How We Filmed Our Work Lives for 1 Year!

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: "How We Filmed Our Work Lives for 1 Year!"
Date: February 10, 2026
Host: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD)
Co-hosts: Andrew Manganelli, David Imel
Guests: Rich, Adam, Eric, Harper, Miles, and others

---

Episode Overview

In this bonus episode, the Waveform team unpacks the making of "Year in the Life," their ambitious yearlong documentary project that chronicled daily work, travel, and behind-the-scenes moments at the MKBHD studio throughout 2025. The team dives deep on the project's evolution, technical challenges, lessons learned, standout moments, and the creative decisions that shaped this unique production. This episode is a candid, detailed roundtable covering both the technical and personal sides of producing a feature-length YouTube documentary with a highly collaborative crew.

---

Main Discussion Topics & Key Insights

1. Origins of "Year in the Life" (Yiddle)

• The team reflects on steady progression: from "Day in the Life" → "Week in the Life" → the massive leap to "Year in the Life."
• Purpose: To capture not just individual projects, but the unique vibe and culture of the MKBHD studio over a full year.
• Naming: Affectionately referred to as "Yiddle" internally.

Notable Quote

“We were building the bridge as we were crossing it, which was really fun.”
— Marques (01:45)

2. Kickoff — Early Chaos and Finding the Story

• Filming everything: January was spent capturing everything possible with no clear narrative, leading to lots of footage but little story structure (06:19).
• Editor Mariah saved early edits by layering in interviews and recurring chapter markers (08:00).
• Gradually, the team realized filming with intentionality—capturing setups, payoffs, and recurring themes—was key.

Notable Quote

“We shot everything, but we didn’t know what we were shooting and we had no story.”
— David (06:19)

3. Technical Approach — The Gear and Storage Challenge

• Canon C70 cameras formed the workhorse backbone, but were bulky and generated huge amounts of footage (06:00).

• Losses: Early mishaps included losing GoPro footage while shooting a Ferrari in Portugal (11:19).

• Data Management: By the end, the full project consumed 37.5 terabytes, highlighting the complexities of multi-terabyte workflows, server swapping, proxy editing, and storage logistics (34:15–39:09).

• Audio: Considerable effort went into foley and post production (“Cinema Hollywood audio post workflow”), including replacing nearly all diegetic audio for certain key sequences (24:18–24:55).

Notable Quotes

“There came a point where we were physically moving server arrays between my desk and Rich’s desk.”
— David (39:09)

“We re-recorded everyone’s lines, everyone’s movement, every shirt swish, every footstep.”
— Harper (24:18)

Important Segment

Storage/Tech Stack Deep Dive: 33:59–39:09

4. Workflow Evolution and Team Culture

• Early Failures to System: Early travel shoots lacked clarity—coverage just “wasn’t it,” until they cracked the rhythm after a South by Southwest trip (13:36).
• The team established new habits: assigning "yiddlers" for coverage, filming meetings, and proactively seeking moments worth capturing (09:44).

Memorable Moment

• Losing a camera in Portugal and the scramble to recover it (11:19–13:00)
• “Yiddler” culture—who’s documenting what each week (09:44)

5. Structure, Storytelling & Editing

• Avoided the “run-on sentence” trap of endless vlogging by reverse-engineering punctuation and story beats (20:39).
• Editing process grew highly collaborative: up to “300 notes the week before upload” from various team members (18:16).

Notable Quote

“We were thinking, ‘What is our punctuation? Where is something going to end?’ And then we’d reverse engineer.”
— David (20:39)

Important Segment

Editing/Story Structure: 17:19–22:41

6. Soundtrack and Signature Moments

• Rufus and Harper led on the “Club Apple” sequence (music/dance montage of launching iPhone videos, 49:23–52:03).
• Sound design was a special point of pride; nearly every notable sequence had custom foley and audio remixing (24:06–24:55).
• Signature ‘in-jokes’ and easter eggs, e.g., the Snoop Dogg wine bottle recurring.

Notable Quote

“No one would know how many of the sounds in Yiddle are fake.”
— Harper (23:28)

Important Segment

Apple Event and Sound: 49:23–52:03

7. Favorite Moments and Team Reflections

• The panel shares their favorite hilarious, stressful, or poignant moments:
  • Google showing off unreleased products while the team jokes in the background (46:03)
  • The iPhone Air ghost intro (46:46)
  • Live stream technical chaos (47:07)
  • Airport close-calls with the DJI Osmo (55:46–56:59)
  • James Cameron interview—both “most profound” and “most ridiculous” part of the film (57:13–59:06)
  • Miles’ story and the theme of the creator economy’s rise (62:08–64:20)

Notable Quotes

“I almost wish we had a Year in the Life from so many of the years we’ve had here.”
— Marques (64:20)

“That’s why we’re gonna do Yiddle til we die, baby!”
— David (68:43)

8. Legacy, Lessons, and the Road to Yiddle 2

• “Yiddle 2” already in development—plans to focus more episodically on individuals (“The Bear Season 2 model”) (41:54).
• What’s changed: They now know to structure stories, manage storage, establish clear coverage, and emphasize both technical and emotional beats.
• The group expresses pride in the team’s evolution from scrappy YouTubers to a professional, collaborative studio recognized by brands, tech companies, and even in journalism circles (65:46–67:44).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “We were building the bridge as we were crossing it, which was really fun.” — Marques (01:45)
• “We shot everything, but we didn’t know what we were shooting and we had no story.” — David (06:19)
• “No one would know how many of the sounds in Yiddle are fake.” — Harper (23:28)
• “There came a point where we were physically moving server arrays between my desk and Rich’s desk.” — David (39:09)
• “I almost wish we had a Year in the Life from so many of the years we’ve had here.” — Marques (64:20)
• Team candidly sharing favorite scenes:
  • Google product leaks with team goofing (46:03)
  • Airport dash caught on Osmo (55:46–56:59)
  • James Cameron’s “filmmaker as star” quote (57:13–59:06)
  • Yiddle “Club Apple” music montage (49:23–52:03)

---

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:45 — Project origins and concept
• 06:19 — Early shoot chaos & lack of story
• 17:19–22:41 — Editing hurdles and finding the narrative
• 33:59–39:09 — Storage, data management, and technical workflow
• 49:23–52:03 — “Club Apple” music montage & scoring discussion
• 55:46–56:59 — Airport close-call, commitment to filming under pressure
• 57:13–59:06 — Dissecting the James Cameron interview and creator economy commentary
• 62:08–64:20 — Miles’ story, intersection with creator culture

---

Final Thoughts from the Team

• Pride in collaboration—the documentary was a huge group effort, with every studio member contributing.
• Recognition of how far the team has come—from solo vlogs to orchestrating vast projects, influencing not just YouTube but broader media.
• Yiddle is seen as both a landmark for the team and a time capsule for a rapidly changing media landscape.

---

Team’s Hopes: Yiddle and subsequent projects will inspire more transparency and self-documentation in YouTube and tech media, serving as benchmarks for the evolution of creator-led storytelling.

---

For Full Context: Watch "Year in the Life" on the MKBHD Studio Channel and return to this episode for a deep-dive director’s commentary and celebration of community, media, and modern creativity.

---

Transcript

[Sponsor Voice]

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate. C. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply right now.

Get up to 20% off select online storage solutions Put heavy duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid impact resistant design prevents cracking, and the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find select online shelving and tote storage up to 20% off at the Home Depot. To organize every room in your home, from your garage to your attic, visit homedepot.com how doers get more done.

[Rich]

How much can we talk about? Like, who sent us? Can we talk about that?

[David]

Why not?

[Marques]

I just.

[Rich]

I don't know.

[Marques]

Yeah, because we ended up making the video.

[Rich]

Yeah, we did. So Ferrari. Well, we got a video made for cars with miles.

[Marques]

Yo, what's up, people of the Internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast. I'm your host, Marques. And we have a different set today and a different set of people because we're doing a bonus episode. So we'll be back with your regularly scheduled programming on Friday like we always do. But let's go around the table and introduce ourselves because it's not the normal set of people.

[Rich]

Hi, I'm Rich.

[Adam]

Hi.

[David]

I am confused for Rich. I'm Eric.

[Andrew]

I'm still Andrew.

[Marques]

So we're all here to talk about our year in the Life project because it was so sick that it deserves a little bit more unpacking. We spent an entire year recording everything that was happening both in the studio and with our teams around the studio, traveling across the country making videos. And then we put it all into one. I keep saying, feature length film, whatever we want to call it, one of the biggest, most ambitious, most challenging undertakings of any of the MKBHD channels that we've ever put together. And we're really proud of it. And Eric and Rich were the sort of masterminds who made this possible, but also, like, came up with it and architected, like, how we were, I like to say, building the bridge as we were crossing it, which was really fun.

[Harper]

Yeah.

[Marques]

So I think we nearly fell off

[David]

that bridge many times.

[Harper]

Many times.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Shiny bridge.

[Marques]

Yeah. So I think you guys should take it from here. We want to know some things that you might not know watching Year in the Life that you guys know.

[David]

So I guess I'll give some context and then I'll pass it over to Rich and we can talk about what actually starting it looked like. But when Rich and I started on the studio, we asked everyone, like, oh, what do you like doing? And we got a lot of pitches of, like, I wanna go to one of Marques's Frisbee games. And we'd do a video talking about that, or, like, we should do a vlog or sort of classic YouTube stuff. And it was really hard because it's like, oh, would people click on a video about how we make the podcast? Would people click on a video about how we made one specific intro? The more specific it gets, the more I think people give them excuses to be like, ah, it's probably not for me. But working here, you kind of sit around and you realize, like, this is a really unique workplace because of the vibe and not necessarily because of any individual project. And so we were thinking about, like, how do you capture the vibe but still have a title where people would click on it? And at the end of 2024, a very difficult year, I was like, it would be kind of sick to do like A Year in the Life video about 2024. And then I pitched it and everyone was like, let's not really rehash that. Let's never do that.

[Marques]

But.

[David]

But what if we did A Year in the life for 2025? And so at the beginning of the year, we were like, we're gonna do this video and we, like, set up a camera. And then. And then it got really difficult really quickly.

[Andrew]

We had also already done, I think the first ever Day in the Life we did was one of the busiest days we've ever had. So we're like, let's do a Day in the Life so you can see what a whole team does on our busiest day. Then I think you kind of talked about it, but we were talking about, like, how the podcast is made slowly turned into A Week in the Life.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Because we realized so much of making the podcast was based around, like, how can we make this weekly thing in the confines of everything else we're doing in a week.

[David]

Exactly.

[Andrew]

And then the next logical step was clearly, skip month, go to year.

[David]

Right. Because if we did month, it would just be September. But by the time we had the idea, it was like November 2024. So I was like, well, let's just do the year one because it's gonna be hard enough to do.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the most fun parts of it was actually having us just start to capture everything. Cause that's one of the ideas for the reason we started a podcast is because we were like, we kind of have a lot of tech related conversations and they're not necessarily videos, but they are interesting. We kind of talk about the news a lot and we have takes on things. How do we just sit down and actually formalize this? And we made the podcast out of that. And I think Yiddle, as we're affectionately calling it, was a whole bunch more of that where anything interesting that's ever happening, or maybe even not interesting, just anything that's happening, let's just get it on camera just in case. Yeah. And then we just kind of went from there.

[David]

So I feel like the place to start is like, Rich, what was our tech stack coming into January? Because I want people to like leave this podcast episode being able to make their own yiddle. And as the technical visionary for this, where did we start? Like what was the first camera we had? And then we can kind of talk about how we added different tech to begin with.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Rich]

We shoot most of you probably 95% on C70, which is kind of our workhorse cameras. We have three of them in the office. There's always one on either mine or Eric's desk. And it's always ready to go. It's got a 416 on it. It's always got a card in it. It's ready to go. The problem is when we're shooting everything, it's a ton of space.

[Marques]

Yep.

[David]

January was like really difficult for, I'd say like three main reasons. We shot everything, but we didn't know what we were shooting and we had no story.

[Rich]

Yeah.

[David]

One of the first things that we shot was like a really busy day where Andrew, like I think it was

[Andrew]

Brandon, was supposed to go on a shoot with Marques for the Sam, the new Samsung. It was actually Samsung launch plus the XR headset, which is why we were going. One of our shooters got sick.

[Adam]

Sick.

[Andrew]

So now I have to meet Marques in California tonight. So tomorrow we can shoot an exclusive shot of the Google Samsung XR headset. The only problem is we had all this pod stuff scheduled for today because we need to record a bonus pod. Then we need to watch unpacked, then we need to record an episode about unpacked. And then I need to be on a plane by 5:30. Might be my longest day of the year total, but let's start it.

[David]

And so I was like, andrew, film that.

[Andrew]

And I was like, I will try a lot of meming. Like, I'm still stuck in the airport. And then later, like, I am tired. And it was pretty boring.

[David]

It was like. And, like, so. So, like, that was all of our January coverage was pretty much just that. Because, like, everything else was just us, like, walking around the studio. We realized, like, okay, we're shooting everything, but we don't have, like, a purpose. Yeah. So. And then that made the edit really hard too, because we didn't know what we were selecting for, so we were just, like, wafting through stuff.

[Adam]

I feel like anyone that's ever tried to, like, make a vlog knows what you're talking about. Like, we've all had that experience of I recorded everything for a week. This will be easy to turn it into a video. And you're sitting there like, wait, it's brutal.

[David]

So the two things that, like, helped are I asked Mariah to take a pass on the edit. I took a pass, and everyone was like, this sucks. And so then I asked Mariah, like, take a pass on the edit. And what she did is she found, like, podcast interviews and clips from across the other channels that she could sprinkle throughout. And I was like, oh, these are, like the chapter markers. Like, everything. Like, these are payoffs and all of the yiddle coverage is setups. And then once that clicked, we had, like, a little micro format. We still didn't know where the story was going or, like, when to choose what actually made it in the cut versus didn't. But we had a rhythm. And so that was kind of like step one, it's showing the creation, and then you get the payoff of, oh, that thing was made. Or if it's an external thing, like a podcast interview, like your thing with Trevor Noah. The whole point of those was to show this is a theme that we'll be setting up or a larger conversation that we could establish. And so Moriah created, like, that basis for the language. And then from there, it was just, like, stepping up to, like, how do we actually, like, make anything that we want to use? Because, yeah, like, the Andrew coverage did just didn't make the cut.

[Andrew]

I mean, I totally understand. As I'm filming, I was like, yeah, this is like, kind of a crazy me talking about that right then. Sounds interesting. I get last minute called to spend 24 hours in San Francisco, but then when you're living it, you're like, I haven't done this. Which I think also along the way, we have a whole year of not just you guys got better at capturing it, and we got better equipment and capturing it. But, like, everyone started being like, rich, we need the idle cam. Like, come over to this side of the office. It was like, a ingrained in us to be like, capture this. Capture this, capture.

[David]

It was definitely like, one of those things where, like, Harper was like, film every meeting. And then Harper would like, at the beginning of every week, be like, we have this, this, this, and this. Which of this is yiddle coverage? Who's the. Who's the yiddler? As we affectionately would refer to them as to, like, to grab each of these. So the next deleted scene that I want to talk about is in February when Rich and Miles flew first class to Portugal to the car.

[Rich]

How much can we talk about, like, who sent us? Can we talk about that? Why not?

[Marques]

I just.

[Rich]

I don't know.

[Marques]

Yeah, because we ended up making the video.

[Rich]

Yeah, we did. So Ferrari. Well, we got a video made for cars with Miles.

[Marques]

So we didn't end up.

[Andrew]

We didn't make that video.

[Rich]

Not for auto.

[David]

So we scrapped that video.

[Marques]

Right.

[David]

And that was like, I'll put a pin in that. Because that was actually important to the storytelling. I was fighting to keep this scene in Year in the Life. But, yeah, our February big thing that we cut was this trip. Do you want to describe your lovely trip, Rick?

[Rich]

Sure. Yeah. This unfortunately got deleted. So maybe at some point in the future we can show the audience. But it was three days, I believe, of me and Miles in the beautiful southwestern coast of Portugal.

[Miles]

Rich and I are in Portugal for a Ferrari thing. We had a camera, an action camera. Basically, suction cup to the front, right side of the car. So we keep going. And then we hit a bump, which is like, check on the GoPro, just to make sure, you know, it's still there. Which I'm assuming it is. He looks over and he's like, yeah, it's going. We relate to everything.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Miles]

And we lost a camera, which had a bunch of footage on it. And then we get Portuguese McDonald's, which turns out is just like American McDonald's.

[Marques]

So pretty. Pretty bad. Was it the Dodeci Cylindri?

[Rich]

It was. It was a convertible, too. We have the top down.

[Andrew]

Chill with the hand movements. There's an Italian.

[Marques]

It's an Italian. I feel like I have to sort of. Sorry.

[Rich]

It was wonderful. It was beautiful. The problem was, I think I didn't know what to capture. Yet. Because this was, like, a month into us doing Year in the Life. And so I'm like, what kind of coverage do we need? And I think that was a big problem for me. And throughout the year, that that really helped was like, oh, okay. Like, this is the kind of coverage we need. We need, like, setups, as in, like, oh, here's where we are in terms of, you know, setting.

[David]

Or this is what we're shooting. This is why we're shooting it. This is why it's challenging. Like, eventually, like, we. We could kind of figure out, like, what we wanted.

[Rich]

Yeah.

[David]

But at this point, we had two travel shoots that were both, like, cut. Yeah, the Portugal one. I'm really disappointed because we lost all that footage, Right? Well, we lost the actual footage up for the video.

[Rich]

Yes.

[David]

Like the. I guess the GoPro that you had, or like, the phone that you had that you used to shoot a bunch of the footage fell off the car, unfortunately.

[Rich]

Yeah, it was.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah.

[Rich]

So it was suction cupped. At some point during our drive, it had fallen off. And we unfortunately only had, like, an hour left before we had to get back to the hotel or else the shuttles would be leaving and we'd be stranded there. And so we, like, turned back and we. We probably searched for that camera for an hour or so. Cause it had all of our, like, you know, kind of, like, bumper shots and all this, like, great coverage. And we're like, oh, man, this is a bummer to lose that footage.

[David]

I was like, from a story perspective, this is so great. Cause it shows stakes, right? Like, I think the big issue that I had with Yida 1 that is already being solved by Yiddle 2 is in Yida 1, we just keep constantly winning all the time. It makes working here look really easily. But that's just because when stuff went really bad, we'd, like, lock in and not know we lost all the footage. So you can't show that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so two months down, month three, there's another trip to south by Southwest.

[Marques]

And.

[David]

And I was just like, rich, we are going on this trip.

[Rich]

Gotta go.

[David]

Both of us are going to shoot everything. And I think that this was the turning point for us.

[Rich]

Oh, absolutely.

[David]

Yeah. So, like, we went to south by with all the. With all the pod boys.

[Rich]

There's a great story about this. Wait, what's the hotel story, bro?

[Marques]

Oh, two, so.

[Harper]

Oh, God, I forgot about that.

[Rich]

There's so much good stuff. There's so much good stuff that did not make the cut.

[Andrew]

I see. Tell that story somewhat Know this.

[Rich]

Which hotel story are we talking about? Because there's.

[Andrew]

I just know, like, south by is really confusing. And we're figuring this out right now. Booking again. But, like, in order to get a hotel at south by, you need a badge. And VOX handles our badges. So VOX booked our hotels, but since you guys aren't hosts on the podcast, we had to get you hotel rooms. Yeah. After this episode, I can send this to vox, but, like, you had to get hotels somewhere else.

[Rich]

Yeah.

[David]

So we just found a place that Rich could book with like Hilton Points or something that was like 30 minutes outside of Austin.

[Andrew]

But it was cheap.

[David]

It was like really cheap.

[Andrew]

Under 100 bucks.

[David]

It was like 100 bucks. Rich and I were just gonna, like, share a bed.

[Adam]

Did you guys get your money's worth?

[David]

So.

[Andrew]

No, we did not. No.

[David]

I would argue we kind of did. So we show up and they're like, there's no clean water.

[Rich]

And we were like, no, no, no hot water. And it's like 11 o' clock at night. We're freezing, we're tired, we're like, I just want to shower and go to bed. And they're like, there's no hot water.

[David]

Yeah. So they were like, so we'll give you half off on the one room you have. And I look at Rich and I'm like, I think we're balling out. Keep the hundred dollars. We gave you two rooms. So Rich and I get our own full sized beds.

[Marques]

Nice.

[David]

There was also, like, no breakfast there.

[Andrew]

And it wasn't the best breakfast anymore, unfortunately.

[David]

But are you sure it was. I remember trying to run the water and I think like a brown sludge came out.

[Rich]

Oh, my room just had cold water, so.

[Andrew]

Sorry.

[Marques]

Between the two rooms, it was either

[David]

way, we go to south by, we film everything. Rich and I stink. But in a good way, because that footage was stanky too.

[Rich]

It was great.

[David]

C70 is not great in low light, but, you know, it's all good.

[Adam]

That was the shoot that you guys came back and you, like, begged the Marques for Sonys. You were like, please.

[David]

And then literally, like two. Two shoots later, we were like, never mind, never mind. We're going magnitude. We should have always trusted you.

[Marques]

It's mostly. That's the one low light shoot. I mean, other than being like in the back of a car or like on a plane or something, it's like, it's usually pretty decently lit.

[David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Harper]

But C70. Color rich. Like, the color job you did is just like, so fantastic.

[David]

Beautiful.

[Rich]

It is a great camera to work with. That's why we love Canon.

[David]

Do you guys want to on our fine cut? So no notes on story. No notes on move this. No notes on cut this. The only notes that people could leave are color, grading, and audio. Do you guys wanna guess how many notes we got?

[Harper]

Yeah.

[David]

Five days to upload.

[Harper]

By the way, whatever miscommunication we had on that was really frustrating because I told you, I said this is unmixed.

[David]

No, no, no. I know.

[Harper]

So only leave notes on missing sounds.

[David]

I know. We just send it to everybody.

[Harper]

No, but you specifically said, do not leave notes on missing sounds. Only leave mix notes.

[Adam]

Oh.

[Andrew]

Oh, that's.

[Harper]

So all of the notes we got were useless.

[David]

To be fair, the mix is still really good, Eric.

[Andrew]

Also, if you're not. We put everything in frame IO and the amount of times this was watched by people in the studio is wild. I think I watched it once a month because the thing evolved.

[Adam]

But yeah, the cut that I watched was not what even got uploaded.

[Andrew]

I've watched so many different cuts of Year in the Life. But there's a point where this. The video gets so big that even though Eric will be like, don't comment on XYZ.

[David]

You'll just forget that by minute 40.

[Andrew]

It's not even that. And also, some of them are like, this is too important of a thing. I have to leave the note because just if for some reason it doesn't, it feels like it will be more detrimental later to be. I know that kind of sounds backwards, but there's things like curses. I don't know. Sometimes there's things where I, like, I have to say, this graphic is messed up. We're like, what's. It's just like if we don't.

[Adam]

Rich's home address is showing in minute 38.

[David]

Yeah. On our second to last cut on our fourth watch through, Rich goes, oh, my God, that's the company credit card.

[Andrew]

I think this was like the day before upload. Just so you guys know, Rich.

[Marques]

Thank you.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, thank you.

[David]

We were like, oh, my God. We blurred so many things we had to do, like, such fine details on it. And that's like. But yeah, we had like 300 notes the week before upload. Yeah, like the week before. So that was like, not. That's not including the story conversations and like the weekly meetings and blah, blah, blah. But the flow that we got into after south by was like, when things really clicked because it was South By. And then I took like a trip to Peru, shout out Peruanos and Then. And Chicago, just cuz. And then while I was in Peru, Harper and Mariah ran point on interviewing every single person here. And then once we had the interview coverage and actually good travel footage, we were like, oh, we have the first 15 minutes. Like, we can figure this out. And so once. And once we sent that video on the first day of April, everyone's like, April Fools, whatever. And they watched and they're like, wait, this is actually kind of good. That's when the momentum started to build. And by like May and June, everyone was like, this video's coming out. I know that I can put my time into it. I know that I can think about it. Cause we've had other videos. Ellis and Adam are both certified in how to use a ham radio because we spent three months on the studio channel trying to get them to call the ISS and we just scrapped that video. I completely forgot about that.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

So like. So like I told like. So like, I think having that come out and Rich and I just going and shooting the coverage, I think that was the moment where everyone realized, like, oh, the video's going to come out.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

And then it was off to the races.

[Marques]

Format wise. It was really fun. Cause I think when you see the title year in the life and when you know what a vlog is, you kind of just picture just a chronological, super, super, super long day, like a long vlog in straight order. And I think some people might find that interesting in its own way. But I think the way obviously we were able to structure things and bring stories through, loop things through the whole video. And the recurring. I've watched it now with people who are seeing it for the first time because I've seen the cut so many times, noticing different things people pick up on like the Snoop Dogg wine bottle and how that keeps recurring or just like various things that sort of bring people's attention back in. All made it feel obviously produced is one thing, but like just cohesive. And it made me really proud of it. So it was exciting to do that.

[David]

Like a piece of advice if you want to do that. Like, I think so many vlogs are run on sentences. So many vlogs are this happened and then this happened, and then this happened and then this happened. And it gets really, really, really diff. It gets difficult for the editors because they don't know what to place focus on when everything is equally weighted. It's difficult for like, Ellis as he's doing, like music decisions, because you can't tell what the difference between beats are and so everything that we were doing was thinking, like, what is our punctuation? Like, where is something going to end? And then we'd reverse engineer. So, like, the summer was, oh, the punctuation ends when Marques comes back from China. And then that gives us clear setup of like, we have to film a bunch of stuff before Marques leaves. And like that. Then I also know what to cut, because if we're shooting something and it doesn't intersect with Marques is going to China soon, then it's all gone. Because we're just focused on that sentence right now. And then once that's done, it's like, oh, Marques comes back from China. And literally the day he's back, busy season begins. Okay, it's smartphone season now. There's like a main thesis for that which leads us to iPhone, which. And so, like, the key was like, we just had to figure out where the cut was going. That's what made cutting, like November and December really, really hard. Because we had already been through the hardest things we could do. And we shot tons of videos in November, December. But it was just like, you've already made your iPhone videos. Like, seeing you make a pixel video is like, that's not impressive anymore. Cause we watched you do it, right? It's not like there's any tension in. Are they going to be able to pull it off? And there's no mystery either. So, like, figuring out what we wanted to keep around was really difficult. But ultimately, like, that's where the three questions idea came from. We just like pulled everyone in for interviews right, at the end of the year to ask them, what are your three questions to describe 2025? And then Rufus did a full score piece. And then we kind of knew, like, okay, three questions for 2025, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then that'll ring with the three questions that describe 2026.

[Marques]

Yeah, that's.

[David]

That's the ending. And it all led three there.

[Andrew]

Three words.

[David]

Oh, three words. Three words. English.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Harper]

I love you.

[Andrew]

Sixers are up, Joel. And still cheers.

[Harper]

We've won five games in a row,

[Marques]

baby, at a 40 piece.

[Adam]

Wait, can I just say something that Ellis was very proud of that people may or may not have noticed?

[David]

Yeah.

[Adam]

The moment in Yiddle when Philadelphia comes on the screen, he put, like, Ellis.

[David]

Do you want to describe it?

[Harper]

Wait, every location has its own signature sound, except for one. I don't remember which.

[David]

New Jersey?

[Harper]

No, New Jersey had one. New Jersey had an arcade machine. A kung fu slap from an arcade machine. The Philadelphia one. Was an eagle screeching and the sound of a car window being shattered.

[Rich]

Oh, wow, nice.

[Harper]

That's not the thing that I'm most proud of. I probably. You know, it's not right to talk about this without Rufus here, because he was the one that really, like, did a lot of this labor on it. But something that Rufus and I are both really proud of in Yiddle is like, no one would know how many of the sounds in Yiddle are fake. Like the entire intro sequence. There's not a. Other than Marques's voice, there's not a single sound that was recorded every sing. Even, like the montage.

[Marques]

Of course, it's not just tech reviews, it's also car reviews. So it's not just phones and it's not just cars. We also do a podcast in here.

[Harper]

Every single clip in the montage was silent. And we re recorded everyone's lines, everyone's movement, every shirt swish, every footstep.

[David]

Rufus was walking around with a microphone and he'd be like, hey, jump. Or he'd say, like, say congratulations. Or he'd say like, I hope this works. And he'd just like run up to people and tell, like, give people lines and then pulled me into robot room

[Adam]

and was like, say something funny. Go.

[Harper]

We just spent a lot of time, like going around the office and recording the sound of every room because it was a lot easier for us to just mute a lot of the clips he gave us and then recreate our own rooms than working like the CC footage.

[David]

Yeah. Yo, Harvey, Zoey. Group selfie.

[Rich]

Ooh, nice.

[David]

New iPhone 17.

[Adam]

Drew ski.

[David]

Let's do a triangle formation. I'm in front with a center stage front camera. Everyone fits in the shot T guide AT T Mobile. But switching takes forever.

[Rich]

Not anymore.

[Marques]

Now you can switch to T mobile

[David]

in just 15 minutes. Focus, people. Nail your pose and you get a

[Marques]

new iPhone 17 on them.

[Rich]

No way.

[Adam]

Yes way.

[Rich]

No way.

[David]

Yes way. Guys, switch to T mobile and get iPhone 17 on us.

[Sponsor Voice]

And right now we'll pay off your

[David]

old phone up to 800 bucks. I'm grabbing my phone and switching to T Mobile right now. Get back, Harvey. We're taking a. Ah, let's go again, y'.

[Marques]

All.

[Sponsor Voice]

With 24 monthly bill credits, finance agreement, 256 gigabytes. $830 eligible. Trade in example iPhone 13 and new qualifying line. $60 plus per month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees for well qualified customers, plus tax and $35 device connection charge, credit tend and balance due. If you pay off earlier. Cancel contact us 800 via virtual prepaid card card typically take 15 days after rebate submission. No cash access and Card expires in 6 months. Check out in 15 minutes per line. Visit t mobile.com My day kicks off

[David]

with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym, pre K pickup

[Miles]

back home to meal prep.

[David]

Time for my fire station shift.

[Miles]

One more Celsius. Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits. I'm ready.

[David]

Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate [e-mail].

[Sponsor Voice]

So everyone knows our politics are divided. There's left versus right and dividing lines on age, gender or race. But maybe our biggest divide in our politics isn't about identity at all. It's insiders versus outsiders. At least that's what Congressman Ro Conner would say.

[David]

The real issue is two tiers of justice in America.

[Harper]

The real issue is people with power and wealth using it to be above the law and escape even investigation or prosecution.

[Sponsor Voice]

And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months as issues like the Epstein files and artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against everybody else. California Congressman Ro Khanna takes on the Epstein class today, explained in your feed every weekday and now on Saturdays, too.

[David]

Okay, this gets into one of the themes of the piece that I think is very interesting because I think that there's a lot. I think there's a great deal of humor in the fact that from within, like, literally the first 15 minutes to the end, we keep being like, YouTube's the best. I don't wanna do movies. YouTube is great. We don't need Hollywood. And then we're like, we're going to fully mix the entire thing with Foley sound. And it's gonna be 90 minutes and you should probably watch it on your TV. And we're gonna do a little director's commentary episode. Like, do you guys. How do we reconcile the dissonance?

[Marques]

I can. I think that a lot of times, and I've talked to. I remember having this question, I think it was in the Will Smith interview of, like, what's the cause? He was doing YouTube videos and obviously Hollywood movies. And what's the biggest difference between the two? It's my Will Smith impression.

[Rich]

Yeah.

[Marques]

And a lot of it, A lot of it comes down to when working on Hollywood movies, you have an idea in your head and you have a goal for a thing you want to create, and you spend a whole lot of time on it. All of this is the same for Us. And then you finish working on it and it doesn't come out for three more years while it's being worked on. And that gap is the frustrating part. And I think for us, we have the same thing. We have this process. We have a vision of what we want to create. We work really hard on it. We put a lot of effort into making it as good as possible, and then it's out.

[David]

Yeah, we picture Locked Year in the Life, January 7, 2026. So we essentially fully edited the entire thing over Christmas break. Took one week to do notes, pickups, finalize the last five minutes, shoot the first five minutes. Because the first version of the first five minutes was me shot on iPhone, reading the lines, just trying to vibe it out.

[Marques]

Yeah. Spoiler. It wasn't actually September.

[David]

Yeah, that's okay.

[Marques]

You got the idea.

[David]

And then.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[David]

And then we essentially finished it. And then Rufus and Ellis had three weeks to sprint out the entire audio. You had two weeks. It's crazy to sprint out the entire audio.

[Andrew]

Two weeks is sprinting. Cause in our world, two weeks is four or five videos. But like, the amount was insane. But I think also, like you're saying, why did we take so much of all this? I would like to hear your guys thoughts. Because, listen, I watched a bunch of cuts of these. When I'm looking at you guys in the room here. I did nothing for this video. I was a person in it. The amount of work you all put in, I can't even put into words.

[Adam]

I did everything.

[Andrew]

Shut up, Adam. But like, part of this is like, this is the first time we did it. The amount of variables that happen over a year, the amount of pieces of equipment that we recorded on, the amount of hard drives and computers and files that we were in the ether. Like, at a certain point, I'm assuming Ellis, you guys realized, like, yeah, we have to do all of this stuff because it's just. There's so much going on. It's like winds up becoming one of the. I don't say easier things to do, but like, in order for it to work, the audio, like, in order to make a full. It's feature length, it's documentary style, like to get the vibe going. And a million. Like you. You don't always get perfect audio off of the DJI OSMO that David forgets to turn on, like in the car

[David]

or like, yeah, my phone. Stuff like that is mind blowing. Because, yeah, like, the initial cut is like, David forgot to turn on the DJI OSMO and you could hear music in the Background and the sound of the road going by. And you two perfectly fixed up the audio so you could always find. It's just insane.

[Harper]

Credit where it's due. The dialogue was really a Rufus championship run. That was. So I guess technically it did spend three weeks in Audio post because the first week was just Rufus doing dialogue for that sequence.

[David]

We actually locked September 1st. Yeah, we turned around September and got it locked by the top of December because we knew something would go wrong. So, like, we were just like, let's just find 20 minutes to figure out what would go wrong.

[Harper]

Rufus and I had a lot of conversations in December about how we wanted Yiddle to sound like what it was actually supposed to sound like. And it became pretty clear after, like, two or three of those conversations the workflow we needed to do, which is, like, not the MKBHD workflow, but very much the, like, Cinema Hollywood audio post workflow. My God, I'm getting tired, like, thinking about this project.

[Rich]

You're still recovering.

[David]

Yeah.

[Harper]

But I don't know. We definitely did a bunch of really funky stuff. Ruis and I had this really funny conversation on Mix day, the morning of Mix day, where he was telling me about this video he had just watched of these remixers doing TV shows, like reality TV in la, where they'll have two mixers on three computers going through the same set of speakers so they can hear what the other person is doing. And we were like, how on earth do they. Like, how do you mix anything hearing someone else's work at the same time? And after mixing Yiddle for, like, three hours, we were like, we need to do this. And we immediately plugged his computer into the same set of speakers. And it, like, made everything so much easier.

[Andrew]

I can't even fathom. It's a Chinese Bible and Mozart.

[Harper]

We had two computers with identical Pro Tools sessions up that were timeline synced with them both going through the same computer. So we were able to make adjustments on both of our machines that we'd sync up at the end. And if we got somewhere where a sound effect was missing or a piece of music was missing, I could keep going forward and mixing while Rufus auditioned sounds. Then we would be in agreement, like, that's the right sound effect. He would blip it to me and I would drop it in on the main session.

[David]

Blip is like fancy airdrop.

[Marques]

Blip is not even. It's.

[Harper]

Blip is light.

[Marques]

It's just better Airdrop.

[Harper]

Yeah. If you're not. If you're not blipping, you ain't living That's.

[Marques]

I gotta say, we use Airdrop a lot around the studio to, like, pass around files. Whether it's a PDF or a thumbnail or entire, like, B roll section or footage. I don't trust Airdrop to work more than 60% of the time, especially as files get past half a gig. Yeah, half a gig.

[Andrew]

That's fair.

[Marques]

That's it. Blip. I remember being in the basement of Newark Airport, you know, that underground gate at the very back of terminal C and getting a blip from Harper at the studio of like, a 350megabyte short. And it was just like, downloading done.

[Andrew]

I was like, wow.

[Rich]

Okay.

[Marques]

Blip is amazing. I love Blip. Shout out to Blip. It brings me to one of my big questions, actually. Okay. How much storage do we think we can estimate we actually shot to for the entire year of all the things we captured?

[Harper]

I have that number.

[Marques]

You do?

[Harper]

With me at this moment in my slack.

[Marques]

How do we.

[Harper]

I mean, I don't think it's exact, but it's. It's the size of the product, of the final cut

[Marques]

library.

[David]

Do we want to do price?

[Harper]

Whatever the highest tier.

[David]

Do we want to do prices?

[Rich]

Right.

[Harper]

Rules.

[Rich]

So, like, everything, all the graphics, all the exports, like, all the B roll.

[David]

Final cut. Final cut. Everything.

[Rich]

All.

[Marques]

Everything.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Everything that made it. No, everything.

[Marques]

We shot everything. We shot all source material.

[David]

Honestly, I have no idea.

[Rich]

I should be aware because I know this answer.

[David]

I have no idea.

[Andrew]

I assumed you. I'm probably the only one that knows

[Rich]

the answer besides Ellis. Yeah.

[David]

So Rich did all of the data management, which was, like, such a feat.

[Rich]

I had to ask Marques for a new drive.

[Marques]

Oh, that does give you some cont.

[Andrew]

No, there. There were times where I would be like, oh, Rich, did we have something from this? And he would have to, like, unplug one drive to the amount of just random bays of storage. Next to Rich is for this.

[David]

Okay, wait, I have. I have, like, a crazy Rich pull story. So when we're in, like, November or December, we're sending cuts for people for, like, final, final notes. Tim leaves a really good note where he's like, we've shown, like, struggles with the merch, and then all of a sudden, the merch is ready for the merch shoot in this cut. Like, we need a version of the cut where we see, like, a triumphant moment with the merch before they go into shooting all of, like, the photos.

[Rich]

Yeah.

[David]

And I was like, that's so true. And I was like, rich, do we have the coverage and so Rich goes and he takes every single merch meeting that we have. Cause we have them all labeled, puts them into a timeline. It's a three and a half hour long timeline. And this is before Final Cut had transcripts. So he just goes through and he listens to the whole timeline on 2x SP and he finds a 15 second clip of them saying, this looks really good.

[Andrew]

Oh, it was like Brandon on Zoom, right?

[Rich]

Yeah, yeah.

[David]

Oh, and the audio was messed up at that time for a month and a half out of the year, right before Rufus joined. We got lucky on this actually. We hadn't checked the footage we were just filming. And there was something wrong with the XLR cable that plugged the microphone into the camera. And so for a month and a half we had pretty much no workable audio and we just had to figure out how to edit around it. And then like between audio team and like, just like creative editing most I haven't seen a single comment. But yeah, brutal.

[Harper]

All right, are you all going to make your guess?

[Andrew]

Rich is going to have photographic memory of 2025

[Harper]

while you guys guess. I just want to say one more thing about audio because not that interesting is we did a fader mix on this. So we watched through with faders and just, just did it all live. It was really, really fun.

[Andrew]

Can I say something since you make it sound like we're not talking about audio anymore. Even though I'm sure we will talk about audio later. When we were watching there's a moment where Rich is hiding from Miles in the dark and you do the like reverb this. This.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Claire just goes, that was awesome song. And I was like. I was like if Ellis saw. If like Ellis or Rufus saw. Claire, who's like, just watches our stuff every once in a while, is not an audio movie nerd at all. Like understand how triumphant a like audio clip was in that. I was like, they would be so

[David]

you know what's funny? Rufus did that as a joke.

[Andrew]

Oh really?

[David]

He threw it in the slack and then we watched a cut and. And it didn't make it into the cut. And I was like, bro, that has

[Marques]

to get added back.

[Andrew]

That's really funny. Yeah, she loved. She thought it was so funny. Like it added to that scene.

[Marques]

It was really good. Yeah.

[David]

Rufus, Mariah and Harper are like definitely the three people who are not in this room who deserve so many flowers.

[Andrew]

Yes.

[Rich]

Yeah.

[David]

Like those were definitely the three people that helped really accelerate it from like the Rich and Eric Manic Power Hour into like this is a part of the company culture, and we're all, like, really deeply into it. All right, let's do numbers.

[Andrew]

I saw Eric's number, and mine's so, so much different.

[Rich]

No, no, no, Andrew. Oh, Marques is pretty close. Okay.

[David]

I figure a terabyte a week.

[Harper]

What did you put, Marques?

[Marques]

I have written 28 terabytes.

[Harper]

Okay. And Eric, you have.

[David]

I have a terabyte a week, so 52 terabytes.

[Andrew]

And then I put 8.1.

[Harper]

The correct answer, the whole project is 37.57 terabytes.

[David]

Damn.

[Marques]

Cause I think my context for that was, Rich, you were like, all right, I think I asked you how much storage do we need to make sure we have to make yeetl2. You don't have to think about not having enough storage. And I think the tiers were 32, 64, 96. And you were like, yeah, as long as we have over 50, we're good. And I was like, all right. Okay.

[Sponsor Voice]

Okay.

[Andrew]

And this is where that price is everywhere. Exponential after.

[Marques]

Yeah, the price goes up. But, yeah, I was like, okay, that is a lot.

[David]

It's gonna help. So, like, you know, Rich, you can talk about this more. But, like, a big lesson that we had was there came a point where we were physically moving server arrays between my desk and Rich's desk. We were back and forth. We could share a cable, but then Mariah would be doing a cut, and we'd. So then we'd have to pass a separate server to Mariah so that Rich and I could work on it while Mariah, like, cuts up something. And then eventually Rufus had to work on something. And so he'd have to pick up the server, take it to his desk, plug it in, plug it into his computer. And then he would have to go and proxy all the footage. So he'd take all the footage that made it into the cut and then re render it in, like a 720p or 1080proxies. And then he could edit locally on his computer. And so eventually, when we don't have to do that, days will be saved.

[Marques]

Yeah, that is the plan. I mean, we want to have this be as now that we've done our first ever version of it. There are so many things that we've learned about the production, about what we do shoot and what we might already know we don't have to shoot and then how we put this together. Also, storylines and arcs are gonna be different too. The first one's always the first one. You're introducing characters we're introducing the flow of the year and how things normally go in the second one. You can correct me if I'm wrong. You can kind of assume that people are familiar with the characters now, that people understand the arc of the season now. And maybe there are more interesting, different dynamics for part two.

[Rich]

We will see.

[David]

That just made it into the cut.

[Marques]

I don't want to.

[David]

That just made it into the cut

[Marques]

of year in the life.

[David]

That just made it into the cut. Yeah. No, I mean, we've already started doing our interviews for 2026 and the interview question that we've asked everyone we've pulled in so far is what is the greatest sequel of all time in your opinion? We've gotten some, some, some good takes there. My personal favorite take is. Is Shrek 2. But I'm like, my. Yeah, my vision for 2026 is I want to treat it like the Bear season two, where the Bear season one is about the action and the plot of running the day to day life in this restaurant. And the Bear season two is much more about the people behind the. The restaurant where you focus a lot on individuals going through their own kind of lives and you get to live with people a little bit more instead of just the ensemble as a whole. So, yeah, we're definitely thinking through what the structure is going to look like and the answer is probably going to steal a lot from 20 minute episodic television more than anything.

[Adam]

Yeah, I'm excited to be commercials.

[David]

If you or someone that you know would like to sponsor, you're in the life too. Please reach out to Jono. He'll probably tell you, no, thank God we didn't have an ad read.

[Marques]

We.

[David]

We. We had a sponsor who's interested and then like through like, you know, back and forth or whatever, it's like, okay, this just isn't gonna work. Oh my. Could you imagine halfway through just being like, thank you to Bombas?

[Marques]

I think that's probably ideal. I don't know why, but I feel like. Well, I guess I do know why. There are certain videos that feel like they have to be just in a flow state. Yeah. And some things kind of interrupt that flow state. And yittle is one of those things where you want to stay in it.

[David]

This is the only video I've ever seen where their attention goes up over time.

[Marques]

Yeah. Maybe one or two videos on MKBHD in the last year that do that. Where the graph is actually increasing and way above the normal line. And that's really satisfying.

[David]

I'm saying every day the average number of people who finish the video goes up. That's by like thousands.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

I do remember seeing. Because we did this as a collab on YouTube, a lot of people, you know, we have to be very careful about using these tools. But we launched it as a collab. No regrets about that. So we can see the analytics. And it's like if you sort comments by newest, you can kind of get a sense of the like, flow of, you know, there was the day one viewers, obviously people who were watching right away.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[David]

They're like, hell yeah, cool.

[Marques]

We're very excited. Super, you know, jazzed about it. Great. Then you get the day two, day three viewers. Now we're at like the one week later, someone who like saved it and bookmarked it and was gonna watch it and forgot about it and came back and like much more casual viewer. And those comments are starting to flow in and I'm reading those and it's. All of them are uniquely interesting and positive. Whether it's like, here's a timestamp of something I really enjoyed. I thought it was hilarious. Or here's six paragraphs of. I never comment on the videos, but I had to comment on this one. Here's a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of really fun stuff there.

[Andrew]

Comments on this are fun because one, they just keep coming in like normally, 24 hours later, comments die pretty hard. These are still flowing. But because the video is so long, it's so hard for someone to comment about a very specific spot. And I think also because it's so long, so many more people are watching it on tv. So generally they're more comments of the vibe of the whole thing. One, they're the most positive comments I've ever seen. Two, everyone loves Ellis. It's just. It's so annoying. It's just like so annoying. The best. But then I do really love when there is find if there's a time stamp and I watch them. Like this person liked this part enough to pause this like hour and 30 long minutes video to specifically point to a very specific part. And like finding those have been really fun.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And then I feel like I go back and then relive that scene because it still is our life.

[David]

The most insane and crazy and weird thing about this is somebody decided to add Year in the Life to letterboxd, which is. That's like, that's where you can log the movies you watch and review them.

[Marques]

I'm curious since it now is like a 90 minute video and we all have our favorite Parts. What is everyone's favorite? It can be a quote or a moment.

[Andrew]

Nintendo, my pants.

[Marques]

Okay, that was my favorite too. All right, that's the answer. Everyone's second favorite quote from. Or a moment from the Year in the Life.

[Adam]

Mine is Eric's, where he's like, talking about you playing golf. And he was like, marques doesn't feel it like an artist. He feels it like an athlete. And I remember watching that because I had seen multiple cuts and none of my cuts had that line in it. And when I heard that line, I

[David]

was like, it clicked.

[Marques]

That's.

[David]

Yeah, that's how it happens. I got a couple notes that are like, ah, the golf thing just isn't working. Like, the audience doesn't care about golf. And I'm like, no, no, no. Like, there's a bigger story. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, we have to figure out a way to, like, communicate why this beat matters. We got comments too that were like, we gotta cut the Snoop Dogg bottle of wine. Cause we only had two clips of it. Rule of threes. You need a setup, a reminder, and a payoff. And so we had to do a setup with the. With like the Slack graphic later. And so, yeah, there were a couple beats there. I have. I have one, but I want. I want Rich to go first.

[Rich]

I have two, and they're both Andrew related. Okay. The first one is when Google came to our offices in.

[Andrew]

I don't think people understand that part of the clip, but. Yeah, can you explain it?

[Rich]

So I remember I was right by Alex's desk and then everyone was, as in Andrew, Marques, David, and all the Google people were, you know, at our lunch table. And I'm like, alex, go. Go ahead and pull up like the Verge article on like, the pixel or whatever.

[Marques]

Right?

[David]

Yeah, the leak.

[Rich]

Pixel leaks, yes. And then I shoot that and then I just pan over and Andrew just deadpans the camera, and he's just like,

[Andrew]

that was so funny. They're showing us the phone. So everyone online only knows the leaks. And I see you guys across the room doing exactly. And I immediately catch it. And I just stare. And you turn the camera at me and all the Google people are talking. And right through them, I'm just pointing at you guys. Like, I only.

[Marques]

Yeah, I saw that on second watch. I thought that was amazing.

[Rich]

My other one is when we were doing the iPhone air intro, and then it's you on the small hd and you're doing like this because you're a ghost. Because we had. We had to do kind of A. An opacity thing so that we could see the iPhone air. It's a very small moment. I think you have to be really paying attention to see that. But it's a fun little kind of Easter egg.

[Andrew]

I think my. One of my favorite parts was our first live stream, which is kind of this really funny thing of us not expecting what's going on. And then some technical difficulties, which it doesn't capture in there. But, like, Rufus finds the one problem that we had and kind of saves everything. But, like, the two moments of that is everyone guessing how many people and guessing really far down. But when Ellis gets asked, he's just like. I don't know.

[Harper]

Just, like, very, like, you can just

[Andrew]

tell he's cooked at that moment. We've already just, like.

[David]

It's so funny.

[Andrew]

We're already exhausted. It hasn't even started. I haven't even shot yet what's gonna happen.

[Adam]

Ellis knew that that was, like, for Yiddo. So he, like, starts the clip, like, very, like, serious, like, oh, I'm gonna give an answer. And you can just see him break in that scene.

[Andrew]

I see the breakup.

[Marques]

You can see his soul leave his body.

[Andrew]

And then right after. It's just so funny, the clip and the really awesome graphics around it of, like, we're, like, we're live. No, we're not live. And we're all. We are live, and we just don't know it. And then it's like, no, no, we're live, but they can't see us. And it's just Marquez on the live stream. And I'm like, I think they can see us. I'm on the thing right now. So I thought that was.

[Marques]

I remember that happening, too. Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax. And let go of whatever you're carrying today.

[Sponsor Voice]

Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.

[Marques]

And breathe.

[Sponsor Voice]

Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.

[David]

Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. To realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.

[Harper]

My favorite moment was not a moment, but a sequence that takes place from about 55 minutes till about 1 hour, 12 minutes. That internally we called Club Apple because

[David]

oh my God, like we haven't even talked about the Apple event yet.

[Harper]

Yeah. So like, I don't know if you guys notice on your watch through, but all the music between flying to Apple and finishing the iPhone air intro is all dance music. Exactly. And we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how do we make this sequence that actually takes place over the course of almost two weeks in real life feel like one continuous onslaught of work. And it started off as me putting the track in the actual Apple event thing, the sort of UK style bass garage stuff and being like, hey Rufus, look how funny this is. It's Apple park, but it's club music. And he was like, wait a second, this really works.

[Andrew]

Cook.

[Harper]

Yeah, I just thought that was so much fun to put together. And it's so much fun to watch the relentless club music. There's a few cuts where the music cuts out for Tim and then we go right back to Marques.

[Andrew]

And it's like

[David]

the comp that I was using as I was cutting that sequence is the Pit, the TV show the Pit. It's about an er and an entire season takes place over the course of a 12 hour shift in an ER. So every episode is one hour in real time. And so you're switching from one patient to the other patient to the other patient to the other patient. And it's one of those things where like, you know, every time that you think it will relent, like every time someone goes to take a break, they're just like, nope, someone's about to die. And then they like run back. And I was watching the Pit and I was like, it's like us, but we're dumb. It's like us, but we're silly. And so. And I feel like the club music perfectly encapsulated that. I grew up with an uncle in the music industry. He's a composer for film and tv. The whole reason that I'm here and I do this is because I got to see Uncle Carlos doing his work every day. And as somebody who would sit and watch him score for hours and hours and hours, it was so familiar and satisfying and fun to see Alison Rufus Cook on music and make that a part of like a core part of the story. The fact that Year in the Life has a theme, like a little, like a little theme song from like beginning, middle and end is just like such a cool joy. I'm so proud of the music on this. I definitely want to do A limited release merch drop where we sell a cd. Ooh, with the music.

[Harper]

Are we gonna do the cargo room? I'm the only person in here that owns a CD player.

[Marques]

It's a vinyl. Vinyl. It's got to be vinyl, then.

[David]

Oh, vinyl or cassette?

[Harper]

I'm the only one.

[Andrew]

Cassette.

[Harper]

Cassette player. Atlas.

[David]

Just buy the whole limited drop. I know how much you make.

[Harper]

Yeah, but we should. Are we going to make the cargo room shirt? Because that was. That was like, half the comments.

[Marques]

It was a pretty spiked moment in the video. It was people, really.

[Andrew]

David.

[Marques]

That one. Yeah.

[David]

I think I was surprised it didn't make the cut on the initial.

[Andrew]

If anyone, really quick. TLDR is like, we wanted to make, like, the core shirts for each one, and that didn't feel like the core. Core of it. There are. Every shirt they showed us was a banger. We could have released every single one. It just would have been too many and a lot of work to do that.

[Rich]

But that merch meeting was like an hour long.

[Andrew]

That's a really long merch meeting. And that was one of many.

[David]

Three minutes of selects. Maybe that's how we edit.

[Marques]

I would say very good. Representative selects of, like, the beats and the arc of the meeting. It was like very.

[Rich]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Very well done.

[David]

We figured that one out.

[Andrew]

Can I throw? I don't want to just do a million things of what my favorite was. But there's one other thing I don't think anyone recognized, which was during Apple event. There is the point where Marquez and David are at the event. So Ellis, Adam, and I are in a room watching all of it, and Eric comes in with the camera, and it looks like we're talking about something super important. But if you really, really listen, it's Ellis and I talking about how the opening to Higher by Creed sounds just like Sugar were going down by Panic at the disco. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

[Rich]

Follow up points.

[Marques]

Wow.

[Harper]

I'm gonna get quick as well as a Paramore song.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

It's like us arguing about. So if you really listen to that, because Adam's just like, hey. At the camera, and Alice and I are, like, almost shouting at each other.

[Harper]

It sounds so much more like Creed.

[Marques]

I feel like that's come up before.

[Andrew]

I have not seen. We've talked about it.

[Marques]

We talked about it, but I didn't

[Andrew]

see a single comment about that. Probably because it's too specific. But there's so many little parts where if you lived it, you're like, people aren't gonna understand that. Or like, it's too Short of a clip of it.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Harper]

Also then immediately after, Adam going, welcome, welcome to Apple or whatever. That Tim good morning is fake. And I just got lucky that he says good morning the exact same way

[Marques]

every single time he hit us with a triple good morning this year. Oh, yeah.

[Andrew]

Has anyone not said their favorite part? You.

[Marques]

I have a favorite. Adam, have you given one My favorite part or any, Any. Any stick stand out lines?

[Adam]

I think my favorite part, like rewatching it back and like, as a viewer, because I specifically made. I intentionally, for the last like two weeks of you guys editing, like, did not look at it. I was like, I'm making it a point to not even look, to leave notes. I'm not even like the way to do it. Nothing. I just want.

[David]

I'm actually gonna do it. You were at the end, so yeah,

[Marques]

you should do that.

[Adam]

Highly recommend it.

[David]

I'm not. I'm just going to edit it with my eyes closed. But the day before.

[Adam]

No, when you guys were uploading that day, Alex and I were doing one final watch through.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Adam]

And just making sure that like nothing, like no, like no company credit cards were out or something like that. So we were watching it at his desk and there was a point where Rufus is explaining how he scored the iPhone intro. And holy crap. The before and after on that, like, it gave me chills. I was like, that was beautiful.

[Andrew]

The sound stuff was really cool. I think the sound files next to the OnePlus 13S intro. Seeing that, I think people know our intros are crazy. I think seeing that extra level in the tracks was like a. I think it clicked for people.

[Harper]

It was only like 2/3 of the tracks too. The rest of them didn't even stay in the screen.

[David]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

I do have a favorite moment I've watched with people. I remember it's when Eric and Ellis were trying to get through the airport at the last. At the last boarding was closing in like eight minutes and they were just getting through security and the bag was getting checked. And at that moment I was like 99.9% of people put the camera down and just like, we have to make this flight. But not Eric and not Ellis.

[David]

Dude. First of all, the DJI Osmo is so much fun to shoot with. And second, the entire time I was just like, yes, content. This is going to be to cook in the intro. I was like, the second we were off the escalator, I was already yelling like, move, move, move. Like you can see like me like picking up pace, but I'm like, I'm yelling as much as I can because I knew. I was like, this is gonna be selects. Yes. I was watching it on the tiny DJI Osmo screen on the airplane. I watched it like three times and

[Marques]

I was just like, in my head. There was never any shot that you guys are going to miss the flight, but there was like, we got to get the bag on the flight. Please have room for the bag. And we got the bag.

[Andrew]

What did you say exactly? There's something Ellis says in line.

[David]

He goes, david, take this.

[Andrew]

Because before that it was like.

[Harper]

So we've never gotten this close to

[Andrew]

missing a flight, but it seems pretty possible.

[Rich]

And it's.

[Andrew]

It's perfect.

[Harper]

Can we talk a little bit about the James Cameron interview? Because that was something. Yeah, dude, that was something that in the post production audio room we had like 50 million conversations about. Because actually the James Cameron interview we talked about it is like the most profound part of the movie and also the silliest part of the movie. And Marques, I don't mean to throw you under the bus, I haven't seen it. But Marques, you don't watch a lot of movies.

[Marques]

I haven't seen it.

[David]

Right.

[Harper]

We've been short on this, Marques.

[David]

There's 13 James Cameron movies.

[Harper]

And so there's something really funny about what we were talking about in the room is that James Cameron says this thing to you, Marques, where he talks about the cinematographer, the filmer becoming the star, and their perspectives becoming the narrative, which we thought was a hilarious thing for James Cameron to say to you because that's your whole thing. Your perspectives on tech are the narratives. You are the filmmaker, you are the star. He clearly had no idea who you are or what you do.

[Marques]

It was really interesting.

[Harper]

Meanwhile you're sitting there having never seen a single one of his movies, not knowing anything that he does. And somehow you both arrive at the. This like ultra philosophical, poetic thing about the future of media and the convergence of Cinema and YouTube. And like, we were like, how, how on earth do we communicate how profound and stupid this conversation is? And meanwhile sitting there in some like, outfit, he obviously didn't pick himself. Yeah, yeah, totally. Like think people are going to buy metaglasses. It's just that whole scene is like, that's too funny.

[Marques]

You couldn't. Yeah, I remember in the moment thinking. So I had two, like, visuals of that conversation. One was in the moment, I was like, I'm asking James Cameron, like someone who's clearly super visionary about what he thinks about the future of filmmaking and Hearing his answer, I was first expecting something like that I'd probably never heard before. And then I'm hearing him describe something that almost like, resembles new world, like media, like creators being part of their creations. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I guess he's probably saying that because it's me. And then after, I'm like, thinking back about what he said, and I'm like, that actually felt like a very organic new thought for him, which is good because it organically arrived at the thing that I would have described as a future. Also the thing we were making, which is the thing that we're already doing. So I thought that was actually interestingly profound. And it worked out to be Cameron

[David]

is somewhere in his submarine watching this. He's just smiling. He's just like, ooh, Marques, do you want to come on my submarine?

[Harper]

We had like 50 million different pieces of music under that before we finally decided on the sort of Philip Glass minimalist classical music.

[Marques]

That was a good one too.

[David]

All right, I want to share my favorite beat because I thought it was also quite profound, even though it's not actually profound, but I found it profound. So the whole reason I'm here right now is because Miles Somerville decided to make a lot of really good YouTube videos while we were living in Chicago. And I knew how to use a gimbal, and we were friends, so I'd hold the gimbals while he made the videos. And then Marques recruited Miles. And then Miles was like, you should talk to Eric. And then I went into a zoom with Marques, and I was like, hey, you're in the life, mate.

[Marques]

Now it's like this access.

[David]

Anyways, so Miles is the whole reason I'm here. And he came up with me and a group of six other kids. I tomorrow fly to Mexico City to go hang out with these six guys. We were all groomsmen in one of our weddings. We're very, very close friends. We all still work in the creator economy or tech. We were nerds when we were 14 making YouTube videos, and we're still nerds now. And so it was really important to me to try to find a way to tell Miles story and how many ways it intersects with here. Because Miles only found me because I made a YouTube video when I was 13 called MKBHD as Spider Man. And then Miles, for literal decades, would hear MKBHD in his comments because people would compare them. And then as he came here, we made a video. I sat down and I interviewed Miles, and I'll Give you guys this clip. I sat down and interviewed Miles the hour before he came, and he started here. And the clip opens with him being like, everyone wanted to compare me to

[Miles]

Marques, but I guess by technicality I am mkbhd.

[David]

And so there's all these sort of bizarre things. And so it was really interesting to sit down with Miles and get to have a conversation with him where so much of his brand curation and thinking about how to position himself and thinking about where the cars comes from comes from. Like, I can lean into a sense of humor that is inherently not Marques ish. And I think that there's almost this. There's this joy and this tragedy in how much of his Internet identity has been informed by this place. And so I think one of the open threads that we opened at the end was this conversation with Miles where he talks about his relationship to journalism and how he doesn't consider himself a traditional journalist. And even though YouTube has opened all these doors and gotten him at the table because of the sense of humor that differentiates him in the digital world, it also bars him from this traditional class, this. This sort of elite class, whatever you might want to call it. And I think at the end of the day, the thing that I'm most proud of with this piece is that hopefully in 10, 15 years, when the creator economy just is the economy, when new media is just the standard for media, we can look back at this time where we were still the upstarts, but very clearly positioned to become the next elite, the next big ones, and we can see the conflicts and the back and forth and have a really crystal clear understanding for what was going through the minds of the people who were living through that changing of the guard. We are at the biggest transition point in the history of media, and it causes a lot of issues for a lot of people. And I hope that this piece can help start to outline the templates for what being the responsible, upstanding and better form of new media can be in the next five or ten years. I hope that what we do will be remembered as quite important because it's certainly important to people like me and Miles.

[Marques]

Yeah, I think there's been a lot of. I almost wish we had a year in the life of so many of the years that we've had here.

[Andrew]

2017 would just be like you and me sitting there like I used to. 2017. I used to not leave until you were done. Which meant the last four hours of most of my days was just watching you edit. So, like, things have changed a lot. But yeah, they might have been a little more boring back then.

[Marques]

Yeah. But I do, I do have memories of like, if you. All the way back to 2017, like being the only YouTuber at the tech event, like I have a lot of those memories. And then being one of three YouTubers at the Tech event and then being like, oh, oh, you're first tech. Oh, and then there was seven of us and then there was 12 and then it was half and then suddenly, you know, they are setting up camera, like lights and like stuff for it to be like, suitable for videos and suddenly they're thinking a lot more about it. And it's become really, really interesting to follow all of that over the years to get to the point where we are now where it feels like, you know, we have, we have like electric cars and we have gas cars and we have hybrids. If you want to make the car analogy, we're kind of like hybrids now and we're like getting to this next stage where EVs are everywhere and it's clearly still in the future, but we're clearly moving in a direction and it's cool to be able to now have this landmark, this snapshot of time where we can see where we're at and Yiddle. 2040 is going to be crazy compared to this one because we just know that a lot of changes happen once

[David]

we hire James Cameron to make it 2040. Cyborg James Cameron is like, you know that.

[Andrew]

Can I throw something on top of that that I think you should be. That I think about. I was thinking about this recently and it stems in perfectly here that I think you should be pretty proud of is you talk about how you slowly watch this. The YouTube media make it into like the journalist invites. And we're getting further and further in that you've created not just a team, but a group of channels to the point where I'm seeing now, you've mentioned this before, like you think Waveform is Now a top 10 tech channel just on its own. Like, I think everything under our, like, I think studio is probably in there. I think Autofocus is like, I think the, the, this little empire that's been created here is. It's stemmed out and each channel lives on its own so well that we're going to events now and at an Apple event, I'm hearing a PR person being like, why we need Ellis on the sound thing of this? Like they're picking people from this team that they need to be inviting to this thing. That's not Just you anymore. That's just like this team has. The stuff that we've created here is big enough in this new media world. Like, again, like Miles, I think all of us here go to a place and don't consider ourselves journalists in the sense of journalists who went to journalism school and follow those standards. It's a different type and, you know, we do it very differently, but it's still an important thing. You've built a place for us all to come here and everyone here is like, crazy important in this world right now. And it's kind of wild to think about that. Like, individuals of us are getting. I got invited to Fashion Week.

[David]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew]

I don't know why. I don't think that's that important. But like, weird.

[Marques]

Have you seen.

[Andrew]

Obviously.

[Adam]

Why is that surprising?

[Harper]

Andrew?

[Marques]

I'm surprised.

[David]

I shouldn't be laughing.

[Marques]

I shouldn't be laughing.

[Andrew]

No, no, no. I mean, again, we're all funny.

[David]

It's a podcast.

[Andrew]

Did you. You've. People in this office now are getting invited to different things because of the stuff we all create. And that's kind of wild. We've seen a lot of channels come and kind of die off. And you didn't just keep going. You built a surrounding cast that they are all part of the ethos now. It's kind of wild.

[Marques]

The thought that I had right after watching it when it was live that I put into Slack was basically, damn, I got lucky. I got a lot of talented people that. And everyone who's here has kind of gotten here in a different way. Like, you've told your story and Miles has his story and Andrew has his story and Rich has his. Like, everyone has a different way that. Whether it was like I saw Vin and Brandon's work or I put out a Google form and people submitted, or I just like had just. Just random recruiters reach out to me with people. Like, there's so much luck that has somehow turned into this incredible group of people. I feel very lucky for it. I kind of have no choice but to make the most of it and hopefully do a lot more of this stuff.

[David]

That's why we're gonna do Yiddle til we die, baby.

[Marques]

Exactly. Yiddle 2 Yiddle Furious, the greatest sequel of all time. Well, I'm excited for it. Well, that feels like a good place to cap it off.

[Andrew]

Do you have anything else you think you were excited to share that maybe we missed anyone here? I mean, like, I once again want to say the amount of work that went into this, there's no words to really talk about how much it went in. I hope everybody is, like, insanely proud of it. And I think there's lots of ways we can make it all too better on all fronts for everybody. Yeah.

[Rich]

But thank.

[Andrew]

Thank you. It's one of the coolest things I've ever watched and being able to. We get to, like, show our families in the future this. And it's like. It's like. I'm thinking of it now as. Do you know how people on TikTok are finding the, like, handycam footage from high school 2003 that they're posting? Like, we get a 4K version of that that we get to. I mean, our kids will be like, 4K. What is this garbage? But that's. That's pretty wild.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

Olivia Harper, Mariah, Rich, Rufus Ellis and Andrew showed up too. I mean, everyone did. Eric Marques signs the tracks, she signs the checks.

[Andrew]

I mean, Tim did a great thumbnail. That's different than what.

[David]

Tim's thumbnail was fantastic. Brandon gave creative direction and Vin. Oh, my God.

[Rich]

Everyone contributed every.

[David]

Like, we don't make things on the studio channel, where pretty much like, every single person touches every single studio video. And honestly, the reason we do it is because strategically, when we do, the videos are better and they do better.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[David]

But this one was definitely just like. Yeah, it was just so cool to see everyone rally behind it and we make good work. Proud of what we do. Go watch Year in the Life. If you somehow watched this entire podcast episode about having seen it.

[Andrew]

Spoilers.

[Marques]

They're spoilers, clearly. Yeah. Go watch our labor of love. Back to our regularly scheduled programming, of course, on Friday, but we'll see you over on the Studio channel. Peace.

[Andrew]

Bye.

[Adam]

I could keep Marquez's camera wide open and he would still be in focus throughout the whole podcast.

[Andrew]

I think Marquez is at, like, 2.8 and David and I are at, like, 5, 6, and we're still out of focus all the time.