've talked twice.

[Marques]

And so HTC obviously does lots of different devices now at this point in xr and obviously have done smartphones in the past rip, but they obviously work with batteries a lot. So he works with batteries and the corporate risk assessment profile of a company who has to decide what types of batteries to use. So I figured this would be informative and interesting. You don't have to hear it from me, but you get all the information at a deeper level. So let's play that quick interview for you now and then we'll come back right after. So. Okay, Shen, thank you for doing this. I appreciate the time. I think we should just start off with what are your. What's your position? What are your credentials? Because people want to know how you know this stuff first. So who are you? What do you do?

[Shen]

Okay, I'm Shen. I look after global product management at HTC. I've been here for almost 11 years now, but I've been running product for the past five and a half years here at our headquarters. So I look after product from conception to all the way to, you know, end of life when we do, you know, we. When we. So. So I don't work on phones anymore, but I work on a lot of things where things like batteries are important. So, like XR headsets.

[Marques]

Right.

[Shen]

Generally what you'll find in the market is about two hours. And I would say also with things like smart glasses that we just launched, the compactness of them is also really important. And then one last thing is considering that they're right on your head, we are actually generally more safety conscious than others when it comes to the battery safety itself.

[Marques]

That's a really good jumping off point because obviously we talked about silicon carbon batteries, regular lithium ion batteries we've seen for years, and I mostly was talking about them in the context of smartphones. But paint me a picture of what this landscape is like. We've had these batteries for a long time. There's been tons of advancements, and I've started talking about silicon carbon batteries for the last year or two in smartphones as a really big, big deal, like a pretty big leap. But obviously there's Some risk assessment there. So what do you, when you look at just batteries in general, silicon carbon versus the typical battery, what, what are you seeing?

[Shen]

So I'm still a massive smartphone fan, so things like silicon carbon batteries do get me excited, especially at the idea of capacity increasing so much.

[David]

Yeah.

[Shen]

But when it comes to the industry itself, I think because batteries are such a high energy density item, everyone is usually a lot more wary of it. The way, you know, the way a battery can usually go wrong is when it expands, it swells, thermal runaway, you know, usually maybe it's like shorts inside and some of them don't even have to come from any structural, like dropping your phone.

[Andrew]

Right.

[Shen]

Like batteries that charge below freezing can sometimes have an issue where the lithium deposits itself as a metal. And that's pretty much an irreversible process. It can cause gas expansion and it can cause shorts itself. So loads of these different things we have to consider when looking at new chemistries.

[David]

And

[Shen]

so it depends on the kind of company you are. Right. So I, I did see the video and I, I do agree with you. When you are kind of in the top two or three in terms of market share, it's kind of your race to lose.

[Andrew]

Right.

[Shen]

So you're more wary about a mistake happening, especially when you sell tens of millions, hundreds of millions of phones a year. So you're going to be a lot more strict when it comes to safety standards. And sometimes it might just be the thing that you don't want to really risk. And I also say when we look at something like silicon carbon or even newer technologies like silicon anode itself,

[Andrew]

what

[Shen]

it helps with things like capacity

[Andrew]

in

[Shen]

terms of battery chemistry, you're playing a lot of other levers instead. So as you go with more and more silicon, it is, you are actually reducing the charge rate as well. So that is another thing you have to balance. And of course, things like longevity you mentioned in your video, and it's quite accurate, when silicon absorbs lithium ions, as it charges, it swells up. There are loads of ways, there's nanolithography ways of making sure those particles don't swell up as much. But at the end of the day, it's still swelling. And that will cause companies to have certain concerns and they'll want to test these for longer periods of time. So I expect it to be slower adoption there as well. And I would say a lot of different companies take things like battery longevity differently. Some will make this their number one thing and you'll realize that they're the ones that don't really increase charge speed that much. Don't really experiment with new types of chemistry. And that's usually because they actually care about longevity a lot more than.

[Marques]

I know you won't say it, but I'll say that that's the thing we've seen from Apple for years. But what is funny about batteries is smartphones. I talk about smartphones so much. We get very few really exciting new things with smartphones at this stage. They're such a mature category. So when we do get something interesting like, oh, a way bigger smartphone sensor or, oh, this really big processor node shift, or, ooh, a huge increase in battery capacity. That's interesting. So, like, we pay more attention to it and we'd like all of our favorite brands and our favorite phone models we're considering buying to be at the forefront of that. But it's not always as simple as just switching to the new thing. I think one thing that was also mentioned in the video that was, you know, it's obviously very complex and I did a lot of simplification, but is the testing process, and I'm assuming this is obviously very important to you because you're putting batteries on people's head. Like, what is the process of testing, you know, charge cycles and for longevity, what is, what is the process like at a big company when trying to assess if a new battery technology is potentially worth it?

[Shen]

So usually when it comes to safety, we work with the battery vendor themselves to, to come out with safety guidelines. And actually most companies have roughly the same kind of guidelines, the same kind of tests. Some may just pull the criteria a little bit higher. You'll usually see battery specs, for example, like, it will retain 80% of its charge after 800 to 1,000 charge cycles.

[Marques]

Yeah, we see that, things like that.

[Shen]

But one other thing is when you have a new product, the way it fits in also makes a difference in terms of how you should test it. I'll give you an example. When it comes to. When it comes to fitting a battery itself, your manufacturers always leave kind of an expansion space between the battery and the actual housing, because batteries will expand, they'll expand with temperature, they'll expand over time. There's always going to be a little bit of off gassing, potentially that can happen. And a lot of the time that's within an acceptable range. And that's why you leave that expansion space. It's mostly when that expansion goes beyond what that expansion space allows that you'll see your phone kind of splitting apart. So we'll test For a lot of different things, we'll test for different temperatures. Even during shipping we have a thing called thermal shock where something might go from minus something degrees to something that's really hot and really humid. So those are things that you, you kind of have to test for for all kinds of products. But I'll still say there are a lot of things that is really hard to test for. There are 20, 30 different combinations that are going to happen. But how do you test those over a long period of time? If you're testing it through for, you can accelerate certain tests, but at the end of the day you always realize you have a certain blind spot when it comes to real world usage. So that comes back to what I mentioned. It's all about how do you want to play that risk.

[Marques]

Yeah, I mean like I said, there's, there's a lot of variables and maybe if it's in something that's in used, it's used in less environments or less situations, then maybe you don't have to test for as many variables. But a smartphone is like it's with you everywhere. Like there's a trillion different things that can happen to it from temperature to pressure and environments and stuff. So that's, it does seem, I don't envy the task. It seems like a very, very detailed, complicated one. My last question for you is just what else do you think people should know about batteries in general? Like there's, it's a complex thing, there's chemistry, there's physics, there's a lot involved. Is there anything that maybe is commonly looked over by, by people buying smartphones? Maybe in just when comparing one smartphone to the other, what do you think people should know about batteries that they probably don't already?

[Shen]

I will say one thing about kind of, I'll say one that's kind of more supply chain oriented first and that specifically, usually with new tech you have this one issue where not many people are making it. If you know from HTC's past, we have rules in place where we are required to kind of second source everything. And that's for a few reasons. Sometimes you don't want one vendor for a really cheap component to go out of business or to have an issue and then impact your entire business. Sure, sometimes it's that, but sometimes it's also more malicious. You have competitors in the space that will attack your supply chain to try and stop you from going to market. That happens more than you'd expect.

[Marques]

That is.

[Shen]

So yeah. So as a big company, whenever you look at new tech you're going to want to try and second source everything. I mean, in htc, the only exception by default is the cpu.

[Andrew]

Right.

[Shen]

Because mostly in a phone you're not going to find a second source for like a Qualcomm chipset.

[Marques]

Sure.

[Shen]

But you can second source most things. And then if we have to waive it, anything for any reason, that usually has to go through an approval process. So that is one thing to consider, which is at the scale of certain companies, they're going to be required to second source those because they don't want their sales to tank because one supplier couldn't make batteries anymore for them.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Shen]

Any other component.

[Marques]

Yeah, that is really interesting you bring that up because that's been a story sometimes, every once in a while in the past, there'll be a big enough noticeable difference between maybe a single component from two different suppliers and that'll make a headline like, oh, I got the iPhone with the LG display or I got the iPhone with the Samsung display and you can actually measure a difference. And it's kind of rare that that happens. But usually, you know, people are pretty good about matching the things together. But that is, that is a fascinating story too.

[Shen]

Yeah, I would say most manufacturers will have the same specs for those different companies to try and make sure that it isn't noticeable. But every now and then you will. Someone notices it. So that's kind of the supply chain side. And then. Yeah, I think the, the one thing about batteries is coming back to there are so many different levers.

[Marques]

Right.

[Shen]

And you might want capacity, but the next person's going to want charging speed. Right. You might be able to have both, but there's a trade off somewhere. That trade off could be longevity. You know, I don't think any, any battery manufacturer will make something that is below what industry safety regulations are. But what I will say is those tolerances will sometimes change how they fit in a product, also impact how it's tested. And yeah, different companies will just have their different priorities. And at the end of the day, that is going to be one of the, the key reasons why they choose a specific battery over another and sometimes could even just be cost.

[Marques]

Right.

[Shen]

Memory is going up crazy, right? Yeah, we've been having meetings about memory for all of our products. Like almost any product with a process is going to have some sort of memory in there. And we're trying to figure out, okay, what else could we do without having to increase prices for certain things? And sometimes, and I'm sure someone in 2026 will end up making a decision that they're not going to invest as much into the newest technologies because they don't want their retail price to go up.

[Marques]

Yeah, like I. I try to. This has come up now that we've, like, started making our own products where we realize how many decisions go into these products. And every lever is just a trade off with something else.

[Andrew]

Else.

[Marques]

I am rooting for silicon carbon batteries to become, like, we haven't had, thankfully, any issues with them. Longevity seems to be totally fine so far. But, you know, batteries, even just within batteries themselves have different levers. It feels like an oversimplification, but a lot of things come down to just like capacity, charge rate, and longevity. Pick two, you know that type. And that's not even with price. And like all the other things, like, there are tons of different levers that will flip based on what your priorities are as a company. But, yeah, I'm waiting for good things.

[Shen]

You might not know what that level will look like if you pull the other two. You don't know what that longevity level is going to look like until you've seen that thing run through its entire life cycle. So I would say, like, those that aren't using silicon carbon batteries, I wouldn't say any of them are rooting against it at all. As long as nothing happens to it in whatever their timeframe they're observing it. I'm sure it's going to be within those discussions. I'm sure it's in their discussions now. But at the end of the day, when they make that decision of which one they use, they're choosing the levers that makes the most sense for them.

[Marques]

Awesome. Well, this has been super helpful and insightful, and I'm sure we'll have you back on the podcast at some point, maybe even back in the studio. But we appreciate the insight. So thanks as always.

[Shen]

Thank you.

[Marques]

All right, so that was it. Thank you again to Shen for spending the time. Obviously he's a very busy person, and being in charge of a big company like that, there are tons of things to consider all the time. It was cool having the facts from him and the expertise. And again, the risk that we're talking about is not just like the specific safety risk of one technology, but it's like a corporate risk. It's a financial risk, it's a longevity risk. It's. It's all sorts of things that come with the choices, the levers you pull to use different technologies. So I thought that was interesting to hear.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I think one of the A pretty common comment was along the lines of like, well, Apple and Samsung aren't going to risk spending more money on it. It's like, yeah, that's, that's part of the risk sentiment thing is like it costs more money, potentially has way more money. You think about Note 7? I mean, how much money Samsung probably lost about this? Like, yeah, all these companies care way more about bottom line and money than they do any of us and getting the best features. So yeah, yeah, I thought that was pretty obvious.

[David]

But I was, I am reminded that the guy at I.O. that told me the reason Google didn't use them at the time, again, this was a year ago. Things might have changed since then.

[Adam]

It was two years ago maybe.

[David]

It might have been two years ago. It might have been two years Ago, might have been two IO. IO. To Google IO. We go, what old MacDonald?

[Andrew]

That's what he said.

[David]

Yeah, the Hamburglar.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[David]

Anyway, so he, at the time, it wasn't, he wasn't saying that like they're more likely to explode necessarily. What he had told me was that their longevity, they started to lose their chart, their total ability to charge to 100% much quicker and after 2 ish years the degradation was a lot higher. I am aware like, like from two years from then, they've actually made the technology quite a bit better. They've made the chemistry a lot better so that it maintains a lot of charge cycles. I think OnePlus has put out a lot of kind of like technical stuff about this and how they're able to actually maintain like 1000 charge cycles for silicon carbon, which is a lot better than some people. Yeah, so that's really important stuff changes.

[Marques]

Yeah, this like assessment of the technology will be constantly changing and then the way that these companies decide whether to use any of this stuff or not is also constant, constantly changing. So as it gets better, like, okay, one of the big points in the comments was, well, we haven't had any issues so far with silicon carbon batteries, which is great. That's really good news for potentially getting them sooner in everyone else's phones. But yeah, this stuff is constantly evolving

[David]

and it's newish to the point where like it's only been out for like two years.

[Marques]

Exactly.

[David]

So like, yeah, we're not going to see if there are any problems. We're not going to start seeing it until like a year from now or so.

[Andrew]

And the variable of humankind is so much more insane than anything you can test in a lab. I mean we've seen how many folds have Been folded a hundred thousand times in a lab and people are breaking

[David]

broken within a week, two weeks.

[Andrew]

Yeah. We peeled the screen protector off of

[David]

the first fold immediately.

[Andrew]

Like, like us as humans destroy things. And when it's something that has a little bit of a more dangerous potential, it's just like, even if that's so small, the news cycle of when, if that potentially happens is so big.

[David]

And we talk about, we talk about how, like, you know, when YouTube makes a change and it's like, oh, we're only testing this on 1% of customers. But then you realize what 1% is for YouTube and that's like a lot of people. It's the same with like, Samsung sells an insane amount of phones. Right. So like, if 1% of their phones have battery issues, that's a way bigger story than 1% of like the amount of phones that Google sells having battery issues.

[Marques]

Yeah, that's exactly. And what Shin was talking about. Like, if you're, if you're pretty confident that the issues with their phones are one in a million and you only sell half a million phones, you feel pretty good about that. But if you're Samsung and you sell tens of millions of phones, the risk

[Andrew]

profile is different and are also like, yeah, you're just leading everything already. Like, why change anything? I'm already making plenty of money and people aren't switching off me, so why would I give them anything else?

[Adam]

Are you just talking about the S26 now?

[Andrew]

I think that's, I think, yeah, literally

[Marques]

that was maybe the most like, impactful line that he said to me, which is like, it's your race to lose.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Marques]

In all these other competitive markets where there is no true, number one runaway with a high market share, they're all very competitive and that's way more exciting. You get way more advanced product really quickly. And then like I said in that video, here in the US where market share is kind of stacked for a couple companies, they are, I mean, we see it. They are so passive about a lot of stuff. So that's their risk assessment profile.

[David]

The S23s, the S24s, the S25 and

[Andrew]

is three plus new boxes.

[David]

Yeah. Note three plus.

[Adam]

My thing too is like, I feel like if there's one thing I can trust and believe in, it's that these companies want to make more money. So if, if there's an, if there's an opportunity for them to grow a good new battery tech, they're going to do it as soon as possible.

[David]

If they think it'll like Drive them market share.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

I mean the whole reason that Samsung is making a foldable, allegedly making it foldable to compete with the iPhone, foldable form factor is because they know it will make them money. Because they want. Because people are like, oh, I love that shape, but I want to be on Android. Also, Samsung has some pretty bad PTSD with the Note 7 explosion.

[Marques]

I was just thinking about that. That was 2016, right? I think it was 27, 16, 2017. So almost a decade ago. I always find myself saying like, hey, you know what happened to Samsung? But for some 15 year olds watching this, they don't, they actually don't know what happened.

[Adam]

Oh yeah.

[David]

Oh yeah. So yeah, a lot of people might not even know what the Galaxy Note was.

[Marques]

Exactly. Part of the age verification is what happened to Samsung.

[Christian]

There was a time where you had to choose between having an Android phone that came with a stylus or air travel.

[David]

That's true. Yeah. Because you could not bring a Galaxy Note 7 on a plane. For those that don't know the Galaxy Note 7 notably appreciate it started exploding a lot.

[Andrew]

And even that is there's 96 cases total. That's a lot. It is a lot. It's a lot. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not really that much.

[Christian]

I only exploded 96 times. It's not that big a deal.

[Marques]

That's the thing.

[David]

Especially knowing that while you're sleeping your phone could randomly explode like that. I would not. Yeah. So they recalled it and then they just didn't end up replacing it, which was very funny. They did later release the Note 7 Fan Edition for those who really want a Note 7. Yeah, yeah.

[Marques]

Like I said, lithium ion batteries aren't perfect either. No, it's just they have some level of risk all the way across the board.

[Andrew]

Can I throw something out there also just about the video, just as an explanation. The reason we showed the jerryrig everything fold like smoking in the video is because when we were looking over the script, someone at the studio was like, oh, I don't know what the term thermal runaway means. So rather than just putting this big explanation there, we just, I mean, I guess it's not a big explanation but we're like, we'll show footage of what a thermal runaway is. We don't have that silicon carbon. I totally get why people think that felt, yeah, targeted. But that was not the purpose of

[Marques]

all the mentality that a lot of comments that we're seeing in some reaction videos people made. A lot of it came from the original thumbnail which was people. Oh, this is a hit piece against silicon carbon, which if you ignore every other video I've ever made is a reasonable take. But now that the thumbnail has changed, that packaging makes a lot more sense. We are explaining the risk assessment not going, hey, silicon carbon bad. Lithium ion good. So if that was your thought, now you know.

[David]

And the risk assignment again is mostly about pricing and longevity and less about exploding.

[Marques]

Exactly.

[David]

Which a lot of people thought it was about explosion exploding, but it's not. So.

[Marques]

So there we go.

[Adam]

Can I say a random thing that Chen pointed out that I thought was interesting was the more he was talking about it. I kind of like in my head tried to visualize what these levers are that he was talking about that you have to like pull and push or whatever. And it just reminded me kind of like an exposure triangle. Like with cameras. Like the more of one thing you do, the less of the other. Like charge cycles or capacity. And it's like.

[Marques]

Right.

[Adam]

Eventually we'll have Sony's that can just see in the dark. But.

[David]

But, yeah, but.

[Christian]

And it was also a good point because it's like an exposure triangle where you have to take 10,000 pictures before you can see the light meter. You know what I mean? Cause like he made that really good point that it's like you can play with the longevity lever or the charge speed lever, but you don't know what that third lever is going to be like until you've had these batteries used for a while.

[Shen]

For years.

[David]

Yeah.

[Christian]

Anyway, thank you, Shen.

[Marques]

All in the name of shading light on things. Thank you again to Shen for helping us out with that. And. And I think it's time for more trivia.

[Adam]

Trivia.

[Marques]

Dude.

[Adam]

So this is a YouTube question. Let's see who gets it.

[David]

YouTube. I should get this like YouTube being

[Adam]

came in pre installed on which ipod. No triggered.

[David]

I knew that one.

[Adam]

Not including music videos, the topmost YouTube video is a GTA 6 trailer. Of course. But one company accidentally broke that record in 2024. Do you remember what company that was?

[Andrew]

Most viewed YouTube video.

[Adam]

That's 24 hours.

[Andrew]

In 24 hours. That is not a music video.

[Adam]

That is not a music video.

[David]

Accidentally.

[Marques]

Accidentally broke that record.

[Adam]

Yep.

[Marques]

Because.

[David]

Oh, it wasn't. Was it? Or was it really? Was it?

[Marques]

I think. I know you think. Well, I'm trying to put the pieces together. I. It was very well worded, well worded question.

[Adam]

Thank you. It took me this whole people go back 20 minutes and just look at me at the desk like this and that was me trying to think about how to phrase this question.

[Marques]

Well done.

[David]

Accidentally.

[Marques]

Okay, we'll think about that. It was intentional answers at the end like usual. We'll be right back.

[Andrew]

This episode is brought to you by Indeed.

[Marques]

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[Andrew]

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[Christian]

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[Marques]

to good use, protecting what's important to you.

[Christian]

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[David]

I am your host, Stassi Schroeder.

[Christian]

Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast.

[David]

What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Steven because he's so evil, I do

[Christian]

think he is misunderstood.

[David]

You see everyone face consequences.

[Andrew]

It's intoxicating.

[Marques]

The writers just know how to trick.

[Andrew]

Yeah, there's always a twist in this show.

[David]

Tell Me Lies, the official podcast January 6th.

[Marques]

And stream the new season of Tell

[David]

Me Lies January 13th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

[Marques]

All right, welcome back to Waveform, the Waveform podcast as you know it, where we talk about EVs. Two EVs to talk about this week. The cheap one or the expensive one? Expensive. The expensive one or the cheap one?

[Andrew]

Cheap is relative to the expensive one, of course.

[Adam]

Yeah, let's do the cheap one.

[David]

Okay.

[Marques]

All right. Rivian R2 reviews dropped this week. Sort of. Including ours. Yeah. First drive reviews, first drive, first impressions, final prototype evaluation. We don't have full pricing of all the trims yet, but you know, our video went up. Car wow. Video went up. Jerry Everything video went up. Doug DeMuro video. A bunch of us got to actually hang out and drive these cars. R2, as many of you know, is the slightly smaller and roughly roughly half the price Rivian R1, it's the second generation product. It's their 2.0suv. It's their model Y fighter. It's their mass market competitor to like put them on the map and save them. Blah, blah, blah. All these expectations for R2. I thought it was really, really good. I thought it was really impressive. The software was good. The steering wheel haptics were like PS5 controllers with the like spring weight. Relax. It was really relax. I'm just saying it looks like an R1. It's just smaller, it's nimble, it's 2,000 pounds lighter. It's simpler. It also was the highest end trim version of it. So it's obviously not gonna be the base $45,000 one. But it was a dual motor, all wheel drive, 600 something horsepower, 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds.

[Shen]

Seconds.

[Marques]

Very, very capable machine. We off road it in it, we drove it on streets. Got roughly 300 miles of range. Lots of good things to say about it. But we don't know the price of the one that I tested. That won't come out for another month or so. Which everyone is now, you know, doing their theorizing about how much they think it will cost. But I'm curious if you guys are thinking good things about R2 now.

[David]

Well, with the Ram shortage, you know it's going to be way more expensive. I'm kidding.

[Marques]

Every car has.

[Adam]

I mean, not that long.

[David]

Yeah. I mean there's a little bit of. Yeah, there's a little bit of metric.

[Adam]

Yeah. I'm curious, do you know which trim you drove? Like did they tell you?

[Marques]

Yes. So I am not allowed to weigh in on the prices. Yeah. But yes, I drove the highest end trim that they plan on shipping in 2026.

[Adam]

And when they announced it however many years ago, what was the price for the people that put in the pre order? Andrew, I believe you did that Right.

[Andrew]

The pre order though was it was

[Marques]

like a hundred down payment.

[Andrew]

It was like a hundred bucks.

[Adam]

But for which trim do you know or was it.

[Andrew]

No, no.

[Adam]

Oh, you didn't get to pick.

[David]

Yeah, you picked that.

[Andrew]

I thought the whole thing was under 60.

[Adam]

That was what I was trying to ask. Like what was the number?

[Andrew]

I don't remember. I thought back in the day there was an under 60.

[Marques]

I, what I mostly see is 45,000. This, this whole promise of like this is their $45,000 competitor.

[Andrew]

If I remember correctly, and I could be totally wrong, is everyone was saying under 60 a few years ago, which makes most people assume that higher trim would be 59. But that was like, like you know, the like 5995 or whatever that is under 60. I don't know that was two years ago. A lot of stuff has changed. Facts, these things never come out the price.

[David]

And to be clear, the R2 is only coming in the R1S trim where it's smaller. I mean it's a smaller SUV.

[Andrew]

It's an SUV.

[Marques]

SUV.

[David]

Correct. There's no pickup traction. Right.

[Marques]

Okay. Which. Yeah, this, this is like the common shape of vehicle that especially America just buys a lot of in general. And model Y is the most popular vehicle own earth for a reason. Like there's a shape in a two row suv, higher off the ground type of thing that people like. And this is competing directly with that. So that's out. That's, you know, not too many hot takes about it.

[Adam]

I'm just more excited for the R3.

[David]

Dude, I want the R3. It's like a Subaru.

[Adam]

This is cute. This is cool. Thank you, dude. Now do R3.

[David]

The R3 is like a foot and a half to two feet shorter than the Model 3. It'll be even easier to park in Brooklyn.

[Andrew]

You mean lengthwise?

[David]

Lengthwise, yeah.

[Adam]

Front of the and wise. You got to really get down to get into that thing.

[Andrew]

Thing about the R2 was they had like the decals on it as like the like R2D2. Well the like camouflage quote unquote. Like it didn't cover any lines. It just still looked exactly the same. It just looked like it had like a silly paint job.

[Marques]

Yeah, we all know. I mean they showed me in that studio like two years ago, whatever what the R2 is supposed to look like. So this is now technically an updated final version. But it's like we already. We can see it. It's like it has a couple stripes on it. Okay, whatever. But we know what the R2 is going to look like. So yeah, R2, they got very clever with it. I will say they had some nice Easter eggs. You can see some of them in Doug Demiro's video, some of them in Zach's video. The charge flap, which is the back left corner has a maze in it. People did screenshot the video and fill out the maze. That doesn't seem to mean anything.

[David]

Just seems like a lot.

[Andrew]

Top post on our subreddit just says

[Marques]

this maze sucks because I when I was there and I'm sure someone from Rivian was watching this, I was like, please show me all the Easter eggs. And they're like, we can't. All I can tell you is there's a bunch and I can't explain any of them or show you where they are. And we Were like, alright, well I found the maze, so can you at least tell me what the maze means when people fill it out, they were like, it's just a maze, it's just a maze. I was like, what do you mean it's just a maze? You spent all this effort building and designing your own maze and the molding to hide in the charge port. What is. They wouldn't tell me. So now that people have filled it out, it seems like it actually is just a maze and nothing special having to do with. Unless it's like a. It's just for the whimsy topographical map or something. I don't know.

[David]

There ain't nothing wrong with something that doesn't mean anything.

[Marques]

That's fair enough. Well, here's some things that did mean something. In the window lining of the windshield, there's a little smiley face that looks like a little yeti smiley face. In the back windows, in the window lining, there's a little climbing.

[David]

Do they mean anything?

[Marques]

Well, it's an adventure vehicle.

[David]

Then why are people so mad at the maze, just a maze?

[Marques]

Well, it's not really adventure themed until it means something. Underneath the lining of the center storage, there's a little diagram of things that could fit there. Like a water bottle and a little camera and a knife, which is kind of cool.

[Andrew]

Is there a speaker they replaced? Sorry, I didn't watch the video yet.

[Marques]

They moved the speakers up until under that front dash. So they took them out of the doors. Actually they're flashlight. There's still a flashlight in the door.

[Andrew]

You know, they know what we want. The most important part that was the

[Marques]

thing about the R2 is how do you take half the price off and still keep all of the character of the Rivian, like R1 stuff? And I thought the flagship was obviously going to go and it stayed. So that was actually kind of impressive.

[David]

They also announced an Apple watch app that you can use to unlock the doors.

[Marques]

Now let's drive as if they. I mean, I mean, yeah, they need better key fobs. Cause that's like my number one complaint.

[David]

Yeah, that is, yeah.

[Marques]

Two other Easter eggs. The molding underneath the windshield wiper fluid canister in the car is a small skunk frog hybrid animal. Because that's a skunk, which is a frunk. It's a frunk. Frunk.

[David]

That means something.

[Andrew]

Got him.

[Marques]

You should also know that this, that spot right underneath the front of the windshield where the windshield wipers are is called the cowl or cowling. And if you peek in there there's also an outline of a cowl owl.

[David]

Okay, that's pretty.

[Andrew]

I didn't know David started working at Rivian with all these puns.

[Marques]

That joke's built into the star.

[Adam]

I love it.

[Andrew]

They know their audience.

[Marques]

They wouldn't show me or tell me about any of the rest of them, but that's as many as I was able to find.

[David]

Wow.

[Adam]

Okay, wait, this is just to be clear. This is gonna be on all R2s, not just these models.

[Marques]

You've reviewed these Easter eggs.

[Adam]

Yeah, these Easter eggs.

[Marques]

I believe this should be on all of them.

[Adam]

Okay, that makes me very happy.

[Marques]

Yes. Yes.

[David]

Are you getting an R2, Adam?

[Adam]

Hell, no. I'm getting an R3X.

[David]

Me too, baby.

[Marques]

Let's go, let's go. You're buckled up for that six year. Wait, I'm ready.

[Adam]

I mean, I still paid off my current car, so by then I'll be ready.

[Marques]

As long as you know. As long as you know, I paid mine off yesterday. Well, there's another EV I do want to bring up to you guys because there's so many weird, interesting things about it that are connected to waveform. Number one one, it's a Ferrari ev. We don't know what the outside looks like, but it's called the Luce. Luce, I think.

[Adam]

Lucy, do you have to say it like that?

[Andrew]

I'm not even gonna have to pronounce it.

[Marques]

It's always something Italian with that. Number two. This interior was the first with assistance from love from which is Jony I've's firm. So this is potentially the first car interior that Jony I've gotten his hands on. And it's always funny listening to old. I think Nilay has brought this up on old vergecasts, which is like all the Apple executives drive Ferraris and all they really want is them to have carplay. And like, now they've finally gotten to work with Ferrari. So this is the first time they've had a direct can in this. But there are some videos out there. This like big teaser video or really not a teaser. They show the whole interior of the car and.

[David]

Okay, okay, okay, okay.

[Marques]

So many thoughts. Each individual switch and display and UI element is actually beautiful, right? But then when in isolation, in isolation, like each button, each switch, really clean, really nicely done. But then you zoom out to the whole interior and it looks bad. I think pretty bad. It has this retro look to it, which is really nice for my take last week. That nostalgia is ruining everyone's taste. They went a little bit confused with the Nostalgia.

[Andrew]

I think it's hard to call it nostalgia when it's like, hey, this steering wheel looks kind of old. But also, here's an Apple Watch Ultra right next to it.

[David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The tablet looks like an Apple Watch. A giant Apple Watch. Apple Watch Ultra.

[Adam]

Yeah, but how long ago did the first Apple Watch come out?

[Marques]

We're on, like, the three now, so probably four years.

[David]

No, he's talking about the.

[Adam]

No, not the Ultra. The original Apple Watch.

[Marques]

Apple watch the 25th. Right.

[Adam]

It's been like a decade, so this could still be reminiscent of older times.

[Marques]

Yeah, it's just a. It's a weird. I am guessing this is not gonna be a cheap car. This is gonna be a car that people is a Ferrari. Like, people with a lot of money are.

[David]

It's a Ferrari.

[Marques]

And I just don't know what type of person wants this. And I say that knowing that a lot of people do actually want retro future. They just want an electric version of an old car. A lot of people say this a lot. And I'm not sure how many would actually buy it. If it's like small phones where we all say we want it, but we don't buy it. But like the old. Remember the Buick commercial where they show the GNX over and over and over again, which is, like, super sick. And everyone's like, we just want that, but electric. And then you show the new Buick and it's like, I don't want that. So the old Volkswagen bus, everyone loves that, and everyone wishes there was just an electric version of that. But then they had to go modernize a whole bunch of design elements, and people want it less. I think that's still true. Like, people seem to really like the idea of an old design that's just electrified 100%. But this is. Yeah, it's. It's. We. I really want to know what the outside of the car looks like.

[David]

I mean, that's kind of why Hyundai. Hyundai. Hyundai is making the. That card that is using five.

[Marques]

No, no.

[David]

What is it called? Oh, the N74474, which they did say is going to be production car, but

[Marques]

then they aren't doing it, aren't they? They keep saying they will, but, yeah, they keep saying they will never get

[Andrew]

into hydrogen doing it.

[David]

It had, like, hydrogen.

[Andrew]

Hydrogen fuel cells.

[Marques]

Yeah, like, whatever. That was years ago. And I've been talking about that. Like.

[David]

And I mean, that car is, like, sick. At first they're like, it's a concept. And then they were like, like, maybe we Might do it. And they're like, but we probably won't. And then they're like, it's gonna go into production, and then we just haven't heard anything.

[Marques]

I just think it would be such a huge PR win if a company would actually do what everyone says we want.

[David]

I just.

[Marques]

There's probably some amount of surveys that they've run or people who just say they would buy it, but wouldn't actually buy it.

[David]

Yeah.

[Adam]

You know what's the best thing about this interior that I'm seeing is just that there's buttons and knobs.

[David]

Yeah, agreed.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

It turns out if it's just not an iPad, people get excited, which is hilarious.

[David]

From Johnny, I will say, like, the giant Apple Watch iPad thing kind of just looks like a knockoff iPad. I don't know all of this, and I'm not a designer, obviously, but a lot of this, to me, is very ugly.

[Marques]

Each individual piece is sick.

[Christian]

The dynamic clock, dude, that, like, you

[David]

can all clocks dynamic.

[Marques]

The torque meter that are all buildings outside.

[Christian]

David.

[Marques]

The torque meter that changes based on what mode you're in is sick.

[Adam]

I will say, if I was able to just, like, buy this tablet and stick it into my car, I would 100% do it.

[David]

It's so ugly.

[Christian]

It's sick as hell.

[David]

Oh, my God.

[Andrew]

It's. This is, like, so on the line of, like, good and bad that I feel like if I have any response to it, it'll either be like, you don't like it because you can't afford it, or. Yeah, you don't know anything about Ferraris. Yeah. Like, what? I lose saying anything about this car.

[Adam]

Car.

[Christian]

The launch mode. Did you see the thing about the launch mode where you, like, you pull that handle in.

[Shen]

Hold on.

[Andrew]

Do you put.

[Christian]

And then everything, like, turns orange?

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

I mean, it looks sick in isolation. It looks awesome.

[Andrew]

Is this the. This is the key, I think.

[Marques]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Christian]

The key is a little mini, like,

[Andrew]

juice box fits in, like, the little piece, like, this is the key. Because later down here, it shows the key.

[David]

That's pretty cool.

[Andrew]

There's a lot of scrolling on this website.

[David]

Yeah. Something that I did think was cool is that they made, like, a book series about the development of. Of this car. That's like four books that, like, Johnny, I've, like, developed with his team, and apparently they do that on every project, and I think that's very cool. And, you know, I'm happy for them.

[Adam]

Remember when they announced CarPlay Ultra and all the things popped up in the. In the ad and they were like, oh, this is so cool. It looks so pretty. And then all the car makers were like, no, we're not doing that. We don't know where we got that from. Does this actually exist or are these just a bunch of pretty renders that they did and put on a website?

[Marques]

This is the interior reveal of. Ferrari has said that they're going to make an electric car. This is the interior reveal of their eventual electric car. They will at some point reveal the exterior and the price and the specs and all the rest of that stuff. But this is a car that they've said they're going to actually make.

[Adam]

But none of these are pictures.

[Marques]

They're like 3D renders. There are videos. Yeah, I'll send you one on Twitter

[David]

or something of like an actual, like

[Adam]

someone driving it or inside it.

[Marques]

No, just they've, like taken the interior and like put it in a studio and let people hit the buttons themselves and they sound really nice and stuff.

[Christian]

We got to talk about the binacle, man.

[David]

What's that?

[Christian]

What's the binal?

[Marques]

Styles are sick, man.

[David]

What?

[Christian]

The binacle is what they're calling the gauge cluster behind this steering wheel. A binnacle is you ever seen on like an old timey boat. There's like that tower right by the helm that has like a compass and maybe like a clock.

[David]

Oh, does it have one of those?

[Christian]

No, but they're calling the gauge cluster the binnacle. And I like saying the word binnacle.

[David]

It's like pinnacle, sort of.

[Marques]

Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, man. I like each individual piece. I hate the whole thing, though.

[David]

I'm also very curious. Like, there's so many screens that are sort of hidden in this car and I'm very curious if you're going to be able to see bezels.

[Marques]

That's a great question.

[David]

That's going to make a big difference about how tacky it looks.

[Adam]

Is this just running Android oled?

[David]

Do we think that would be really funny?

[Andrew]

Definitely is. Almost positive.

[Marques]

You would be rational to think that such an expensive car has to use the latest tech and screens, but if you look at any other Ferrari.

[David]

Are they all LCDs?

[Marques]

They don't look great.

[Christian]

Yeah. I would not trust Ferrari to go and write horse os, you know, like, that's not. That's not what I would want to use.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah, I.

[Adam]

It's.

[Marques]

It's weird. Anyway, that. That ends my Ferrari crash out for now.

[Andrew]

All right, my turn.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Andrew, brought you guys another game.

[Adam]

Buckle up, guys.

[Andrew]

Yeah, it's called how long can you listen to me crash out about a Super Bowl?

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Christian]

Yo, Andrew, did you see, like Olympic figure skating the other day?

[Andrew]

I've. I have not had Internet for a very long time, and that is the start of my crash hour. Well, sure, but I want to open this with a question to you guys.

[David]

Okay.

[Andrew]

If at your house, a wire connecting to the telephone pole.

[David]

I'll stop you right there. Three of us don't have houses.

[Andrew]

I know, but just imagine, okay, just imagine. Imagine you and your family live in a house.

[David]

I would stop you right there.

[Andrew]

I do not have a family. A wire is down across your driveway and you contact the company that deals with that wire.

[Christian]

Three of us do not have driveways. Sorry.

[Marques]

I'm so sorry.

[Andrew]

How fast do you think that company should come to deal with that wire?

[Adam]

Is it a live wire?

[Andrew]

How am I supposed to know? I'm not an expert. Expert.

[Marques]

Well, this is the Internet. Your Internet went down. So it's not like a power line.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Christian]

So a wire has come down.

[Andrew]

A wire has come down from a telephone pole.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Do you feel confident enough that that is a power wire or a cable wire?

[David]

I don't know.

[Marques]

Sounds like it's cable.

[Andrew]

Okay. I only know it is a cable wire because here I'll paint the picture.

[Christian]

Andrew in the video showed me there's a transformer on the pole.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Christian]

Well, so instantly.

[Andrew]

I'll explain a little further. This is the. This is on Saturday. Remember, we're recording this Wednesday. That will help in this story on Saturday. This big tree in front of my yard, it's a very tall, skinny tree. It's probably like 50 or 60ft tall. Pine tree is swaying in the winds because we have had super, super cold days. Lots and lots of ice. And on Saturday, we had one of the coldest days of the year, including wind gusts of like 40 to 50 miles an hour hour. So like 11am there's two of these trees standing next to each other, and I noticed one is significantly leaning more than the other. I also have pictures at them. I'll give them to you. If you're watching, you can see these to the point where there's this, like, bulge coming out of the ground. And I'm like, next to the tree. That looks bad. And I realized that the root system is pulling up on this tree. So I immediately call our power company and say this tree is going to fall down and is most likely going to hit a, a telephone pole within an hour. I'm sitting at my bay window and I hear the gust of wind. And I look out, and I watch this tree come down and snap the telephone pole in half. Yeah.

[Marques]

Damn.

[Andrew]

It hit the wires. Not even the pole. The wires so hard that the telephone pole about a third of the way up snapped clean off. The whole telephone pole flips upside down because the transformer and all the wires are at the top. It is now hanging in the road. And a tree is across my driveway and across the road. Road. So I do what I should have done. I first call the fire. I first call 91 1- because there's active wires down in the middle of the road. Then I call the power company, tell them what's happening. Then I call Xfinity.

[Marques]

Did you lose power when that.

[Andrew]

Immediately.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Also. So at the telephone pole, it's technically across the street. No sparks, but it's across the street. But there's a wire that comes and then runs into a telephone pole between me and my neighbor's house to then split up off how we get our utilities. So dispatcher obviously picks up. I talk to a real person. Power company. I talk to a real person. Xfinity, who's my cable company. I tell them about it. And through their Automated services at 1-800-XFINITY is just. You think it literally is like, would you like to report a down and potentially dangerous wire? Do you want me to text you a way to submit this? And at this point, I'm like, I just want my power back. I will just take the ticket and submit it. So that happens. The power company fixes this telephone pole by 10pm it was still a really long time of being really cold at home because I had no power, but they get that stuff done. Then the next day, my wires.

[Adam]

Saturday was the coldest day.

[Andrew]

It was the coldest day we've had. It was.

[David]

I could felt like negative see my

[Andrew]

breath inside my house. We sent Claire and Lane to someone else's house, and they stayed there. This is all going to end with me talking about customer service and how every large company is a bunch of cowards and that they use customer service to just deal with all of it. Um, but. Okay, I'm going to try and go as fast as I can here. Next day, Sunday, I realized there's still a wire across my driveway. The only reason I know this is not a dangerous wire is because I personally talked to one of the power company people, and they say, we did all our wires. The wire left down on your driveway right now is the cable companies. And we. You're not going to Deal with it. Sorry. So then I call that day. Xfinity. The problem with Xfinity's horrific call answering service, or whatever it is, is it connects you to pretty much no one until you at some point, can get to technical customer support. The people who are, like, trying to help you troubleshoot your router and everything. First guy tells me me, someone will be there today between 6 and 11. And at that point, I'm like, that feels like way too long for a wire to be down. So I get mad. And then no one shows up that day. And so then I call the next day, and they were like, oh, no one showed up. They're supposed to be here at 10 to 12. Call us later. If no one shows up, I call them later. No one shows up. They're like, oh, it's scheduled for tomorrow. And then yesterday, I call again. They're like, oh, 10 to 12, 12 o'. Clock. I actually did get an automated thing saying, like, they'll be a little late today. I call again at 5pm oh, the schedule's for tomorrow. Now no one can connect me to

[David]

the, like, actual person.

[Andrew]

The technicians that are doing the exterior things every time, they're just like, well, we're just technical support. There's nothing we can do. And I go, what's the line for customer service? And they say, it's 1-800-xfinity, which is how I got to those people in the first place. I super tldr. I'm not proud of how many times I freaked out at people on the phone. I mean, I probably have spent six to eight hours on the telephone in the last three or four days. Marquez came in the other day at me. Like, the hold for me.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

No, no. Physically talking to people for that long, trying to get anything done, it's just literally nothing can happen. No one can connect me to any of these technicians. None of these technicians are calling me to tell me they're just not going to show up that day. It's gotta be the worst customer service I've ever dealt with. And we all know that Comcast and Xfinity sucks.

[Marques]

Yep.

[Andrew]

But this is not just them. Like, if you think about it, most places now, if there's customer service, you get this crappy answering machine of, like, here's a bunch of different options that take you nowhere, hang the phone up on you all the time. And when you talk to someone, someone, it's a call center that probably can't help you. And those poor people on that side are definitely just getting screamed at. For nothing.

[Adam]

Why don't you just change your provider? We have plenty of options.

[Andrew]

I literally don't have any other provider option in my area except for, I think, their Spectrum, and it offers 25 down as their max.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So I don't have another option, but

[David]

California has a lot of laws around this, so I would kill from in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. In Santa Cruz, we had cruise net and we had gigabit before anybody else had gigabit because there was, like, 20 different options just in Santa Cruz, which is, like, a town of, like, not that many people.

[Marques]

If I had kind of say that having multiple options creates competition, which then.

[Adam]

Marques, careful.

[Marques]

Careful.

[Andrew]

Yeah. It's like, competition is bad.

[Christian]

Competition is bad. We need to own people.

[David]

Are you saying you could bust trusts? Is that what you're saying?

[Marques]

Wait a second. Wait.

[David]

What if we did that?

[Andrew]

Yeah, I.

[David]

What if we had more than one option? Have you ever guys played that game? It's kind of old. You have to, like, you own the stuff, and then you keep. And then you own more stuff.

[Marques]

Yeah. Wait, how do you win that game?

[David]

You don't. You just hate each other.

[Andrew]

Everyone gives up.

[Marques]

Oh, I know how you win. You just make sure you're the only option.

[David]

I think it's called mono poly because it means one.

[Adam]

That's why there's only one Poly Market.

[David]

There are two. There's call sheets.

[Andrew]

Well, I never. I want to say I appreciate you guys, because I'm still fuming thinking about this, and it's like, helping me not look like as much of an idiot.

[Christian]

It's crazy.

[Andrew]

Can I tell you some of the funniest things that I dealt with in these calls? One of them was me on the phone with somebody and then getting a text message from Xfinity saying, service in your area has been restored. That really helps.

[Christian]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew]

I had one person say. I kept just asking. They were like, oh, the. The appointment with the external technician is for 10 to 12 tomorrow. And I. I was like, can I get any confirmation for that? Can you send me an email? No, we're not able to do that. And then one of them said, we can do that. And I said, well, I haven't gotten it yet. And she said, is your Internet working? I said, no, the wires down across the road. And she said, well, you didn't get the email because you don't have Internet. And I was like, I'm calling you on my phone. Like, this is the. This is the point where I tried to keep my cool for so long because I knew, and I was just hoping someone could give me a number. Someone, somewhere. But then they basically just lie to me and, like, basically call me an idiot. And then I just start freaking out. And I was not nice. And I feel bad because it's not their fault because Xfinity is using a bunch of labor somewhere else as punching bags. Complete as punching bags. To completely dodge any responsibility, which then just makes me even more mad. So, honestly, anyone out there, if you have Xfinity and can change, change, do it. Because that place sucks. Even though everywhere else probably sucks. But what I would give.

[Christian]

Change.

[Andrew]

I know what I would give for Verizon fios, who are probably almost just as bad.

[Christian]

Yeah. Verizon. As a FiOS. I promise you, it's the FiOS. Customer service is so laughable. Like, the ways they have managed to screw me over.

[Adam]

Dude.

[Christian]

But I have an. Andrew, I have an affinity story for you, but I think I told one, like, years ago on the podcast. But we know we're just gonna tell it again, because I hate Xfinity. I was paying an insane amount of money for Xfinity gigabit. Like, 80, $90 a month.

[Andrew]

Oh, I pay way more than that for their, like, 1.1200.

[Christian]

Yeah. I never, ever, ever got more than 100 megabytes down, ever. Most of the time, I was in the low 30s. And we would complain to Xfinity every day, like, why are we paying all this money if you just cannot deliver the right service? And every day, they'd be like, we don't know what's going on. It must be you somehow. Like, you need to get a new router. You need to do this. We'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't lie to me. And after months of this, we were talking to someone via the live chat at Xfinity, and they go, hold on. Give me one sec. Test your Internet speed now. Gigabit. Gigabit up, gigabit. It was, like, crazy. We were like, wait a second. How did you do that?

[Marques]

That?

[Christian]

They were like, I can't really say.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Christian]

And chat. Four days later, Internet speed goes back down to 30. What happened? We get back on the live chat, talking. We're like, no, no. You fixed. Someone fixed it last time. They're like, no way to fix it. Finally, we got them to admit. We texted them, you have a button on your dashboard that says, give us gigabit. And you're just refusing to hit it because your boss said not to to. And the guy goes, yes, period. I'm sorry, period. Ends the chapter.

[David]

Oh my God, that's so similar.

[Marques]

Not with all the proof, but I had a similar story briefly in college. I had like, horrible. There was like two possible service whatever providers. And I'm pretty sure it was Comcast was the first one and I was getting like.

[David]

And Comcast with a wig on the second one.

[Marques]

Yeah, basically I was getting like three down or whatever and it was, it kept going in and out. Had like Internet outages. And I just called them and I was like, cancel my service. Cancel it now. Cancel it. I don't even wanna bother working with you, Just cancel it. And they're like, no, please, please, please, we can upgrade you for free. And that's when they start offering bargains. They're like, we'll upgrade you for a discount. I was like, cancel it, I don't care. And they're like, okay, we'll just put you on the highest tier plan and we won't have to change anything else. And I was like, fine. And I hung up. And immediately my Internet was like 300 up and down with zero changes to price or anything else. I was like, this could have been my situation the entire time. Time. But they hold you in the little box as long as they can.

[David]

Yeah, so it's true.

[Andrew]

So real quick, then I. My neighbors, who also are missing Internet, when they called them, they said, oh, we don't see any other outages. It must be something in your house. But we can't get a home technician there till Wednesday. This is on Sunday. While I'm screaming at someone on the phone saying there's wires down and they know the. They're telling me there's no reported outside outage right now. I think it actually got fixed. And I only know that because my neighbor texted me during this podcast saying, hey, our Internet's back up. I think it might be working. Still not a single technician has called me or done anything. If I go home and that wire's on the ground, boy, I don't know what's going on.

[David]

When I got my FiOS installed, they didn't show up on like the first three days. They said they were supposed to show up. And I kept being like, hey, they said they were going to show up between these hours, and they didn't. And then when the guy eventually came, he's like, oh, yeah, like, if we take too long in another job, we just don't come. And I was like, but do you tell anyone who tells me? And they're like, no, my fios Technician. Okay.

[Christian]

My fios technician took nine and a half hours to put fios in my house. I don't know why. Like, he didn't do anything. And then there's a bunch of other stuff that happened while he was there that was, like, so crazy. I was like, this is insane. But I will say I got a lot of really nice tools out of it because he left, like, half of his stuff at my apartment, including his hard hat. So I have a Verizon. Verizon hard hat now, which I'm, like, really into.

[David]

That's cool.

[Andrew]

That's. Yeah. Do you know the hours they gave me 6am to 11pm and then say, someone must be home when they show up. I was like, that is not happening. You're fixing this.

[Marques]

That is silly.

[David]

I'm sorry.

[Andrew]

So they basically have expected me to miss three days of work.

[Marques]

Yeah. They often assume you don't have a job. They're like, you must just be home all day. Right.

[Christian]

Right.

[Marques]

You're good. You're home all day.

[Adam]

Cool.

[Andrew]

Because.

[Marques]

Yeah, we'll. I mean, anytime, honestly.

[Christian]

You have a job. Just use the Internet at work. Idiot.

[Andrew]

I mean, I guess I was thinking of the scenario where if I didn't get to talk to the power person to know that that wire down was not electrically charged at this point, I would have had to call the fire department probably to come get it. But, like, I asked every single person I talked to like, is this. Is this wire dangerous? And they were usually like, yes, it's dangerous. Like, do you think you should get someone to come here right away? And they're like, well, I guess if maybe it's just the power or if it's just the cable line, then that doesn't have electricity flowing through it. I was like, do you trust me knowing if that's the power? I didn't tell them. I knew it was, but, like, I had people basically telling me, oh, you could cross over the power line. Don't worry about it.

[Marques]

Damn.

[Andrew]

Which seems like an insane liability for.

[David]

So is your car not in the driveway?

[Andrew]

I've. I knew it was safe, so I've rolled over it since then. But it's. But that's only because of the power people. But I wasn't telling them that. I was trying to get them to. Can clean up a wire or actually show up.

[David]

Well, I feel it.

[Adam]

I'm titling this the Crash out episode.

[Marques]

Thanks for. Thanks for tuning into our Crash Out. Our weekly Crash out podcast.

[Adam]

The one where everyone crashes out felt good.

[Andrew]

You, Xfinity. Seriously, Like I, I plus one. Yes, you.

[Christian]

Sam Altman, too, while we're at it.

[Marques]

I don't like any of your Ferraris either.

[Christian]

And your binnacle.

[Andrew]

I need Adam to say Adam, who are you mad at?

[Adam]

Ring canvas right now? WhatsApp. But that's a story for another episode.

[Andrew]

I thought he was gonna say all of you for making this an impossible episode to edit afterwards.

[Adam]

That too.

[David]

Wait, what did WhatsApp do?

[Marques]

Really quick, bro.

[Adam]

I can't get into this right now. Tune in next week.

[Andrew]

Subscribe to find out what WhatsApp did.

[David]

Um, really quickly related to WhatsApp. Really quickly. There's a funny thing that happened.

[Marques]

Where?

[David]

Do you guys remember when ChatGPT was in WhatsApp randomly, all of a sudden? Well, it was.

[Adam]

I don't remember.

[David]

Well, it was.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Adam]

I only remember Meta AI being in WhatsApp all of.

[David]

Yeah. So also, ChatGPT was. And then Meta was like, oh, no. And then they took it out because they were like, nobody else can have AIs in WhatsApp.

[Adam]

Now. Isn't that like anti competitive or something?

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

And then the European Commission very quickly was like. And now they are passing legislation to force Meta to allow AI other human.

[Marques]

No.

[David]

They're saving our asses about everything. Greenland, Come on. A lot of stuff.

[Marques]

Competent government is crazy.

[David]

It's crazy. Anyway, it would be great.

[Andrew]

Come get your boy. Xfinity over here. We need you. Eu.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

European Union, please come break up Comcast.

[Christian]

Can we have the city of Philadelphia somehow join the eu so that Comcast is, like, under EU jurisdiction now?

[Marques]

Like, that would be crazy.

[David]

They've just moved it.

[Marques]

There was a Jersey, now there's New Jersey. There should be, like, New Philadelphia, New

[David]

Philly, New Philadelphia, New New York.

[Marques]

It's about time for some trivia.

[Andrew]

I forgot we had trivia.

[David]

This is a crazy. The episode, dude.

[Marques]

God.

[Christian]

You know, I am feeling like I went a little too far. So because I said you, Sam Altman, I'm going to change my trivia question. I feel like at a certain point, I got to draw the line. So today's new trivia question.

[Andrew]

What was the answer?

[Christian]

The answer was 6.8 gigawatts, which is so we can round it up to seven. So that's 70% of what Sam Altman says it would take to. To cure cancer or tutor every child.

[David]

Is that with the full capacity or the 30% capacity?

[Christian]

That's full capacity.

[Adam]

That's with the flux capacitor.

[Christian]

That's with the flux capacity.

[Marques]

Very cool.

[Christian]

Very cool how that Translates to gigawatt hours? I don't know. But the trivia question I do know the answer to is was inspired actually by something David Amell said earlier this episode, which was about the band straight line manifesto. No.

[Marques]

3 doors down.

[Andrew]

U2. U2.

[Christian]

U2, specifically, U2 is now forever associated with Apple because they put that one

[David]

album out and there was a U2 edition iPod that got sold.

[Christian]

That's different than the red edition, though, right? That product read U2 Apple like this.

[Andrew]

Yeah, homies.

[David]

It's like Tim Cook and that guy with the shoes.

[Christian]

However.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Christian]

Samsung and U2's lineup share one thing in common. What is that thing?

[David]

What do you mean by lineup?

[Christian]

That's it. That's the question. Oh,

[Adam]

David, I'm not going to give you the answer. Stop staring at me like that.

[Marques]

I don't know anything about you two, so that's going to be tough for me.

[Christian]

What I'm really confused about is I kind of thought David would nail this one. I kind of thought this was a David layup.

[Andrew]

That means it's a pun.

[Marques]

I wrote down the only thing I know about you two.

[Andrew]

So please, I hope yours just says Bono.

[Marques]

I just don't know anything about you two. So is that it?

[Christian]

No, Andrew, I didn't write anything. All right, David. Galaxy. No.

[David]

Sunday. Bloody Sunday.

[Christian]

You were closest. The answer is the Edge, which is the name of the lead guitarist in the band YouTube and the thin phone, the S25.

[David]

I mean, Viva la vida.

[Marques]

You know, they're listening to the podcast and immediately. Because they know a lot about U2, they immediately went through and they're like, oh, yeah, the Edge. I know they're all gonna get this.

[Christian]

You would have to both know a lot about U2 and be aware of the current lineup of Samp some Galaxy folks.

[David]

Well, the Edge line thing has been in the lineup for a very long time. Galaxy. S6. Edge. Galaxy. No.

[Christian]

Edge.

[Marques]

Shout out to the node. Edge. That one was insane.

[David]

I didn't know that his guitarist was named the Edge or that their guitarist was named the Edge.

[Andrew]

I thought Bono just played all of the instruments.

[David]

Is Bono his real name is Bono Jovi.

[Marques]

That's going to trigger someone. I can.

[Adam]

Next question. But first, quick update on the score.

[Marques]

Score, of course.

[David]

Wait, did Marquez get that point?

[Marques]

No.

[Adam]

Okay. Marquez with 14. Speaking of which.

[Marques]

14.

[Adam]

David with 16.

[David]

Whoa.

[Adam]

Andrew, still carrying the one with 17.

[Andrew]

I don't think David and I's points have changed in a very.

[Adam]

No, it's been a while.

[Andrew]

I think ever since. No, you Had a great. Yeah. Yeah. Ever since you complained about not getting any points, I don't think David and I have gotten any voodoo magic.

[David]

Questions are hard.

[Adam]

Okay, the next question.

[David]

Yeah.

[Adam]

In 2024. 4. One company accidentally broke the record for the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours. What was that company?

[David]

Was this in 2024?

[Adam]

It was in 2024. David, can you put the. Put that down because you keep locking your face.

[Christian]

Thank you.

[David]

Sorry.

[Christian]

Oh, I forgot about this.

[Adam]

I know. Me too.

[Marques]

Me too.

[Adam]

I was wondering if they would remember because I completely blanked on it.

[Marques]

I feel like I remember the story but not the specifics, you know?

[David]

Oh, that. I'm wrong.

[Andrew]

I didn't even write anything.

[Adam]

Anything Flipperman read. What do you got? Well, Marquez, what'd you put?

[Marques]

Rockstar.

[David]

Like the energy drink?

[Marques]

No, the.

[Andrew]

A trailer. I didn't write accidentally.

[Adam]

You didn't write anything.

[Andrew]

I. I panicked. Xfinity.

[Marques]

He's just thinking.

[David]

I put oneplus for when. When they ran Marquez's entire video as an ad.

[Adam]

Oh, yeah, no, not that. That's a good guess, though.

[David]

But that was like the OnePlus.

[Andrew]

I didn't know. You're such a OnePlus show, Marquez.

[David]

That was like the OnePlus 6 or something.

[Adam]

Yeah, it was a while ago.

[Marques]

Also, it was an accidentally published trailer for something.

[Adam]

It was a April Fool's joke that Discord did that. It was a 17 second video that was on loop in their server numbers and it accidentally crossed over and YouTube had to, like, take away that.

[Andrew]

It was like a pop up thing. So it's like, it's. They basically botted the views because, like, it was embedded into 1.4 billion views in 24 hours. Oh, my God.

[Marques]

Sorry.

[David]

Well,

[Andrew]

the worst thing Discord's ever done, maybe next to this face recognition stuff, is adding these stupid little pop ups in the corner that you always have to be like, I don't want to do a quest right now. Shut up. It's an ad or whatever. A new feature.

[Marques]

Wow.

[David]

That kind of defines 2026. Yeah.

[Marques]

Yeah. Side quest.

[David]

Is it an ad or a feature? Do a quest to find out. It's 2026.

[Marques]

Well, thank you for tuning into the Crash out podcast. We appreciate your time. Next week, we'll be crashing out about a slightly different set of things. Yeah, WhatsApp possibly. WhatsApp will be on the list, of course. And then just keep. Keep in touch with the news. Maybe we'll get an idea of what we're gonna crash shot to next.

[Andrew]

If you're still here. Kudos.

[David]

Quad fold.

[Marques]

That means we appreciate you already because you're probably already subscribed. But if you haven't already get subscribed. See you guys in the next episode.

[Adam]

Peace.

[David]

Goodbye.

[Andrew]

Waveform is produced by Animalina and Ellis Roven. We're a partner of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and our trouble music was vain. Silly. Am I the only one in this room who has not met Reggie Watts? Endor knows who he is.

[David]

He was at mark.

[Andrew]

He's a football player, right?

[David]

No.