EXCLUSIVE: Lots of Drama Around OnePlus

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode Summary – “EXCLUSIVE: Lots of Drama Around OnePlus”

Date: January 23, 2026
Hosts: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, David Imel, Miles, Ellis

Overview

This episode of Waveform dives deep into several hot tech topics currently stirring up the industry. The main focus is the recent controversy and confusion surrounding OnePlus—fuelled by an “exclusive” (and potentially AI-written) article that sparked shutdown rumors. The hosts also discuss the increasing prevalence of ads in tech products (from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Nova Launcher and Threads), highlight a big shakeup in the TV world involving Sony and TCL, talk through updates in the YouTube ecosystem, and more. Throughout, the team keeps the discussion lively, skeptical, and full of their signature friendly jabs.

---

Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Netflix Introduces Live Voting & Live Events

[01:54–05:13]

• Netflix is rolling out live voting features for events, reminiscent of past TV hits like American Idol.
• Hosts are skeptical given Netflix’s history of botched live events, especially “Love Is Blind” and “boxing events” streams that crashed or lagged.
  • “If you’re aware of any previous Netflix Live events, you know, there’s zero chance this works for quite a while… I can’t tell how many Netflix Live things…that just were massively delayed or didn’t work at all.” – Andrew [02:51]
• Special mention: Alex Honnold’s live free solo climb of Taipei 101 is set for Netflix—elicits both fascination and fear from the hosts.

---

2. OpenAI (ChatGPT) Adds Ads

[06:09–14:37]

• OpenAI has officially introduced ads to the ChatGPT Go tier (originally piloted in India) as it expands globally.
• There’s concern about privacy and AI ethics:
  • Potential manipulation of AI results to favor ad placements.
    • “If it knows it can serve an ad with a certain response where it couldn’t with another response, it might choose the response to also serve an ad.” – Marques [08:45]
  • Reference to past statements from OpenAI’s Sam Altman:
    • “In 2024, he said, ‘I kind of think of ads as a last resort as a business model.’” – Andrew [06:51]
    • Just two years later, ads are rolled out—leads to trust concerns.
• Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO) takes a subtle dig, noting Gemini (Google’s AI) has no plans for ads and suggesting OpenAI’s move is financially motivated:
  • “Regarding OpenAI testing ads, maybe they feel they need to make more revenue.” [09:38]
• The hosts compare data collection depth in ChatGPT to Meta and Google and worry about what hyper-targeted advertising could look like.

---

3. Nova Launcher’s Ad-Tracking Drama

[14:44–18:34]

• Nova Launcher—a beloved Android launcher—was sold to InstaBridge after layoffs left only the founder, Kevin Barry, at the company.
• Post-acquisition changes:
  • Facebook and Google ad-tracking code added.
  • Plans to add ads to the free tier (Nova Prime remains ad-free).
  • “So now there are ad tracking things in Nova Launcher already.” – Andrew [16:21]
• The team is nostalgic about the “Golden Days” of Nova.
  • “People installed Nova on every single Samsung phone because of how bad TouchWiz... we all kind of prefer just a clean looking stockish Android launcher.” – Marques [16:50]
• Alternatives like Niagara Launcher are discussed.

---

4. Sony & TCL: Major TV Industry Shake-Up

[18:34–23:39]

• Sony is in talks with TCL to create a joint TV company, with Sony owning 49% and TCL 51%.
• This could bring Sony’s high-end Bravia tech (especially their image processing SOCs) to more affordable TVs.
  • “What actually makes a Sony Bravia TV really high quality is not the panel… it’s really their SOC and their image pipeline… TCL uses their resources for manufacturing. You could theoretically see much cheaper Bravia TVs in people’s homes.” – Miles [19:23]
• The hosts reminisce about Sony’s reputation in the TV market, CRT innovations (Trinitron), and status-symbol TVs.
  • “You’d go into a store and be like, oh, all the TVs are bad. And then there’s the Sony.” – David [23:16]

---

5. Threads Rolls Out Ads (and Social Media Metrics Skepticism)

[23:34–25:55]

• Meta’s Threads app starts rolling out ads globally.
• The hosts are cynical about reports of Threads “overtaking Twitter” in app usage, calling out tricks like auto-onboarding from Instagram.
• Discussion on the nature of engagement farming:
  • “Threads is still in its engagement farming days… but it’s starting to get a little…All social media platforms are just engagement farming.” – Marques & Miles [24:36]
  • Concern that ad load will inevitably climb.

---

6. MAIN SEGMENT – OnePlus “Shutdown” Article Controversy

[34:48–53:32]

• An Android Headlines article titled “Exclusive: OnePlus is being dismantled” created panic, but the team breaks down:
  • The article recycled public info and rumors and added nothing new or exclusive. Structurally, it reads like it was heavily AI-assisted (confirmed later by site owner).
  • “It felt very much written by ChatGPT… by the third of the waypoint, it was painfully obvious.” – Marques [36:49]
  • “Red flag number one—why hide that at the beginning? Why put a different person’s name? Why not write your own article?” – Marques [39:03]
• Major reasons for skepticism:
  • Sloppy “exclusive” label (clickbait).
  • Author name swap to leverage a more viral reporter.
  • OnePlus has officially denied shutdown rumors.
    • “OnePlus has since come out and just clarified that they are not shutting down… recent unverified reports… are false.” – Marques [40:36]
• The team analyzes larger issues facing OnePlus:
  • Restructuring of BBK sub-brands.
  • Ongoing rumors about market withdrawals and leadership legal issues.
  • The necessity and utility of sub-brands for Chinese companies (privacy, market segmentation, and entry into places like the US).
  • The story arc of OnePlus, Carl Pei’s exit, and nostalgia for peak models (7/7T and OnePlus One).
    • “The OnePlus One wasn’t their best phone ever, but one of the best deals ever, and it actually lived up to the hype.” – Marques [47:20]
  • “Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Miles [53:32]

---

7. YouTube CEO’s “State of the Union” & Platform Updates

[63:38–82:44]

• Every January, YouTube CEO Neil Mohan publishes a letter with data (“We’re still huge”) and new initiatives.
  • YouTube is the dominant, stable platform for creator businesses.
    “The creator economy is still mostly YouTube... the most stable version of that is a YouTube one.” – Marques [64:33]
• Educational angle: 79% of US teachers who use YouTube find it improves learning. Not universal embrace, but notable.
• Shorts & parental controls: New features let parents limit or block Shorts for kids.
• Push for video content to receive traditional media accolades (Emmys, Oscars):
  • Hosts are dismissive, suggesting YouTube doesn’t need “validation” from TV/film institutions.
• Major Technical Update: Baked-In Ads That Can Be Dynamically Removed
  • YouTube is working on tools to let creators insert sponsor messages that disappear after a set number of views.
    • “A tool to allow YouTube to control how long that baked-in ad is viewable and then removes it… for the first X views, and then removes when it hits that view count.” – Marques [68:28]
  • Pros & Cons:
    • Advertisers get precise ROI.
    • Could lower rates if sponsors only pay for initial views.
    • Could enable dynamic, retroactive ads on existing library.
    • Raises user experience questions, especially for Premium subscribers.
    • “If you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, you don’t want ads… but now they are kind of controlling it.” – Andrew [74:41]
  • Concern (and some humor) about YouTube’s lack of UI for chaptering and corrections despite dynamic ad rollouts.
    • “Three truths in life: death, taxes, and chapters breaking within the first hour.” – Miles [74:35]
• AI on YouTube:
  • Expansion of generative tools for creators, including ones for Shorts using user likeness (“I can’t wait to make us dance.” – Ellis [80:35])
  • YouTube claims efforts to fight “AI slop” (bad AI-generated videos).
  • Noted: The system for chapters and corrections still relies on manual description hacks, which the hosts find endlessly frustrating.

---

8. Verizon Outage & Customer Compensation

[58:32–62:45]

• Recent widespread Verizon outage; company offered $20 credits to affected customers (with some skepticism about who actually claims it).
• The panel compares it to poor compensation provided by airlines for massive delays.
  • “There’s no way to accurately assess the amount of inconvenience you’ve caused and appropriately compensate everyone. $20 to every customer who lost service… seems fine.” – Marques [59:57]

---

Memorable Quotes

• “It’s one of those things where it put a lot of things in one article that I think could have been a useful article… but slapping an exclusive badge on it and offering no exclusive information is, like, very clickbaity.” – Miles [39:59]
• “People installed Nova on every single Samsung phone because of how bad TouchWiz… we all kind of prefer just a clean looking stockish Android launcher.” – Marques [16:50]
• “If they know it can serve an ad with a certain response… it might choose the response to also serve an ad.” – Marques [08:45]
• “They always seem to want to prove they’re better than TV by doing TV stuff… your audience loves you for what you are.” – Marques [67:11]
• “The long tail progression of this is always worse than you think. A lot of times when tech CEOs say, ‘We’ll never do this,’ about two years later they start doing it.” – Miles [09:09]

---

Notable Timestamps for Segment Skipping

• Netflix live voting discussion: [01:54–05:13]
• OpenAI (ChatGPT) adds ads: [06:09–14:37]
• Nova Launcher acquisition/ad drama: [14:44–18:34]
• Sony/TCL TV joint venture: [18:34–23:39]
• Threads global ad rollout: [23:34–25:55]
• OnePlus drama/main segment: [34:48–53:32]
• Trivia (fun banter and Easter eggs): [53:43, 86:36, 87:30]
• YouTube State of the Union: [63:38–82:44]
• Verizon outage compensation: [58:32–62:45]

---

Tone & Closing Thoughts

The hosts balance skepticism and humor, dishing out critique for clickbaity journalism (especially when AI is involved), expressing concern at mounting ad encroachment in beloved products, and maintaining the perspective of techie consumers. Despite frustrations with the industry’s direction (more ads, more AI slop), there’s still excitement about technology, nostalgia for simpler days, and honest appreciation for companies that get it right.

“Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Miles [53:32]

---

Podcast produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Irvin, a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Transcript

[Andrew]

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[David]

right, Pod TikTok showered since last year.

[Marques]

I never washed.

[Andrew]

Who did something that was like, I haven't changed my underwear since last year. It's like we're three weeks into January.

[Marques]

What is up, people of the Internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast.

[Ellis]

We're your hosts.

[Marques]

I'm Marques.

[Andrew]

I'm Andrew.

[Miles]

And I'm David. And it's really cold in here.

[Marques]

It's chilly. It's cold everywhere, actually. But yeah, we have a lot to talk about. We got OpenAI and Nova Launcher both adding ads to their products. We gotta talk about that. Also, Sony and TCL joining forces to make TVs question mark a bunch of oneplus drama that has sort of unfolded on Twitter. And we gotta talk about that. And then also the State of the YouTube Union as presented by Neil Mohan, CEO, but analyzed by me. So we'll get to all of that. But first, which is the.

[Miles]

But first.

[Andrew]

This week, Netflix is introducing live voting. This is such a small live little, but I think it's really cool.

[Marques]

What is it?

[Andrew]

It's like, remember the American Idol days where we used to like, vote for the winners by text message? It was texting or calling, I think.

[Marques]

Does Dancing with the Stars do that?

[Andrew]

I don't know.

[Marques]

Oh, probably. I feel like they do.

[Andrew]

I'm sure there's still things that do it. The voice. What's the mask singer? Yeah, probably does. I can't believe you haven't gotten invited to do that yet.

[Miles]

Um, but I can't wait.

[Andrew]

No on Netflix now, live events via either the mobile app or the TV remote. There are different ways you'll be able

[Miles]

to participate, but you can't Chromecast Netflix anymore, so.

[Andrew]

Oh, really?

[Miles]

There you go. Yeah, they got rid of the Chromecast feature a few weeks ago.

[Andrew]

Cool. Thanks, Netflix.

[Marques]

Netflix is always adding stuff like they are. Didn't they try to do streaming like. Like that boxing event or something?

[Andrew]

So here's. This is all based on live events because it's. It's affecting the event for it. And I. I immediately wrote after this. If you're aware of any previous Netflix Live events, you know, there's zero chance this works for quite a while. I can't tell how many Netflix Live things for Love is Blind or whatever that I've tried to watch that just were massively delayed or didn't work at all. I don't know why Netflix can't figure out live.

[Miles]

It feels like it's because they want you to be able to do Poly Market bets live on the app.

[Marques]

We should remember all of this when we get to the end and we talk about YouTube State of the Union, because every complaint that we have about all the rest of the streamers, we'll get to YouTube at the end and it's like, oh, yeah, YouTube is the biggest streamer and everything works and it's the most stable and it's the entire creator economy and it's where all the content is. Anyway, we'll. We'll get to that later, obviously. All right. But yeah, yeah, Netflix is doing more stuff. They're trying to do podcasts, too. They're always doing stuff.

[Miles]

Today, the Day this Goes Live. Friday, Alex Honnold is doing that Taipei 101 climb.

[Marques]

Yeah, Netflix.

[Miles]

He's scaling the Taipei 101 live on Netflix. Free solo.

[Marques]

It's a building, right?

[Miles]

It's a. Yeah.

[Andrew]

Yes.

[David]

Yeah, I think he's doing it free solo. Live on.

[Andrew]

Live on tv. Terrible.

[Miles]

I will not be watching this. Yeah, I will be not watching this, frankly.

[David]

Alex, get down from there.

[Miles]

You're gonna hurt yourself.

[Ellis]

Big fan.

[Andrew]

Big fan. I think this will be no problem for him. Like, in terms of who holds and everything, it's literally nothing compared to El Cap. But I still don't. There's too many variables. And live. You can live your life. I just don't think we need the live footage of it.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

If it happens.

[Miles]

I don't know why they're doing this live on Netflix. I don't want to witness a why.

[Marques]

A live.

[Andrew]

For those.

[Marques]

For those who are just wondering and may have just googled it, like me, the Taipei 101 is a 101 story, 1,667 T tower in. In Taipei.

[Miles]

It's cool. I've been inside it. They have a big ball bearing that on the inside that goes through the center of the column that basically it's supposed to take, like, earthquake, you know, movements and also just like random little shakes because it's like near a fault line. And so sometimes when you're in there, you can see the ball that's like in the center of the building, kind of just like swaying briefly and it takes all of the.

[Marques]

This swing of building. That's pretty cool.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

That doesn't happen while he's climbing it. I don't like it.

[Andrew]

That's all I gotta say.

[Marques]

That's Netflix for you professionals.

[Andrew]

One big thing in free solo he had was he, like, he really didn't want the production to ever tell him when he couldn't do something. Knowing how Netflix is doing live stuff, how long are they gonna delay this when it inevitably doesn't go live?

[Miles]

Oh, yeah.

[Marques]

This reminds me of when I did the David Blaine free the Ascension thing that we did where we. It was gonna be a completely different day and it was just slightly too windy. He had to float up into the sky weather balloons. That was like, yeah, not today. Tomorrow winds will be better. Weatherman was like, yep, this is perfect. We did it.

[Andrew]

The next day, Netflix is like, we don't technically know what we're doing at all. That's why it fails every now what

[Marques]

you want to hear?

[Miles]

I'm just nervous about this because Taipe is very humid and your hands get all clammy, you know, chalk.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Miles]

But then. Then it gets all like, cheeky and gross.

[Marques]

You know, he's probably figured out what to do with the. Yeah, I think he's.

[Miles]

He knows what he's doing, but I still don't like it. That's all I gotta say. All right, moving on.

[Andrew]

Let's go. OpenAI adding ads. I've had to type the phrase adding ads so many times in this that it. It doesn't feel like a real word or two real words anymore.

[Miles]

Adding ad.

[Marques]

So chatgpt in the free tier and the bottom go tier.

[Miles]

So OpenAI recently released. They decided they were going to release the go tier to more people. Originally, this was just a pilot program in India to sell ChatGPT at a lower rate. But now they are expanding that to more users. And of course, just like netf did when they made the ad supported tier, they are now going to put ads in the cheaper tiers. Sam Altman, a long time ago, I think he was quoted saying we'll never have ads.

[Andrew]

It's in 2024. He said I kind of think of ads as a last resorts, as a

[Miles]

business model, which last resort's not great if that's what you're doing right now. They. Yeah. So along with that they had some statements about how the ads work. They're saying that it will not affect your responses in chat. GPT ads are always separate and clearly labeled. The conversations are private from advertisers and the higher tiers won't have ads. There is an example that you can see here. Adam will put it on the screen.

[Ellis]

No, I won't.

[Andrew]

The example is so it's like asking for an authentic Mex Mexican dish for a dinner party and then Chachi PT goes on to give you a couple options and then under it kind of clearly separated. Not too clearly, but then it says harvest grocery sponsors and says these options might help if you're stocking up on ingredients and has some ingredients that you can buy.

[Marques]

Yeah, looks like an ad.

[Andrew]

It looks like an ad. But in my eyes this feels like the exact example of something that could so easily manipulate results later down the line to increase ad rates and like, like in. In the future. First of all they said we're not going to no ads will affect results. But also two years ago they said ads are last result or last resort. So we're already kind of not trusting what they're saying. But like why would this not be like oh, I want a recipe for you know, this Italian dish but whole foods. Whole food ad rates pay way better. But yeah, this, this ingredient isn't available at all food. So let's just substitute one of those ingredients right for something from the better ad rate company.

[Marques]

So the argument is like the ads should ideally never affect the like product and the actual results and it should never be hidden in like you're talking to the chatbot just starts telling you about a thing and it's secretly an ad like that should never happen.

[Miles]

Should.

[Marques]

But your concern is potentially if it knows it can serve an ad with a certain response where it couldn't with another response, it might choose the response to also serve an ad.

[Andrew]

I think this is an awful example to try and prove that it's not going to affect because it's so easy to see in this example where it could affect easily be implemented in for just more money.

[Miles]

The long tail progression of this is always worse than you think. A lot of times when tech CEOs say like we will never do this. About two years later they start doing it and they make excuses for it. Speaking of Demis Hasabis, which is the CEO of Google DeepMind which makes Gemini, responded to Sam Altman adding these ads to Chat GBD saying we do not have any plans for ads in gemini. And regarding OpenAI testing ads, maybe they feel they need to make more revenue. Well, which is kind of a burn

[Andrew]

that also kind of isn't like, probably stems off the back of these like reports of the internal documents saying they might lose like $14 billion this year.

[Miles]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

So last resort came up on us pretty quick here.

[Miles]

They're burning through a lot of money

[Marques]

they haven't made any money for. Yeah, these things.

[Andrew]

I saw this great meme that was like SAM or OpenAI in 2024 and it just said like $sign 0 and then 2026 and it was $sign 0 comma 000 comma 000 comma $0000 trillion.

[Miles]

Yeah. Yeah. They are also asking advertisers to commit at least a million in advertising if they sign up for any advertising at all. So that's a big commitment. I think that a lot of people probably see the opportunity here because ch

[Marques]

out of control high and it makes sense because it should know maybe even more about you than Google. Like if I go to Google, I'm searching for things I want to find.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

But a lot of people use ChatGPT in much deeper ways of like these are things I want to know, these are things I want to understand. This is like information about me to help inform my thing. And so now it knows all the stuff about you.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

And so the ads, I guess theoretically could be more targeted. So if you're an advertiser, you probably like that for sure.

[Andrew]

Which we all know how great this is going to play out when it's implemented, which will turn into a bunch of people asking super deranged things to chat GPT and getting advertisements for the potential item underneath it.

[Miles]

Yeah. We'll see if they have standards for who they advertise.

[Andrew]

We'll have another.

[Miles]

Unlike X.

[Andrew]

Well, but even like when they used to, remember when it used to go off the rails all the time and you would like ask it its name and weird stuff like that. Like we're going to get another week of that. It's just going to be showing advertising, advertising for items that really don't want to be part of that conversation and it'll be broken for a week and then they'll Adjust everything.

[Marques]

And what's happened on YouTube? The Adpocalypse.

[Miles]

Remember that when the ad rates all got cut like crazy.

[Marques]

Yeah. Because briefly there was like people taking screenshots of like a large company ad alongside some heinous video that happened to be on YouTube and it was like, oh do you really want your brand alongside this? YouTube is so brand unsafe. And then all the marketing CEOs and managers went oh that's a bad headline. Pulled all their spending so that they didn't look like they were doing brand unsafe things by advertising on YouTube and YouTube had to go no, no, no, it's fine. That doesn't happen very often. In fact we're going to do better. And then they had to slowly convince all the advertisers to come back. Yeah, but I also would argue that they didn't have to convince all the advertisers to come back because there's no other way to reach those people. So they all came back and now here we are. So that arc could be a possibility again for OpenAI if they have a whole moment where there's an ad for a knife alongside a ridiculous query about how I want to use this knife to do something crazy. Yeah. So yeah, that's, that may be a possibility.

[Ellis]

I feel like that's what the million dollar like minimum is for to avoid randos just buying ads.

[Miles]

Oh you mean like Bluechew? What I mean all over Twitter for the first like year of them of Elon ownership Bluechew was like the only sponsor because nobody want to run like

[Andrew]

hey, it was really bad, like absolute no name felt like crappy Etsy store type. It was horrible white labeled AliExpress items all over it.

[Miles]

But now a lot of the brands came back but it was pretty rough.

[Andrew]

But I think the thing with the million dollar ad, I don't think they're necessarily trying to get rid of maybe low quality ads. I'm saying more of high quality ads are going to be placed in low quality search results trying to do something funny and that's could backfire.

[Miles]

What do you mean by trying to do something funny?

[Andrew]

Like people are going to type stupid stuff into chat GPT to essentially try and break it and get requested an ad like Marquez said, like maybe you say something wild about wanting to use a knife for something that's clearly illegal and next thing you know Cabela's is on the bottom selling you like a hunting knife or something like that which would never want to be associated.

[Miles]

Yeah, yeah. To your guys know about ChatGPT probably knowing even more about you. I mean, Meta's entire business is that it knows a lot about you and it knows a lot about you through two ways. One, Facebook, you just told it everything about you. But that's that data is very old and people never update their Facebook. So it's like whatever. Two is the Facebook pixel that tracks you around the Internet. That's exactly what Google does when you're searching things on Google. And that's why Google's ad business is like good, but not as good as Meta's. But now you're just constantly telling chatgpt about everything you are doing in your life. Like when you make a Google query, it is like I'm searching something because you search this and you're in this demographic and you're in this location. We can infer based on this big data pool that you probably are interested in this. But ChatGPT is like, oh, he asked for that.

[Andrew]

Yeah, it's his

[Marques]

many ways.

[Andrew]

I feel like it's like the difference between.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Knowing everything you search on Your phone and ChatGPT now is like I know everything that you told your therapist, every mentor you've ever had, your boss, your friends. Yeah, like every.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Your medical questions.

[Miles]

Yeah, totally. So it's a big opportunity, but they gotta be careful. It can get crazy pretty quick.

[Andrew]

Well, I don't know if you're attempting to segue talking about Facebook pixel, but. No, but it is Nova Launcher not. Oh no, it is getting. It's getting. They added Facebook and Google track ad tracking code into the new Nova Launcher into Nova Launcher.

[Miles]

Didn't they get bought by a conglomerate?

[Andrew]

I did a really quick tldr of what's going on. So over the last two years I'll just really quickly run through this company called branch acquired nova launcher in 2022.

[Ellis]

I remember 2024 like sad music underneath

[Miles]

the

[Andrew]

in 2024 there were so many layoffs to the point where the only person left as a full time developer was the founder, Kevin Barry.

[Marques]

That is such a sad sentence.

[Andrew]

It is. And then Kevin put into his contract or got put into his contract that if he were ever to leave branch, the code would be open source and given to the community. Then in September last year, he was told to stop working on the app and stop working on making it open source to where? Then this past week Nova was acquired by a company called InstaBridge based in Sweden. They claim it's not shutting down. They want it to be actively maintained. They're planning on putting ads to have a Sustainable business model are committed to no ads in Nova prime which will be 399 also somewhere in here. I don't know why I didn't write it. Kevin's leaving Nova.

[Miles]

Yeah

[Andrew]

but yeah Nova prime will be 399. No ads. They did accidentally list it at 49.99 on the app. Been there, done that. Not a great price but yeah. So now there are ad tracking things in Nova Launcher already.

[Miles]

Yes, we did that. History of signage and mod deep dive episode. I feel like Nova is like up there with importance. You know people installed Nova on every single Samsung phone because of how bad me touch with people. Ye my. Yeah.

[David]

On my phone right now.

[Miles]

Do you really for people that don't know because like a lot of people don't use launchers these days. Nova Launcher was basically like a stock Android launcher that you could run on your phone. People that don't know what launchers are which is.

[Marques]

It was just back when yeah the home screen and the, the app drawer and all the pages and the setup would feel very different, especially visually between different types of phones. So like a Samsung phone would have all this bloop bloop touchwiz happening and then an HTC phone would have like their famous wetter widget and then and honestly we all kind of prefer just a clean looking stockish Android looking launcher. And so if you got bloop bloop touchwiz you would put Nova Launcher on it and it would feel so much cleaner and it would be nicer and that was the, that was the golden days of Nova Launcher.

[Miles]

Nova was effectively the Nexus UI but it had even more settings, toggles and custom.

[Andrew]

So good. My note I'm most nostalgic about my Note 8 with Nova Launcher in terms of like my peak phone experience which

[Marques]

is why I was so into the Google Play Edition HTC phones. Cuz it was all there already man.

[Miles]

So good.

[Marques]

I'm just reminiscing now. So yeah, now it's going to be a sad like corporate shell of itself. It seems like that's kind of disappointing. I actually started using Niagara Launcher a little more.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Which I've seen a little a couple other people using as well. It's kind of interesting. A little different style but yeah, very

[Andrew]

different style, isn't it?

[Miles]

Yeah. I mean I was thinking the other day about how Nova or Niagara is kind of the dumb phone kind of launcher because it lists your app in a vertical orientation, your apps in a vertical orientation with just the text. So there's nothing there's no big icons to click around on. It's just very utilitarian. So it's very good for folding phones, by the way, because when you open like a. Well, like a hamburger style folding phone. Because when you open the Z, Flip six or whatever, it's got the longer aspect ratio so it waterfalls down, triple fold out vertically.

[Marques]

Like all your apps are everywhere. Yeah, yeah, fun.

[Miles]

So rip Nova. That sucks. Okay, Sony, this is a big story this week actually, which was a bit surprising. People are very, very emotional about Sony Bravia TVs, even though nobody could ever afford them. Sony announced that it is developing a division that joins forces with TCL to start a new venture. Basically, it's like a new company that the two are starting together where Sony is going to own 49% of the company. TCL is going to own 51% of the company. And it's not, it hasn't gone through yet. Right now they just have a memorandum of understanding, which is a very Japanese concept to do. Concepts of a plan. That's exactly what it is. It's concepts of a plan. They're basically in talks about how this is going to work. So I'm not really sure why they announced it publicly yet, but there's a very, very thorough article by John Higgins at the Verge about this. He spent 20 years covering TV, so you should really go read his article. And he says in the article there are still a couple of months before any binding agreements are drawn up and it still has to go through regulatory approval before it can happen. So it's not complete. And even if it does pass, the new company won't go into effect until April of 2027. But anyway, effectively this could lead to the Sony Abravia TVs being manufactured by TCL, which if you sort of break down how the production pipeline of these compute these TVs work anyway. What actually makes a Sony Bravia TV really high quality is not the panel they're using, because they don't make the panels. The panels are made by LG and tcl and these guys, it's really their SOC and their, their image pipeline. So theoretically, if Sony allows TCL to use their SoCs and image pipeline, TCL uses their resources for manufacturing. You could theoretically see much cheaper Bravia TVs in people's homes. Because Bravias are like the most expensive TVs that you can get.

[Marques]

They're really good, but they're really expensive.

[Andrew]

Sony, it's been a while since I've been to ces, but CES Being the like big screen, everyone look at us. Sony's always like, they're not doing rolling or folding or anything, but they are like, damn, these look so good. And then you leave CES and you're like, I'm not going to hear about a Sony TV till I come to CES next year. And look at that, all the hairs on that panther's face again. Yeah. Like in a dark room.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Miles]

LG's got like the tunnel of foldable TVs that makes this like aquarium. And Sony's just like.

[Andrew]

Sony's just like a dark room with like six TVs showing you the highest quality video you've ever seen.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And then you never see it again.

[Miles]

Yeah. So I don't know, a lot of people are talking about this apparent. I, I guess I'm a little bit too young to remember this, which is something I don't usually say because we're considered old now. Yeah. But people have been talking a lot about on social media about how big of a deal it was if you walked into your friend's house and they had a Sony TV on the wall.

[Marques]

Yeah. Or like. Yeah. Because there's just, there's generations of TVs that make a big impact. Like the plasma TV stuff. Back in the day, if you had a friend with a plasma tv, it was like, whoa.

[Miles]

Okay. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah.

[Andrew]

Depending on how long ago if you just had a TV on the wall, that was. That's also impressive. Maybe I'm just really.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Miles]

I still have none of those things.

[Andrew]

So nothing's changed now.

[Marques]

There are people actually in college that use a TV as a computer monitor. That's true. Because it's a huge screen.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

But it's cheaper.

[Miles]

And on Black Friday, like a hundred

[Marques]

dollars, like 1080p 49 inch screen for like $7. Yeah, yeah, that's.

[Miles]

That's going to, going to do that. It's good enough for me.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

I'd ask Alice's thoughts, but he knows nothing about TVs.

[Miles]

So.

[Marques]

TV guy.

[David]

Before TVs could even go on walls. Tony, Tony.

[Miles]

Tony the TV.

[David]

Did you guys know that Sony is short for Anthony? That was a Tony joke.

[Andrew]

Oh, okay.

[Miles]

What's Tony? Oh, Anthony.

[Andrew]

Anthony.

[David]

Anyway, yeah, before TVs.

[Andrew]

I like that.

[Miles]

That's pretty good.

[David]

Before TVs could go on walls, Sony made like the defining contribution to the CRT with Trinitron.

[Andrew]

Trina was it is Sony that that guy who like went to Japan made that video? That was a Sony, right? Yeah. Just Watching how bad he wanted that TV makes me understand how big Sony was.

[David]

The gist of it is that, like, CRTs were really good and color CRTs were really good. And then Sony changed the way that the color processing worked. That essentially allowed TVs, Sony TVs, to be like 50ish percent brighter than all other TVs on the market. And so it was like. It wasn't like CES now, where it's like, oh, you can see a few more hairs on the panthers. Like, you'd go into a store and be like, oh, all the TVs are bad. And then there's the Sony.

[Miles]

Damn. But it costs three times as much.

[David]

It cost. It cost more until Sony started licensing the technology out to other companies. Then you got Diamond Tron and. Yeah, I don't know, who cares about

[Andrew]

a lot of Trons back then?

[Marques]

Those names are tough.

[Miles]

Yeah. Pegatron.

[Marques]

Yeah, Megatron.

[Miles]

Pegatron. Megatron. One more quick. One more quick story. Really quickly. Speaking of ads, Threads is rolling out ads globally starting next week.

[Marques]

Threads. Wasn't there just a bunch of stories about how Threads was just about to overtake Twitter and mobile use?

[Miles]

They just did overtake Twitter and mobile use. They're still way behind them with total active users.

[Marques]

I saw all those headlines and I'm like, but they're just putting threads in Instagram, so can they really well say that? Like, are they counting that?

[Miles]

I think it's the actual app, but the thing about the Instagram threads is that once you click on it, it automatically takes you to the app store to download it, and then you don't even have to make an account. So I think the amount of people that they've just easily onloaded on the

[Marques]

Threads on board, that's like more of the story. It's like Instagram has unloaded a bunch of people onto Threads.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Both of them are a battle over how can we have the most impressive numbers and an article headline.

[Marques]

Yeah, I guess I'm not as interested in users as much as I'm interested in usage. It's fair. Like, you could have a bunch of users that don't use it.

[Andrew]

I hate the usage on both of them.

[Marques]

I think Threads is. Is still in its engagement farming days, but it's. It's starting to get a little.

[Miles]

Aren't all social media platforms still just engagement farming?

[Marques]

Well, X will pay you. Yes, but different types of engagement farming.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Like on YouTube, there's like, sophisticated engagement farming.

[Andrew]

That's what we do.

[Marques]

Venmo. Artistic farming. Venmo Vimeo Venm. It also works with.

[Miles]

You're not wrong.

[Marques]

Yeah, Easy pass is just like engagement farming for cars. So yeah, Threads is in its like. I mean, I'm getting custom content now at this point on Threads that seems like pretty tailored to me, but it's still like full of also brands.

[Ellis]

I've been living great on threads over here, over on this side.

[Marques]

Good stuff on threads.

[Ellis]

Good stuff on threads.

[Miles]

The problem is when you hang on a post for like a quarter second longer than you should and then the algorithm's like, we got more of that baby.

[Marques]

And you just don't.

[Miles]

You just don't want more.

[Marques]

So we're gonna have in. So everyone gets ads and threads now?

[Miles]

Yeah. So they started rolling out very slowly, but now they're rolling them out globally starting next week. They say that the ad delivery will initially, initially specific word remain low as they reach global user availability in the coming months. Initially remain low. So get ready for all those ads, baby.

[Ellis]

That happened quicker than I thought it would, to be honest.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Really?

[Ellis]

Yeah, I thought it would take. I thought they would wait till they were like pretty dominant before they started turning on the ad.

[Miles]

I think they are pretty dominant.

[Andrew]

I thought they'd wait till they federated.

[Miles]

Yeah, they're. It's over. They're not federating anymore. We got one way federation through threads and it only. It only benefits them. So would ads go through the Fediverse only if.

[Ellis]

Probably not.

[Andrew]

They were federated.

[Marques]

They're posted to if they.

[Andrew]

I've got a great business idea.

[Miles]

Well, with that I'd rather talk about a trivia question than be more depressed about advertising trivia.

[Ellis]

And then we'll get to the ads.

[Andrew]

This question brought to you by this

[Miles]

trivia question is brought to you by Meta Sony Bravia.

[David]

Guys, what does bravia. I'm just kidding.

[Miles]

We've already done that, Bolivia.

[Andrew]

And we'd still all get it wrong.

[David]

I don't remember either.

[Miles]

That was a whole acronym.

[Marques]

Bravia.

[David]

Yeah, it was a trivia question.

[Miles]

I remember it. Wow, that's crazy.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Miles]

Oh, it's a backronym. Right?

[David]

Right.

[Miles]

Beautiful.

[Andrew]

Beautiful.

[Miles]

Resonance. Absolutely.

[David]

Resolution audio video.

[Andrew]

I think I wasn't here for that episode because I remember listening to this in the car and trying to figure it out.

[Miles]

Yeah, Anyway.

[David]

Well, and their stupid laptops also had a. The dumb. Anyway, guys, the dumb. This question is about chat GPT adding ads to the go tier. Which by the way, shout out to the go tier. Somebody that I used to know is one of my favorite songs. Of all time.

[Marques]

Oh my God.

[David]

Thanks, Marquez.

[Marques]

That was horrible.

[Miles]

Yeah, I'm trying.

[Marques]

You should not be proud of that.

[David]

Oh, gosh.

[Miles]

Wait. That was really good.

[David]

Wait.

[Ellis]

Actually, when Ellis is tired, he's on

[Andrew]

I like all day. I like the Anthony joke better. I thought that one was a bad no go tier.

[Marques]

Wait, that's of kind.

[David]

Thanks, David.

[Miles]

You're cooking, Alice. I love it.

[David]

Guys. Okay, so as you mentioned, in 2024, Sam Altman said that adding ads was a last resort. And In January of 2026, ads got announced that they would be added. So my question to you guys is what took a shorter amount of time? The time between Sam Altman saying there would not be ads and saying there would be ads, or the time between Google Stadia being released and canceled?

[Marques]

Released, not announced.

[David]

Like from shelf to done.

[Miles]

Negative latency.

[Marques]

Wow.

[David]

What was quicker?

[Andrew]

Stadia is such. Such. It's such a cool thing. I'm still seeing articles about like the Stadia controller lost this. But don't worry, here's how to like get it back. And I'm like, oh my people are still was good.

[Miles]

Google is often 10 years too early to things and Stadia was one of them. Microsoft Game Pass is very, very popular.

[David]

Xbox Cloud.

[Marques]

Xbox Cloud.

[Miles]

That's just what it's called.

[Andrew]

Well, because Game Pass is just getting the games via a subscription rate and then Cloud is the compute on the cloud. It's just called cloud or like GeForce Now.

[David]

GeForce now is the Nvidia version.

[Miles]

Well, anyway, the.

[Andrew]

Wow.

[Miles]

Showing my age here.

[Marques]

Google glass is also 10 years. Yeah.

[Miles]

I mean again, Google is very often 10 years to early things. But the Microsoft version of game streaming is ex. Extremely popular. Google had.

[Marques]

I'm just looking at other. Why is this gonna be trivia later?

[Andrew]

Well, no, Stadia, it's gonna be on there.

[David]

It's gonna be.

[Andrew]

Oh, oh, sorry.

[Marques]

Look at all these other things that were ahead of their time and then died. I'll be.

[David]

I. I've played my hand. I played a handful of Xbox Cloud on my. I've got pretty fast Internet at home.

[Andrew]

You know, name all the games.

[David]

It's like it doesn't really work. Or at least it didn't work that well for me. I found. I guess I was playing games that required like pretty low latency. But yeah, no, like 2K. Like 2K is pretty much impossible on cloud.

[Miles]

My one claim to fame is that I put the. I put out the first ever Stadia review on the Internet and then I went on the Piers Morgan show to talk about Stadia.

[David]

You are on Piers Morgan.

[Miles]

I have a. I have an IMDb that I did not make that someone made for me because I appeared on the Piers Morgan show. Yeah.

[David]

Can we, can we play that clip on the.

[Andrew]

On the.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques]

It's not a video. So you're telling me.

[Miles]

Oh, it is.

[Andrew]

I forgot it is.

[Marques]

You play a game and it's not

[Andrew]

on your Waveform has an IMDb and it only has Marquez and some random guy who included himself in an episode. Richard Cannon iii Legend. I don't.

[Miles]

Anyway, my point is that Stadia would be very popular right now and Rip. But the controllers are very good and you can turn them into standard Bluetooth controllers.

[Ellis]

I'm so mad I got rid of mine.

[Marques]

It's huge.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

All right, well, we'll think about that trivia question. Answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your.com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is a website builder that can transform your.com from a mere formality into a tool for growth. They've already helped thousands of businesses, from early stage startups to Fortune 500s build better websites faster. Framer is an enterprise grade no code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster. With real time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com. From day one, changes to your Framer site go live to the web in seconds with one click without help from engineering. So whether you want to launch a new site or test a few landing Pages or migrate Yourful.com, framer has programs for startups, scale ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. So learn how to get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building for free today@free framer.com wave for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com wave for 30 percent off framer.com wave rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Zapier. There's a lot of talk about AI these days and a lot of hype surrounding what it can do and how it can help your business. But talk is cheap. The real value comes from actually using AI to get things done. That's Zapier. Zapier is a way for you to break the hype cycle and put AI to work across your company. For real. Zapier helps you actually deliver on your AI strategy. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow so you can do more of what matters. You can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the tools your team already uses. So you can add AI exactly where you need it. Whether that's AI powered workflows, an autonomous agent, a personal customer chatbot, or something else, you can orchestrate it all with Zapier. Plus, Zapier is for everyone, tech expert or not. Teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. So join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com wave that's Z-A P I-E-R.com wave support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. So when you're deep in something, figuring out how a new chip architecture works, or trying to understand why an update broke something you built last week, you need a thinking partner that can keep up. Claude works through those problems with you, not a quick summary and move on. It digs in for developers. Claude code runs directly in your terminal, so handed a task, writing tests, refactoring a module, tracking down a bug, and it takes it from there without you walking it through every single step. You can kick off multiple tasks in parallel and come back to finished work. If you want that level of capability without ever opening a terminal, that's where cowork comes in. Point it to a folder on your computer, connect your tools, and it handles the heavy lifting. Organizing files, synthesizing notes into reports, building out spreadsheets while you stay focused on the thinking that actually requires you. And one more thing worth knowing. Ads are coming to AI Anthropic committed to keeping Claude ad free. Your conversations won't be shaped by what someone else paid for. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Waveform and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. All right, welcome back. We gotta talk about this OnePlus drama a little bit. It's kind of all over the place, but if you've been on social media for the past four days or so, you may have seen some of this arc could do our best to break down what happened versus what didn't happen, but yeah, so OnePlus for those of you who know, smartphone company, subset of BBK Electronics, they make this one right here. This is OnePlus 15. I've been using it for a while. It's nice. But they've been making phones for a while, ever since the OnePlus One days when they were like a cult favorite.

[Miles]

Yeah, that's right.

[Marques]

And then so over this past week, this article popped up on Android headlines that was titled Exclusive OnePlus is being dismantled. And this is kind of a shocker headline because they're a company that exists and seems to be doing okay. Maybe a little bit quiet lately, maybe a little bit down, downward trending lately.

[Andrew]

But can I explain a little context that kind of makes sense of why this article hitting here? Yeah, just like since the start of the year, there's been some. There's been a bunch of random articles here and there about like maybe BBK slash, like Oppo and then sub brands. OnePlus. Yeah, getting in the news. One of them is that realme is going back to being considered a sub brand of Oppo. They originally were, then they left after a year. Now they're coming back. Part of that Oppo is saying is to improve resource management and Oppo's global expansion strategy. I know that's not OnePlus exactly, but you know, general branding around there. There's some rumors that then got deleted about the OnePlus 16 maybe not coming to the US and then Pete Lau also right now has an arrest warrant in Taiwan for illegal business and recruitment activities, allegedly. So, yeah, there's. There's a reason OnePlus is. It's hot right now in the tech world, at least in specific tech world. So, like, this article talks about a lot of those things, but it makes sense why it came out right now.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Miles]

You mean the article?

[Andrew]

The article, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Marques]

So I saw that headline, I was like, oh, that's really interesting. So I read the entire article. A couple of things stuck out to me. One was nothing was actually exclusive or new about OnePlus actually being dismantled, but it was a bunch of publicly available but information about the trends with OnePlus lately and the rumors and the types sort of summarizing, putting everything in one place. So that was.

[Miles]

Note on the summarizing.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah.

[Miles]

Maybe a little bit of heavy on the summarizing.

[Marques]

Yeah, well, people might first of all use the word clickbait to describe something that says exclusive in all caps and then doesn't have exclusives. But the other thing was, it was. It felt very much written by ChatGPT. Like, I read the whole thing and it was. By the third of the waypoint, it was painfully obvious that it was like structured the same way over and over and over again. To which the author, I guess, later admitted that he, like, updated the headline. It was like, yeah, I did use AI to structure this, but to clear

[Andrew]

that up, they originally had made the post that it was written by someone named Alex Maxim at Android Headlines. Then everyone started saying this is AI because of it had a lot of what do they like to do? A lot of like, if X, then Y.

[Miles]

It's like, it's not. It's not this. It's actually this. This wasn't just a this, it was a whole that. Like something like.

[Andrew]

And then the M dashes over and over again are always like, justice for

[Miles]

the freaking M dash, man. I used to use that all the time.

[Andrew]

Don't use it.

[Marques]

I can't use it anymore.

[Andrew]

It's. Yeah, yeah, it's like an extra finger. It's just such proof that it's AI.

[Miles]

I just never want to end my sentences, you know, just gotta just stop using periods only.

[Andrew]

Let's recreate the ellipses but with commas and just use that instead. Three commas.

[Marques]

You know, it's funny, when I do my script writing in Google Docs, I use dashes, ellipses and semicolons to indicate in my own head a different type of pause. Yeah, and it's just I. I'm reading it a certain way because I know what that means to my brain. But now online it means this was written with AI, so I can't use this ever outside of my script writing. But yeah, it is what it is.

[Andrew]

But so originally it was said it was written by Alex, and then after it got all the flack online about it being written by AI, he came out and said, this was not written by me, it just had my name. To then which Chris Yakulik, the owner of Android Headlines, said that he wrote it and then admitted to using AI in it, claiming he said, as a site owner, I made the decision to use AI assistance in structuring this article. Everything else is human work, including the entire investigation, reporting from independent sources, current former employees, Chinese business publication research, and four analyst firms. But like, okay, there's so many red flags going on.

[Marques]

Yeah, red flag number one. Why hide that at the beginning? That was why. Why put a different person's name on it? Why do any of that? Why not write your own article? It's just a bunch of weird things going on here. And then also. Yeah, I don't know. This doesn't. It didn't convince me that. I don't know if you read it and weren't convinced at all, but it didn't convince me that OnePlus is actually on their deathbed. It seemed like it wanted to convince me. So, yeah, there's a lot of things that are going on with OnePlus like you mentioned, that are really interesting to follow and that sort of represent the end of an arc of what was once a really, really hot brand and is now just kind of like corporate sub brand going back to its roots. But yeah, it was just kind of a disappointment to me.

[Miles]

Yeah, it's one of those things where it put a lot of things in one article that I think could have been a useful article if you wanted to say, here's everything that's going on with OnePlus right now.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Miles]

But slapping an exclusive badge on it and offering no exclusive information is like very clickbaity.

[Andrew]

And then putting a different author because it seems like he maybe has had more like viral posts. Posts lately. So they seem to put it on him to try and maybe get some more traction from it.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Now if I'm that author, I'm not happy because now it looks like I did a bunch of.

[Ellis]

I know what we're talking about.

[Andrew]

Exclusive. Well, exclusive. M dash Brand new OnePlus, M dash drama.

[Miles]

OnePlus isn't dead. It's actually alive. That's what we're titling it.

[Marques]

OnePlus has since come out and just clarified that they are not shutting down. They said recent unverified reports claiming OnePlus is shutting down are false. So there's that.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah. And then they said OnePlus India's business operations continue as normal. This was because this is OnePlus India responding. Correct. Just to be fully clear on that. Yeah.

[Miles]

And a lot of people are like, well, that's just the India team that's saying they're not closing. And it's like, you know, maybe it could happen. I think that there's a lot of reasoning why Oppo might want to simplify their lineup. Again, the Oppo brand is very popular in China and different parts of Europe because Oppo phones are sold in different parts of Europe. And, you know, they tried to change the OnePlus UI to color OS and then they just.

[Marques]

One of the things changed the name

[Miles]

back to Oxygen os, but it's still color os, which is good. It's a good os.

[Marques]

It's one of the Things that was interesting to me about this because I still am, like, thinking a lot about OnePlus and the existence of sub brands and why companies use them is always interesting to me. Like, why do you have Lexus as a sub brand of Toyota? Because you can't really sell such a pricey car with a Toyota badge. So you have this badge. Like, this is what Genesis is. This is what a lot of other companies do.

[Ellis]

Cmf.

[Marques]

Cmf again. So Oppo is a huge popular company in one market, but the same company wants to use a new brand called OnePlus to get into other markets that aren't as excited about buying something from Oppo. And they kind of had some success, like in the US and in India, and people were getting really excited about OnePlus phones. I remember the OnePlus One being impossible to get and like the invite system and the Cyanogen mod collab and all of that. So following all that was very exciting.

[Andrew]

You can get OnePlus stuff at carriers in the US now. Like, yeah, it felt like for a long time new phone companies were not in carriers in the U.S. yeah, for sure.

[Marques]

It was so hard to get a new phone company off the ground all the way to the point where you could actually sell it to a real human in the US if you aren't in the us you probably aren't as familiar. But for those in the us, you know, like, it's mostly Samsung and Apple phones in stores. They've made the deals. There's some Motorola stuff, there's the prepaid carrier stuff. But, like, if you want to come in and spend $800 or whatever premium flagship money on a phone, the options are slim. And it was so hard to get on the shelf alongside those, let alone get enough market share. Pixel's at like 2%.

[Ellis]

Yeah, I was just gonna say even Pixel took so long just to get on shelves.

[Marques]

That's Google trying, right? So imagine a new company trying to get along. So the story was really exciting and OnePlus got very far. And as far as the enthusiast crowd goes, they kind of had a stranglehold on, like, I remember so many of my friends buying OnePlus phones because it was like, yeah, the OnePlus 7 versus all the other phones I could get for the same money is unreal deal, right? So, yeah, the arc of OnePlus has been fascinating to follow now. I mean, I use the OnePlus 15. They still, to an extent, represent a lot of good things. Like, this is still one of the cleaner versions of Android with Their again, we were talking about launchers earlier, but the skin, great specs, still pricey. Yeah, they're still good enough phones that we should keep them around. So we don't want OnePlus going anywhere.

[Miles]

But, yeah, there's a couple major reasons why these brands like to make these sub brands. I mean, obviously, you got to subdivide. You would need to know this brand represents luxury. Right. Like, Louis Vuitton is never going to sell. Like a $40 sneaker or something, or a $4 bag, whatever they make. Bags. Bags. But the other big reason, hey, I'm not a fashionista. We all know this. I bought this for $5.

[Andrew]

I see that Gucci belt you've got on right now.

[Ellis]

You're not fooling us.

[Marques]

Anyway.

[Miles]

But the other reason is that a lot of Chinese brands want to basically sneak their way into the United States. This has happened a million times. Like, the US Government doesn't know that Hasselblad zoned by dji.

[Marques]

You know what I mean?

[Andrew]

They just don't know.

[Miles]

That's like, that's why they try to make it such a big deal that they're like, oh, don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. Even though when you send in your. Your Hasselblad camera for service, it goes to the DJI headquarters, they're like, but we're not. Anyway, a lot of phone companies have done that because I'm trying to remember the brand. Adam, you might remember the brand that we got put on the. Besides Huawei, they got put on the entity list that, like, it was an honor. Or there was another phone brand that in 2017 or so got basically forced to stop selling phones in the United States.

[Marques]

While it was a popular one, while

[Miles]

it was the main one.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Miles]

But effectively, like, when the US Government realizes that a company is Chinese, they get really nervous about it, especially telecoms companies, you know, networking companies. So, I mean, OnePlus in a large way was a way for Oppo BBK Group to get their devices in many more markets. And the fact that the original OnePlus ethos of, like, we're community oriented, we're doing all these community events and this and this and this is like, we're homegrown, but we're just, you know, owned by a giant mega corporation.

[Ellis]

It was the flagship killer.

[Miles]

Yeah. But especially now with there being a lot more tensions heating up between the United States and China and everyone. And everyone. The tariffs that are probably going to make it really hard for them to keep selling OnePlus phones in this, in the Western world, for the price that they sell it at, you could see a big reason why they might want to pull back and just be like, you know what? OnePlus is not doing as well as we thought. Oppo phones are actually still selling really well. It's just that like this article is just, it's, it's jumping to a lot of conclusions.

[Marques]

Big jump.

[Andrew]

It had the opportunity to like maybe have a. Or potentially still does have a bunch of interesting information, but you kind of shoot yourself in the foot when you put that title. Do the weird author switch use AI and a bunch like you've just turned it into a big laughing stock kind of at that point. Which is not a great look.

[Miles]

Not a great look. Yeah. Multiple different OnePlus kind of heads of social media have come out and been like, the rumors of my death are highly exaggerated. Yeah.

[Ellis]

Okay, question for you guys now in. Okay, never mind. Onwards. What was peak OnePlus phone to you? Because Miles and I and Andrew a little this morning we're talking about this and we all had different answers.

[Miles]

70.

[Andrew]

That's what I said. I got argued against as the 7 over 17.

[Miles]

17 is better.

[Marques]

I think they had two peaks. I think the 7 and 7T and 7T Pro is one of the peaks and I think the OnePlus one is the other peak.

[Ellis]

I would say 1 plus 1 as

[Miles]

well is the peak.

[Andrew]

It's the start.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

And I don't think you think they

[Andrew]

peaked right off the bat.

[Ellis]

I think they peaked right off the bat.

[Andrew]

Do you know what the peak Was? The Pocophone, pH1 or whatever. F1.

[Marques]

I just, I think the OnePlus one peaked in some ways. It wasn't their best phone ever, but it was one of the best deals ever. And it was one of the biggest hype machines ever. And people got. It was one of those rare things where it actually lived up to the hype. I think that's why it felt like a peaked game.

[Miles]

The OnePlus 3 was the phone where a lot of the people in my life that knew sort of about technology and wanted a good deal started being like, I'm hearing a lot about this OnePlus 3 phone. And I knew a lot of people who actually bought the OnePlus 3. It was easier to buy because you didn't have to go through the invite system and everything.

[Andrew]

Okay. I think Miles was agreeing with me. He just had the wrong thing that. Because he was like the one with the pop up selfie camera. And that was the 7.

[Ellis]

Oh, I thought he said the McLaren edition, which was.

[Andrew]

No, but he thought the 7 Pro was the one with the pop up selfie camera. But the 7T Pro is it? Which then was the McLaren Edition. Right.

[David]

The pop up selfie camera was the miata Edition.

[Marques]

The 7T Pro was a phone that I could have used for ever a long time.

[Miles]

The main problem was the ghost touches on the, on the corners, on the sides because it had a wraparound screen. And I said, I swear that thing was tapping all over the place.

[Marques]

That was a downside I would be willing to live with for all the upsides of that phone. It was so, so fast. Great, great software optimization. Really good screen. The whole fast and smooth thing was like very appreciated. And now here we are in the 15. The 15 is still one of the absolute fastest and smoothest phones. But lots of phones are fast and smooth like that now.

[Miles]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ellis]

I was wondering before, because you've been using the 15 now for weeks.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

How does this compare to like in your Mount Rushmore in your head of OnePlus phones? Is this on there already or is it still working its way up?

[Marques]

So the battery Life of the 15 has elevated it a lot for me over other phones I could be using. I think that combined with fast and smooth and clean software is why I'm still using it. The camera is such a huge letdown, which is what's dragging it down from like possible peak status.

[Andrew]

That's why you bought a Hasselblad.

[Marques]

Yeah, gotta get the Hasselblad stuff somewhere. So I bought a Hasselblad. No, it's, it's, it's one of the best phones still. But it's in like the arc of OnePlus. It's definitely not one of their all time best, but it is like convenient that they jumped on the silicon carbon thing early and executed it well.

[Ellis]

Like, I Wonder if in 10 years will you be remembering this phone fondly.

[Marques]

Not like, not like the peak phones.

[Miles]

Yeah, Carl, pay left. Right after the peak. It's like right as the, the stock is hitting the top and then it starts to go. He left after the 8T.

[Marques]

The 8T. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Miles]

I think that was the one that was. The 8 was like locked to Verizon and I think, oh, it didn't have the 5G band and it was 100 or. It did have the 5G band, the millimeter wave band. But it was a hundred dollars more if you bought it on Verizon. But you had to buy that model.

[Marques]

Yeah, I Want to do a quick exercise?

[Andrew]

I really can't remember.

[Marques]

The exercise I wanted to do is I'm going to read you the titles. The titles I used for all the OnePlus reviews. Okay. So the One Plus One review is just called the One Plus One review. Right. The One Plus Two review didn't have a subtitle, but it was called the Flagship Killer and got the full review treatment. OnePlus 3 review was a third attempt at a killer flagship and it was. It had that metal jacket. Then I started doing titles. So there's no one plus four because four is bad luck. So no, four.

[Andrew]

I think five is. When I was a 2017. Did that come out?

[Marques]

The OnePlus five. I have it here was, yeah, 2017. Six million views.

[Ellis]

Super.

[Marques]

So that's when I started then.

[Andrew]

I love the 5T.

[Marques]

OnePlus 6 review was my most reviewed, my most viewed phone review I had ever made at the time. Also, they just pumped it up with a bunch of other. A bunch of extra views. That has 22 million views. Title is right on the money. 8 plus for the price. Then the OnePlus 6T, new design, same price. Then the OnePlus 7.

[Andrew]

You could use that for every T

[Marques]

model pretty much after OnePlus 7 review is way under the radar. OnePlus 7 Pro review is silly. Fast silly. Then OnePlus 7T high refresh, low price, and 7T Pro. Tiny tweaks to excellence. Now we get to OnePlus 8. OnePlus 8 review special. No more OnePlus 8 Pro review. Finally, a flagship OnePlus 9 review. Sneaky value and OnePlus 9 Pro review. A huge Hasselblad promise.

[Andrew]

Can I say, even the title, finally a Flagship almost feels like a negative title. And the arc of OnePlus, like its whole thing, is Flagship Killer. And when it. It almost feels like you're saying that they like, conformed to, like a killer anymore. Yeah, they're the flagship, AKA the pricey.

[Marques]

The thing that's about to be killed by the next killer.

[Andrew]

Yeah. The Pokemon phone.

[Miles]

Yeah. I. I was reading my review titles for the OnePlus phones for the 7T. I titled the review OnePlus 7T. Is it too good?

[Andrew]

So good.

[Miles]

Then OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro, I titled what should have been.

[Andrew]

Oh, wow.

[Miles]

And then I immediately after I made a video.

[Marques]

Oh, these are the worst ones.

[Miles]

I made a video immediately after this literally called. Is OnePlus turning into Oppo?

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

All of these would be made better if you put exclusive at the beginning.

[Andrew]

What's the.

[Marques]

So I have three in a row for the last near. You can tell they're no longer in their peak. I made a video called what happened to OnePlus? Then I made a video called OnePlus 10 Pro Impressions. What happened? OnePlus 10T impressions. Somebody that you used to know.

[Andrew]

Oh, wait, there's no way that went full circle. Yeah, that's like John Oliver where he makes a reference in the beginning and pulls it back at the end.

[Marques]

It was the real title.

[Ellis]

Wow.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Pretty good.

[Andrew]

I was gonna say the he's with the meme of like, what is it? Who from the Simpson goes like. You can see the exact moment his heart rips in half. Like, that's 70 to 8.

[Marques]

Yeah, you can see it.

[Miles]

And that's when Carl Pei left.

[Marques]

So the arc is real. The 13 and 15 are good phones, but you can see when the peak was pretty clearly.

[Miles]

Yeah. Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated.

[Marques]

Let's say a quick ad break and do some trivia.

[Ellis]

Trivia, dude. So earlier in the show, we spoke about Netflix adding live voting to their service. We also spoke about American Idol, which you may or may not know. The first episode aired in 2002. So here's your question.

[Marques]

Kelly Clarkson.

[Ellis]

No, it was Clay Aiken.

[Marques]

Rupert Akon.

[Miles]

Rupert Murdoch.

[Ellis]

How old was Ellis when the first

[Miles]

episode aired in 2002?

[Andrew]

What month did it air?

[Miles]

What month?

[Ellis]

Thank you for asking. It aired June of 2000.

[Miles]

So this question is just how.

[Andrew]

What month was Ellis born?

[Ellis]

That's all the information you get.

[Miles]

I know that.

[Marques]

I know that.

[Miles]

How old are you alone else.

[Ellis]

No, don't worry about it.

[Marques]

Wait,

[Ellis]

was the first episode June of 2002?

[Marques]

So how old?

[Miles]

I'm 12.

[Andrew]

Why can't I remember Ellis's birthday?

[Miles]

I had to ask him 28, but he hasn't his birthday.

[Marques]

I'll give you.

[David]

I can give you a hint.

[Andrew]

What is. What's the last letter of the hint for my birthday.

[David]

It's also my dad's birthday.

[Miles]

I actually do know that's actually. But only because I went to a

[David]

birthday party ones in my family. No, I'm not joking. Like, there's a bunch of members of my family at all of my birthday.

[Marques]

That's kind of sick.

[David]

I don't know if that actually works, but I was.

[Miles]

Your dad was born at the exact. On the same day and same time as you. In the same year?

[David]

Yeah, same year and everything.

[Miles]

Your dad and you were twins.

[Andrew]

Clones.

[Miles]

Clones.

[David]

Oh, no. My birthday runs in my family. And proof that it there's something going on is I was born, like, really premature. Like, I was not supposed to be born anywhere close to my dad's birthday.

[Miles]

And yet I was like, that explains it.

[Marques]

You're like, what day is it?

[Andrew]

He probably had some sweet plans that day. Dinner. Not anymore.

[Miles]

How long did you cook after you came out of the womb?

[David]

How did I cook after I came out of the womb? I have no idea what you're asking.

[Miles]

Yeah. If you were premature, you know, Are you asking you something? Develop a little bit.

[David]

How long did I cook?

[Marques]

Yeah, you still have to.

[Miles]

Your brain had to continue to develop.

[David]

You know, I popped out the womb. I immediately pirated a copy of the whole studio and I went to work, man.

[Miles]

That makes sense, bro. That makes sense.

[Ellis]

All right. Sick.

[Marques]

We'll be right back.

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[Andrew]

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[Marques]

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[Marques]

Foreign.

[Andrew]

Welcome back. There was a Verizon outage last week and pretty. I mean it's exactly what it sounded like. Verizon was just straight up out in the US for like hours. Right.

[David]

I am a Verizon customer and I never lost service. I was so confused.

[Miles]

It wasn't everybody. It was.

[David]

Yeah, it was like.

[Andrew]

Seems like a lot of people.

[David]

Maybe it's because I'm a visible customer, but I thought that was a Verizon network.

[Andrew]

But yeah, I think I, I read that the like the. What's the website? Is it down or something like that down Right now I'd like over 175,000 queries or something about Verizon. But so it went out around like 4pm EST. 4 hours. Like a very long time. I think it was still pretty late at night. Anyways, I'll quickly. I just want to know. They wound up giving a 20 credit to everybody.

[Miles]

Hell yeah.

[Andrew]

In one way, if you're thinking about like pro rating, a month long contract, a couple hours is worth way less than $20.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But at the same time, if it was like if I had my GPS going or I had to like pick up a kid from school or an event like prorated minute by minute, $20 is like more than enough. The amount of stress and like how annoying that would be for those hours is not even close to like I would pay $20 to just get my service back at that point. So what do we think is. Do we think that's an appropriate credit? It never is.

[Marques]

Yeah. That's the thing. I there's no way to accurately assess the amount of convenience or inconvenience you've caused and like appropriately compensate everyone. So them deciding to give $20 to every customer who lost service is like that's, that seems fine. Some people are going to be disappointed because they had worse inconveniences. Some people are going to be like, I didn't even notice it was out. And they just got 20 bucks. Yeah, it's. That's just kind of the way I'm

[Miles]

also like, I'm not, you know, I'm always for, like, corporations can give money to people. It's fine. They're really, really wealthy. But, you know, giving every single Verizon customer 20 bucks is kind of a lot of money.

[Andrew]

I'm assuming it's based on outages, but that's still so, so much.

[Miles]

It's a lot of money. And it means that they're. They're, what is it, January? They' Revenue is going to be down.

[Ellis]

Like, well, then you also have to go. I believe you had to claim it. Oh, so it was like you had to go into the app or the

[Miles]

website or something, which like 20 people did.

[Ellis]

Exactly.

[Miles]

Okay. Never mind.

[Marques]

They should have given people a lot more money. How many things go down and you don't get, like, how many times does your Comcast or your home Internet or whatever, you don't, you don't get money back. That's true. And it probably caused you some inconvenience.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

How many times does YouTube go down and you don't get your premium money back or whatever?

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And it sucks.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

I mean, I had my like flight canceled one time because they claimed it was weather, but it was like weather from three days ago that they were just still backed up on. Which then eventually, after enough people complained, they gave me like 30, 000 miles. It's like not even close to the trip. I guess I still got my miles back, but like, I had to cancel non refundable hotels, all sorts of different. I lost like $2,000 or something on it. It's like, cool. 30, 000 miles is like. I could maybe get like two Diet Cokes on the way. Like, it's, it's nothing.

[David]

The, the last time I flew, I won't, I won't shame them here, but the last time I flew, the last time I flew American Airlines, they.

[Miles]

Why not shame American Airlines? They're like the worst airline.

[David]

They rebooked. I had a layover somewhere and they rebooked the first leg of the flight to get in after the layover was going to get in in a random city that I knew no one in. And then I was like, I got there two hours after my layover had left. No more flights the rest of the day. And I go up to the American person and I was like, so my, my hotel. And they were like, no, you're sleeping at the airport, buddy.

[Andrew]

Like, and then imagine your Verizon's out.

[David]

And then. And then guess how much they offered me?

[Andrew]

I bet you it was like a 15.

[David]

It was $0. Oh, it was literally $0.

[Miles]

Dang.

[Marques]

So shout out to Verizon.

[Miles]

Yeah, honestly. Yeah.

[Andrew]

Verizon.

[David]

Was it only in New Jersey? Was the outage only in New Jersey?

[Miles]

It happened in New York.

[Marques]

It was enough that I saw memes on threads that day about Verizon peeing out. So it was pretty widespread, probably.

[Miles]

Maybe Staten Island.

[Andrew]

Yeah, there's a lot.

[Miles]

Just want to get that in there.

[Marques]

Memes on threads.

[Ellis]

Staten Island, New Jersey.

[Miles]

Yeah, Staten Island, New Jersey.

[Andrew]

Get out of here.

[Marques]

All right, well, I got one more story for you guys, and that is it's January, and every January, Neil Mohan, or Whoever is the CEO of YouTube at the time, puts out a letter as a sort of a state of the union of what's going on on YouTube. And it's usually pretty informative. I will say I appreciate a little peek behind the curtain into what YouTube is planning on emphasizing and working towards in the upcoming year, because we're YouTubers. We want to know ahead of time as much as possible what's gonna go down on this platform and how to prepare for it and how to maybe even take advantage of stuff that's gonna be emphasized. So I read it. It was an interesting blog post, and I have some highlights that I'll share with you, and maybe I can get your reactions on what you think of some of these things. Some of them, I think, are pretty generic, but some of them, I thought were, like, little nuggets that were really interesting buried in here.

[Miles]

Okay, so the.

[Marques]

The sort of headliner one that you kind of expect them to say every year is breaking news. YouTube's still really huge, exclusive, really big.

[Andrew]

YouTube big. Are you serious?

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

It turns out they're an enormous website. Dude, that's no way. Biggest streamer, biggest podcast platform, biggest video library.

[Ellis]

What are your sources?

[Andrew]

Sources?

[Marques]

Yeah, sources are. I use it every day.

[Miles]

It's pretty huge. Did you come up with that via ChatGPT?

[Marques]

No, I swear. This is. This had to come from the CEO himself, so. Yeah, that's still true.

[Miles]

Great.

[Marques]

They emphasize all of that creators are real businesses now. Like, the creator economy is still mostly YouTube. And it's good that they sort of reemphasize this because we're on lots of other platforms where it's like, you could have a business on Instagram, or you could have a business on Facebook, you could have a content creation TikTok business, but at the end of the day, the most stable version of that is a YouTube one.

[Miles]

Everything else is so volatile.

[Marques]

Yeah, they've just reminded us that that's true again, so I wasn't shocked by that. Yeah, there was a brief focus on making YouTube safer for kids and people who are of learning ages. There's a quote that 79% of teachers in the US who use YouTube agree that it helps students learn. Which I thought was an interesting phrasing because I thought they were going to say 79% of teachers in the US use YouTube to help students learn. But no, it was 79% of the teachers who do use YouTube then think it helps students learn.

[Miles]

I think nine out of ten, oh

[David]

wait, there's 21% of teachers who are like, yeah, we watch YouTube in class.

[Andrew]

Let's actually do anything.

[David]

But that's one in five.

[Miles]

Yeah, well, I think nine out of ten people would only buy a new car if it had Apple CarPlay in it.

[Marques]

Which is interesting that not all teachers use YouTube and not all of them who use it agree that it helps students learn, but 79% of them do. I hear from teachers all the time who are like, I showed your video about this business to my business class in college and it was very helpful. Thank you. I hear that all the time. So it was cool. They. They also will let you set the timer for scrolling shorts on your kids account to zero.

[Miles]

Can you do that? Yeah,

[Marques]

I.

[Andrew]

Wait, that legit? I was just thinking of that in the comments car this morning. I was like, I deleted Twitter, I deleted Instagram, I deleted TikTok, I all the shorts things. But I need YouTube for work and I. My thumb just hovers. Stop it. And it goes, if I could have that, I would love that timer.

[Marques]

I think it's a parental control, but you might as well be able to do that.

[Miles]

Can you pee the parent and the kid?

[Marques]

Yeah, you can if you're.

[Miles]

Ellis, set up.

[Marques]

Set up parental controls and then flip flop. That's a good one.

[Andrew]

We're very referential. Yeah, that's a good one.

[Marques]

But that's. You should set up parental controls and then log into your kids account.

[Miles]

Ellis, do you want to be my dad on my YouTube account? I can set you as my dad.

[David]

We can be each other's dad.

[Marques]

Yes.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques]

So anyway, that's all good. They also had the statement that was very definitive. This is all in service of empowering parents to protect their kids in the digital world. Not from the digital world, aka please keep letting your kids use YouTube.

[Andrew]

It sounds like you have to protect them from 21% of teachers because I don't know what they're showing them, but

[Marques]

they're not learning unhelpful YouTube.

[Miles]

They're just watching AI slot videos.

[Marques]

Yeah, there was another push, and I think this is going to continue because this is in their letter about making YouTube content eligible for and rewarded for or rewarded along the same lines as, like, traditional media, like Emmys and Oscars and that sort of stuff. They seem to really. They always have this, like, back of the mind, like, inferiority complex. Like, they always have to prove they're better than TV by doing TV stuff. I always thought it was weird.

[Miles]

It's like, dude, you're the biggest streaming platform.

[Marques]

People should be scared of you. Like, your audience loves you for what you are. But they also are like, but please, Jimmy Fallon, please put it on YouTube. They always have all this TV stuff. And this is another one of those traditional media things. They're like, oh, but we want this stuff to win Oscars and Emmys. I personally don't really care if YouTube videos never win Oscars and Emmys. I think there will be a future version of that at some point that's just as valuable and prestigious, the streaming.

[Andrew]

We're gonna win our Golden Globe. And then you can feel like that we were.

[Marques]

I don't even remember Emmy nominated. Oscar Retro Tech was Oscar nominated. Whatever it was nominated for. And it was cool that it was nominated. That's fine. That's about as far as it would

[Miles]

go by a fake award show.

[Marques]

The trophy wouldn't mean as much because I wasn't aiming to get the trophy.

[Ellis]

You don't want to be an EGOT winner.

[Marques]

Well, I think that some people do. I think some people aim to make a thing to win the award.

[Andrew]

Mkbhd. The show, the play, the.

[Marques]

Anyway, so that was the thing in the letter. Then, of course, they had to get to the AI stuff. So here's two of the more interesting nuggets. One of them is actually not AI, but it's an interesting note adding a way for creators to insert baked in ads into YouTube videos that can then disappear.

[Miles]

What?

[Marques]

It was just one of those little things that they just tossed in there. But that they would be working on a tool this year that lets you have a baked in. You know how we'll do like a thanks for the sponsor and it's baked in fully into the video. Yeah. And then there's other types of ads that are not baked in. They're like an overlay ad or a side ad or a pre roll ad. It's a tool to allow YouTube to control how long that baked in ad is viewable and then removes it. And it was interesting hearing about that. And I got briefed by YouTube and talked to him a bit about this. And I guess the example that this would make the most sense is let's say you have a sponsor that would look to put an ad on your channel but can't afford, say your whole typical viewership. But they can afford the first hundred thousand views or the first million views. So you can have an ad that is baked in and appears in the video for the first X views and then removes when it hits that view count. So they can pay that lower total value for that sponsorship and they still get to get to your audience and they got to, you know, you got to work with that company.

[Miles]

That worries me that this is just going to lower sponsorship rates.

[Marques]

Rates. Like why?

[Miles]

Because companies know that like after a certain point in the video being public that the views are going way down anyway. So I feel like the sponsorship, the sponsors are going to be able to be like, well, you know, since we're not getting it for the lifetime, we can pay you less.

[Marques]

I think that would actually empower creators to charge more for a lifetime because videos sometimes have a longer tail and over performing. So if you're reaching out to me in the past as let's say whatever company you go, hey, we want to work with MKBHD and we have this stuff and we like you, you like us, let's work together. Your audience loves our product and there is a baked in ad and that video could get the regular number of views or it could happen to get 22 million views like a random video sometimes does. Right. That company doesn't then pay more because of the 22 million views. They just got a good deal basically.

[Miles]

That is sort of the chaos.

[David]

It would also in theory allow creators to make more ads than videos if they could get dynamically in like. Does that make sense?

[Miles]

Yeah, you could have multiple sponsors for one video and it just like after the first hundred thousand, the second sponsor gets.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

Or it's like if you have a catalog of 20 videos, like you're, you know what I mean? I don't know. That's no creator has just 20 videos and is getting ad deals. But you know what I mean, like hypothetically, that's

[Andrew]

there's nominal, you know?

[David]

You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You Know what I mean? You know what I mean, Gautier? But like, yeah, like, like you could in theory not make a video for a month, but still take ad deals that get retroactively applied. I also like this idea, I just want to say because I think it'd be really fun for TV viewers if those dynamic ads played. Not for me, I'm a premium subscriber.

[Andrew]

But no. So here's. You would see it as a premium.

[David]

I know, but I love the idea of these playing in between videos if they're. If they're. So it becomes more like a linear TV experience. Like when you're watching on your couch on your tv.

[Miles]

Right.

[David]

You know, instead of in the middle of a video having to take a break and be like, here's this service that'll allegedly delete all my data. I have no idea if it will. Or not finishing a video and then instead of getting like a normal bat post roll, like ad. Ad getting something made by a creator and then going to my next video.

[Andrew]

That is like not what this does though.

[David]

No, I know, but I'm saying it opens the door to that being possible.

[Marques]

I mean, I guess you could put the slot at the end of the video. Theoretically it wouldn't be in between, but it would be a.

[Miles]

No, no.

[David]

I'm not saying this is what is happening. I'm saying. Yeah, the fact that now these sponsors are discrete video can be discrete video productions that are dynamically inserted and are not linked with a specific video production. YouTube could in the future make the viewing experience more similar to a linear TV experience, which I think I wouldn't put a pass. I would enjoy if I wasn't a premium subscriber.

[Andrew]

It's funny. Arguably almost works better for us if we were to accomplish because we do post roles so much. I see there being an issue for people who do more mid roll stuff because most YouTubers like to make ads come in with a great segue and stuff. But now if we're starting to like, even if we're not going to sell second ad after first one reaches a million views. Now I segued into something. Where did that ad start and where did it end and where did it pick up from? And now we just lost. Yeah, a minute of video. Is there now a weird jump there? I also want to know, how does YouTube know this is going to be an ad that's in there? Could I just say, oh, I want to. I want to make a little Easter egg for the first 10,000 people that watch this video?

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Can that come in and be like, yo, here's 15 off shop mkbhd.com for our first thousand. It's like when you go to a sporting event, you get a hat for the first 10,000 people.

[Marques]

I think that'd be great if they

[Miles]

really incentivize people to watch the video as soon as it goes live.

[Andrew]

It would. But does that mean we can put whatever the hell we want in here? Can we do that?

[David]

So can we do that on podcasts already?

[Marques]

Yes. Dynamically inserted ads, but just whatever you want. Yeah.

[David]

Like, there's nothing stopping us in megaphone from.

[Miles]

That's fair.

[David]

Not putting an ad in the ad slot.

[Marques]

Yeah, no, I think that's. That's valid. I think. I mean, this is only a single line in the letter, so I don't know. There's no. Yeah, well, yes.

[David]

Other than, you know, the people paying us.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

Yeah. But in theory, you know, if. In theory, if all the money just disappeared and no one wanted to sponsor us, we could just start doing whatever, man. Right, right.

[Marques]

Yeah. No, I think this is only one line in the letter, but. So we don't know what the UI is going to look like or how this tool will be allowed to be used, but I do think that that is something that will happen. Yeah.

[Ellis]

There is one thing I know for sure, and that is it will break chapters.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Already.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Wait, we're about to dynamically put ads in, and I still need to type out the damn numbers for chapters.

[Marques]

We've been saying forever, chapter should be built in ui. It's just crazy.

[Miles]

There are three truths in life, death, taxes, and chapters breaking within the first hour. Yeah.

[Andrew]

But, yeah, I think some people are going to be mad at this because now technically. So if you're a YouTube Premium subscriber, you don't want ads. That's a big reason why you pay for it. Previously, YouTube couldn't control the ads that people bake into videos. Now they are kind of controlling it. And I think premium subscribers are not going to want to see it. I agree with everything we're saying here. And, like, for a creator, this is good. And probably for most audiences, this is good because, hey, maybe you watch our videos later that night. You might not even have to see an ad that we do. That's like one that we need to, you know, continue paying our employees and having a building and everything.

[Marques]

It's really. I. It's interesting. I think it lands on the creator how they choose to use the tools or not use the tools. So, like, if I'm subscribed to premium. I don't expect to see pre rolls ever or whatever like pop up ads or anything like that. But you still see all of the midroll ads that YouTubers do all the time and post roll ads, things like that, the integrated stuff. So the main difference is going to be that sometimes it gets deleted. So if I'm a premium subscriber, I'm still going to see all the mid rolls and the post rolls from all the creators who choose to continue to do that. But sometimes the creators will choose to use the YouTube tool to get one that's dynamically inserted and then you might not ever see that one maybe. So it feels like a win just for everyone who doesn't have to see the ads that get deleted.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Marques]

But yes, it is like putting it in the hands of YouTube. But I'll, I wouldn't, I guess I wouldn't expect YouTube to just delete every ad that goes through that tool. For premium users that would seem like not something that they can do.

[Miles]

It reminds me of the skip ahead feature that they have where. Which, yeah. Which is a premium feature I believe.

[Marques]

And the skip ahead feature is just a auto. It's like a. I think it detects based on user behavior. It seems like people fast forward for 30 seconds here and it's usually because of an ad because. And that's why they imagine that feature. But like that's why that exists.

[Andrew]

I thought that felt like a way of YouTube being like, hey, we're gonna give this to the benefit of the users. But only because that's money we're not getting a slice of right now. So it's good for the users because it's not hurting our bottom line. Then my ultimate goal for Here is if YouTube's allowing us to use this feature with, with our ads that we're negotiating.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Where's their benefit from this?

[Marques]

Yeah. Will they eventually take a cut of

[Andrew]

those ads and they. Because like they're not part of negotiations from. I don't know, it could be like something weird's gonna happen.

[Miles]

It could be some sort of premium paid ad slot feature that they ask for a cut of or something.

[Andrew]

Or like they give the option to put another ad in there. Maybe it's like, oh, we negotiate with dbrand and pay for a million views and they're like, oh, but after that million views is up, here's X amount of like ones that now could live here.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

They want to throw that up their

[Miles]

own ads in there and then they start getting a cut after the first 100,000 or whatever, it starts being YouTube ads.

[Ellis]

This is also going to give advertisers, I feel like a way more accurate roi because they can see exactly, exactly what they're buying. Exactly. More clicked for a million views because

[Miles]

it is chaotic right now. It's like you can pay for, you could pay for a video and you get 22 million views or you get like 100,000. You don't know what it's gonna be.

[Marques]

Yeah, you try your best to like, I see this in contracts all the time. They try to slip in like a minimum view guarantee. Like, oh, if it doesn't get enough views, then you have to do another make gig of free.

[Andrew]

Don't ever.

[Marques]

Creators do not sign those red flags. So obviously advertisers always want to know exactly what they're getting. And so maybe this is a tool that lets them know more specifically in some cases, exactly what they're getting.

[Andrew]

I. That annoys me. So, like, if you're an advertiser and for some reason listening to this, especially this deep into the episode, like, hi, stop worrying about. I know you kind of have to worry about the numbers, but like, do the partnership because you like that creator and their audience and you think this is a good, like, yeah, if you put a minimum view guarantee, it's such a red flag of like, you don't care about this partnership at all.

[Marques]

There's different tiers of partnerships. I feel like in YouTube and some of them want to be like, I, I always use dbrand as an example. They know what it' like to work with a creator and they are really good at working with creators and facilitating, letting the creator do their own creative. That's why you work with them and reaching your audience with their product, that's like what you want it to be. Some companies are bad at that. And so they're, they're after like, okay, we need to run a campaign that gets 10 million views and we need to get it in front of young, affluent tech purchasers. Okay, what do we do? We work with these three tech YouTubers, we guarantee 10 million views and we press buy. And that's not the same thing.

[Andrew]

It's probably a lot of that is we work with insert middleman marketing agency and that person that is like, I want to give these numbers.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's one more tool. I noticed it in there. I feel like we'll see it when it rolls out. It'll be interesting. But yeah, then of course, then the last bit was AI. So yes, AI. There's still going to be AI creation tools on YouTube. Just like last year they talked about this. They're adding more tools. We're actively. Also, they say they're actively combating AI slop. They're trying to reduce the spread of low quality AI content by building our established systems that have been very successful in combating spam and clickbait and reducing the spread of low quality repetitive content.

[Andrew]

That sentence was repetitive. Yeah.

[Ellis]

So I wonder, is there an EM dash in there?

[Marques]

I don't know exactly how effective their tools have been, but they claim to be both adding AI creation tools and combating AI slop. That is fascinating. And then last I saw, they mentioned a tool that they plan to roll out this year which will allow creators to create shorts using their own likeness.

[Ellis]

I can't wait to try this.

[Andrew]

I don't know what the.

[Ellis]

And I'm super against this for regular people, but for us five, I want to do this so bad.

[Marques]

It's really interesting. Last. Last year I have vague memories of them talking about this. I don't know if it was in the letter or at an event I went to where essentially YouTube has your likeness and can use your voice and your face to make you dance and like walk around and do things in videos and do trends. And I don't see how this isn't slop, but some people are gonna make it fun and they're gonna make it like entertaining, interesting content. Hi, I'm here. I'm not sure how people are going to use it.

[Andrew]

I'm gonna do the podcast from now on.

[Marques]

Soon. It might be a little late.

[Andrew]

Yeah, 300 episodes.

[Marques]

Yeah, that. That'll be interesting to keep an eye on cuz our likenesses can't wait to make us dance. Yeah, it's definitely an opt in thing as well.

[Andrew]

I hope so.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Okay, I. This just makes me have two requests at the end of it.

[Miles]

Okay.

[Andrew]

The version of the time limit on shorts, but I want to parent me the parent. That sounds fantastic.

[Miles]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And how have we still not done chapter stuff yet? You brought it up and now I'm just mad again. And all I could think about this whole time is they're dynamically inserting ads and we still don't have a UI for chapters. Seems crazy they should name it after us when they finally.

[Marques]

You know what I also learned when we did our all mistakes video? The same way that you add chapters to a YouTube video, which is by going to the description and typing all of your timestamps and formatting the chapter Names yourself and then YouTube Auto detects that formatting and adds the UI. That's the same way you add corrections annotations to YouTube videos today. But they never told us that there's still a feature. They don't tell you about this they don't like. Actually, it's not built into the ui. You then go down to the bottom and add the word corrections, colon, space, timestamp, and then write the corrections out and it shows up visually in the corner.

[Miles]

I hate that you have to run freaking python script in order to.

[Andrew]

Why don't they just add this?

[Marques]

Why isn't this ui?

[Ellis]

It's just.

[Miles]

They should just add it into the.

[Ellis]

Everything is just a python script. David, quick, say something false so I can correct this.

[Marques]

I'm eight and a half feet tall.

[Ellis]

Perfect.

[Andrew]

Correct. Yeah, he's 8.75ft tall, actually.

[Miles]

True.

[Marques]

So, yeah, they. They refuse to build the ui. I don't know why it's taking so long or why they refuse to do it, but you can do corrections and timestamps for chapters and hope they don't break. Just cross your fingers. Cool. Speaking of things that don't break, Trivia.

[David]

Hit the lights.

[Miles]

They do break. Everything's broken when I say they don't. Every week.

[Marques]

Wow.

[David]

Touch Designer crashed. You totally jinxed it, Marquez.

[Miles]

And yeah, for sure.

[David]

Okay, trivia. But first, a quick moment of silence for Jimmy Butler's acl.

[Marques]

Damn.

[Ellis]

Damn.

[Andrew]

That was the worst moment of silence.

[David]

Yeah, no silence.

[Andrew]

Eat it, acl. No, I can say it. I've lost four of them.

[Ellis]

Are any of your ACLS yours anymore?

[Andrew]

No.

[David]

Wait, you got an ACL transplant.

[Andrew]

That's how you fix ACLs.

[David]

I thought they take it from another part of your body.

[Andrew]

It depends. Oh, they're mine. They're not my ACLs, though. They're my patella, tendon, my hamstring.

[David]

I don't have a cadet someone else's acl.

[Andrew]

I didn't do that. I was too young and flexible. Which got proven wrong when I tore it three more times after this.

[David]

Amazing. Anyway, guys, what took a shorter amount of time. Shorter amount of time. Sam Altman saying we won't put ads in or not.

[Marques]

We won't.

[David]

But Sam Altman saying we're going to try not to put ads in chat GPT and then putting ads in chat GPT or Google making stadia available to buy and then not available to buy.

[Marques]

And can you remind us this the timeline for the Sam Altman quote.

[David]

What I will say it is from 2024 to 2026. But I won't say what month in 2020.

[Miles]

Longer amount of time.

[David]

They are close.

[Marques]

Which is shorter.

[Miles]

Shorter.

[David]

Shorter. Which is a shorter amount of time. What happened Faster. Also, I just want to say, you know what? Actually this is going to be a rare. You know, when I tried to find exactly what month, Sam Altman said that the only place that I found an accurate thing in was Google AI overviews. Everyone else who tweeted about it said it happened in October, but it did not happen in October, it happened in May. And everyone reported that it happened in October because the video of him saying it got uploaded in October, but the video was shot in May. So please do your due diligence. Internet tweeters.

[Marques]

Wow.

[Andrew]

Ellis is an AI Overview lover. Yeah, that's an AI Ellis and AI overview. That's another guy in a tree.

[David]

There's your next correction.

[Ellis]

What do we got?

[David]

Thank you. Who would like to read first?

[Marques]

Cool. I think it was Stadia that was shorter.

[David]

Stadia had a lifespan of November 2019 to January 2023, giving it a 38 month lifespan, which is incorrect.

[Miles]

Wow.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

And Andrew and David, you guys have the same answer?

[Miles]

Yeah, sort of same, but different.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I said Chat GPT.

[Miles]

I said Altman, which is both correct.

[David]

Yeah, that was 20 months.

[Marques]

Back to my old ways of not getting trivia points.

[David]

Adam, we have Marquez. You should just decide your answer and then. No, no, that's rude. You got it right.

[Marques]

Last week I got one point this

[David]

year you're doing fine. No, no, no, no.

[Ellis]

Yeah, actually, yeah, you have quick update on the score. Thank you for everyone who commented last week that it was incorrect in the video. We fixed it today. Now, correction. It is actually Marques with 12, Andrew with 16 after that correct answer and David with 15 after that correct answer. Now next one.

[Marques]

And this one's worth 50 points.

[Ellis]

50 points on the line. No, not 50 points. How old was Ellis when the first episode of American idol aired in 2002?

[Andrew]

Is this closest or you just have to get it right?

[Ellis]

I'll let. Oh, okay. I'll do closest. I'll do closest. So someone gets a point. Who will it be? Will it be you, David?

[Marques]

Will it be you, Andrew?

[David]

It's not prices, right? It's Delta.

[Ellis]

Yeah, I'm just going Delta here. How well do you know American Idol and Ellis? What is that Venn diagram.

[Andrew]

Whoa. What do you got? Wait, that's so specific old.

[Marques]

Do you think I am? I don't know when any of this stuff happened. I said 10 months old.

[Andrew]

I said three, David.

[Ellis]

What'd you say?

[Miles]

I said five.

[David]

Oh, my God.

[Ellis]

So the correct answer.

[Andrew]

That's four, isn't it?

[Ellis]

Is four. So you both got a point.

[Marques]

Oh, shoot.

[Andrew]

No, you did joke. You know what?

[Miles]

So I knew how old Ellis was now, but I didn't take into account the fact that he was born in July and this was June. Oh, I did that. I didn't think about that.

[Marques]

Dang.

[Miles]

Well, I feel bad.

[Andrew]

I forgot you were in July.

[Marques]

I could have sworn Alice was 12. I'm gonna get a point. I'm gonna get on a point for sure. Did you guys know it's gonna snow this week?

[David]

Allegedly.

[Andrew]

For anyone that's still listening, every break we've taken this entire last three hours is Marquez just online with 40 articles about how much it's gonna snow this weekend.

[Marques]

It's so much.

[David]

It's so much. If we make it a trivia question, will it snow this weekend? It won't.

[Andrew]

That's a joke about you getting everything wrong, Marquez. Yeah, he's too busy tweeting about the snow right now.

[Marques]

It's gonna snow a lot anyway. Well, join us back next week when I hopefully get maybe a point on trivia. It'll be February by then, won't it? No, we got one more January episode, I think, so stay tuned for that. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Thanks for subscribing, most importantly, and getting us off the hype train. You know what that means. Catch you guys in the next one.

[Andrew]

People were saying they could still hype us for some reason, so that broken already.

[Marques]

Keep hyping us, then. See you later.

[Miles]

Bye.

[Andrew]

Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Irvin. We're partnering with Vox Media Podcast Network, and our true outro music was created by Vain Sill.

[Marques]

Bingo. Let's go. We're talking about weather for the next hour, right?

[Ellis]

Absolutely.

[Marques]

That's right, Dan.