Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Does Marques Hate OnePlus?

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

This week, the crew chats everything from Super Bowl commercials to Ferrari interiors. After that, Shen comes back on the pod to talk batteries with Marques. Fair warning: before this episode is over pretty much everyone crashes out about something. Then we wrap it all up with some trivia. Enjoy! Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Links: 9to5Google - YouTube Music premium lyrics Verge - Ring Camera Super Bowl ad Verge - Discord age verification MKBHD - The Problem with these Smartphone Batteries Ferrari EV Interior Auto Focus - Rivian R2 first look Music provided by: Epidemic Sound Social: Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en Waveform TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Hosts: Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Intro/Outro music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Each individual piece is sick. The dynamic clock dude that like you can... Are all the clock's dynamic? Yeah, what is up? People of the Internet. Welcome back to another episode of the Wayform podcast. We're your host. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David.

We're actually renaming the podcast this week to the Crash Out podcast because we've realized that everything we're talking about this week, someone is going to crash out about. We'll get there. Today we're talking about TV ads. You might have seen some if you watched like a big bowl event or something recently. We've got chat GPT ads. We've got car ads slash teasers.

We've also got our friend Shen on to explain batteries a little bit better, and we're going to wrap out with just Andrew crashing out. That's it. Just Andrew crashing out. It's going to be great. But first, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you follow on whatever podcast player you use. We're aware that many of you use Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

but there are others. I use PocketCast on Android. And there are even others, yet others, that if you're using them, you should rate our podcast on because that helps aside a lot. So we appreciate that. Yeah. Okay.

It says here first thing is weather apps. And usually I crash out about that. If you don't mind, this is not crashing out. Oh, okay. I'm just going really fast. It's a nice shout out. Do you remember like two weeks ago we were talking about weather apps and I said the Google one is like literally the worst and wrong all the time?

But it does have the frog. And I do like the frog. What's the frog? Wait, does not have the frog anymore. The little corner animated frog. I think that's if you Google the weather. What? Not like in the-oh.

I think you're right. In the Google weather app though. I don't think it was. Well, or maybe. Wow. RIP frog. Lots of people, tons of great suggestions.

Here's the two I landed on and I'll let you guys check them out. One is called, what? It's just as weather. I think it's called Breezy, right, Adam? Breezy, you have to download it on F-Droid,

which is something that I just learned about. Wait, this is not on a Play Store? No. No, you have to download F-Droid from the Play-Sore, and then in F-Droid search for Breezy. Here, as I'll let you look at this. That looks nice. Solid UI.

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

What am I doing with my life? Overcast. This is. No, it is overcast. It's called overmorrow. Got it. I've been using it. Overmorrow.

Which looks great. It's super simple. It's like material you-based in terms of the design and everything. But it looks great. It's been working well. I have multiple different sources right at the bottom that I can pull from. The only thing is, if you are in the U.S. and go to it, just remember it's in Celsius. And it's just been so cold here.

It took me like three days before I really. No, no, no, no. You can switch to Fahrenheit. but it defaults to Celsius. But it's been so cold to your seeing single-digit numbers to me was like, yeah, that's right. Yeah, three. It's been three.

Guys, it was zero the other night. Yeah. For everyone else in the world, that is negative 17.8. It's Celsius. It's 40 degrees Fahrenheit right now, and it feels like I could wear shorts outside because I'm so amped. That's how cooked we'd be. Three degrees is a normal.

It's literally freezing, and I'm like, yes. Nice. Yeah. Thank you for all the weather suggestions. Now, I just need the weather to not suck so I can look at the apps more happily. It's getting better. The Groundhog, Paxatani Phil,

which we didn't talk about last week and everyone was mad because we're the New Jersey podcast. Oh. It didn't really matter to us. I thought he was Pennsylvania. He's in Pennsylvania. He did shout out six more weeks of winter for those who were wondering. He lied about that, though.

Yeah, that lying. What you mean? What you mean? Because it instantly is 40 again. It got warmer. Yeah, but that's winter weather. Nah, man. Compared to what we had

If it was spring You'd be like It's still only 40 I don't know man But it isn't spring It's early February That's what I'm saying You would either say

It's about to be spring Or we got six more weeks of winter Then it's spring If you said this was spring And it was 39 We'd be a Though Ellis and I Will both take every opportunity

To remind people That we are from California We have finally been accustomed To this kind of weather Yeah And now that zero is the norm 40 feels pretty damn good.

I'm feeling good about it. I took my gloves off this morning like on my walk and I was like, oh. It was a PG podcast. Let's come down. I was in a t-shirt this morning. I went to my outdoor building, went inside the building, got a coffee,

and everyone was like, you're in a t-shirt. You're getting an ice drink too? And I was like, yeah, I will. Nice. We love talking about the weather. You know what's related to the weather? No, we can do better than that. Oh.

You know, a lot of weather apps make you pay extra for premium features. That's what I was just about to do. You know what else does? Pretty much everything. Every single thing in your life. But the headline we have to react to it is that YouTube music now requires premium for lyrics. Yeah.

I don't care. But do you guys care about lyrics in your music app? It's about the principle. Okay. I did a poll about this. on social media because I was curious because I was like I don't really care and when I look up lyrics I usually just Google them yeah but apparently a lot of people use lyrics in the app I have many friends who when we are driving listening to music they will grab my phone and

look at the lyrics in the app on the phone it is popular for people so okay here are the results of my poll and I said is this a lucrative our lyrics a lucrative feature for you and something that you would pay for in a music app. Out of 691 votes, 71 people said they would not pay for it. But 18.8 said that they would pay for it specifically, just for lyrics. And 19.6 said that they would pay at the right price. Just to clarify, you're talking about percentages, not people. Sorry, percent.

19.6 people. Oh, sorry. This says 9.6. Yeah, 9.6. I say 19. Yes. Yeah. 18.8 percent said yes.

9.6 says yes at the right price. Honestly, 28% of people being willing to pay for lyrics in their music app was more than I thought it would be. Way more than I expected. I'm holstering so many panel's jokes about being free on Google. Okay. I mean, sometimes I open Spotify and I scroll down and I see the lyrics and I'm like, oh, that's what he was saying. I'm like, oh, cool. But I guess I'm not someone who looks up lyrics that much.

But when I do, my instinct is to Google it. Yeah. So I guess. It might be because we're old, though. Oh, interesting. I mean, we've been doing it for a long time. I kind of like just pretending like I know what the lyrics are and mumbling through most of the song.

I just think the little book like that. Do you say Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg? I don't know. That's the words, right? That's probably the words. Eventually. I'm even second guessing my mumbling, right? Yeah, I mean, I also just like fake it until I make it

and then eventually I get annoyed enough that I look them up. That's fair. And then I'm usually disappointed because they're not as good as I envision they'd be. Yeah, most of the music I listen to, I'm not like listening to the words specifically. Usually it's the beat and then the lyrics or words like happen to sound nice, but I'm not like really... I'm a lyric guy for sure. I have kind of a funny story about that. It'll be really quick.

Do you know the song Wonderful by... I'm going to go out on a limit and say, I haven't heard of it. Oh, Ever Clear. Okay, there's a song called Wonderful by Ever Clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the chorus is like, everything is wonderful now, but the whole song is really sad and him like trying to convince himself. And I used to listen to it all the time because I thought it was, I'm just listening. my mom took my car once and came out and she's like are you okay Andrew

that song was like blasting in your car lyrics are pretty dark everything going good I was like yeah I love yeah there's a word for when the music feels happy but the lyrics are really depressing that's this song yeah yeah it's open to the I close my eyes when I get too sad I think thoughts that I know are bad and somehow none of that comprehended in my eye just snapping to it in the car that's like all south of songs they're all about really really dark things and then the band just makes you dance the the story around this is that Google is making lyrics a premium feature where you have to pay for YouTube premium they're really well if you to pay for Google YouTube

music premium but they're really trying to get people they're really just trying to import people to YouTube premium because YouTube premium is barely more expensive than the YouTube music subscription anyway users who don't pay will get five free lyrics before they're asked to subscribe and it's not like per month songs Words. Yeah. Songlet. Who words?

Yeah. For five words. Can I get the second word? Oh, nice. I wish you would step. I'd like to buy a vowel. Yeah, so they will get five free lyrics and then it'll be like, lyrics are premium.

And it's not per month. It is at all. Oh. Yeah. Not to side with YouTube here, but if in a month you are looking up the lyrics more than five times, it's probably worth paying for the lyrics. That's up. I just can't imagine.

I have not looked up lyrics five times. I guess there's more of the passive discovery of the lyrics. Because if I ever want the lyrics, I can just look up a lyric video on YouTube. But if I'm in the song and I just happen to scroll back and be like, what did he actually say? And the lyrics are just right there. That's the convenience that you're paying for. But, you know, Google made more money this quarter than they ever have, so I don't think

it's a good excuse. What if Spotify started doing this, but like for hearing? Like you paid for Spotify and you got all the like instrumentals of all the music. but that if you wanted to hear the lyrics, you had to pay an extra fee on top. Damn. Pretty me a cart. Yeah, I don't give up any ideas.

Exactly. That's what's next. I'm telling you. Well, then everything would just, it would just be a karaoke app for the free users. Well, now you have to pay for the lyrics, though, which makes it way hard. No, no, it'd be a carrier.

Oh, my God. That's the only reason I assume people want lyrics is because they want a karaoke with the phone in their hand. Or they just want to know the music. I just want to know. I like the spot-up on Spotify. I just say. I like the lyrics because I sometimes.

like to jump to specific points in a song and I like being able to know like oh if I click this word it'll take me to like as a transport feature take me it's kind of nice interesting the segue I was thinking I was like that's why a lot of weather apps are paid is because the data you have to pay for so a lot of people want like a free weather app obviously but if you have a bunch of sources and a lot of them are paid you right you need to charge like a subscription to pay the subscription yeah but anyway yeah just weather again sorry so Anyway, I was surprised by these results. I really just didn't think this many people would be willing to pay for lyrics, but apparently they are.

So, you know, Google's going to make even more money, I guess. Speaking of Google. Speaking of YouTube. YouTube. Speaking of you, too, getting put on everybody's iPods. There's now, officially, a YouTube app for Applevision Pro. Wasn't there at launch? There are dozens of.

of them. Honestly, brave. Yeah, it was brave. It's crazy because you had to, it almost felt like they were withholding it on purpose. Like, you had to go to the browser. Which wasn't the end of the world. You just have a browser tab open. But you had to go to the browser to watch YouTube videos

and you have to deal with all the stuff there. If you don't have premium, blah, blah, blah. Now you just have an app, all the Discovery, all the doom scrolling, native. Well, didn't Apple also make some workarounds, like, in the Safari app for Vision Pro? For full-screen video? Yeah. Yeah. They would make it so it basically just felt like YouTube. Yes.

Yeah. But now it's, yeah. Yeah, you can have environments. You can have all the other fun stuff. Just YouTube. RIP2, Christian, sell, like, Juneau. Was it called June? Didn't that already a year?

Yeah, they killed it. They knocked that out a while. If it was not called Juneau, I apologize, Christian. Well, that's exciting for the 12 people that use Vision Pro. And speaking of, I guess we're done with that. Pretty quick segment. I guess we'll try it, and we'll get back to it. I don't know.

We definitely will not try it by next week. Maybe it's amazing. And I'll watch it. Maybe it's amazing, you know? What if it's amazing? It's just, I'll try it. I don't, okay. What if?

What could they possibly have added that will make it? It uses Gemini. If the Vision Pro is the ideal flight movie watcher, then the YouTube app is Vision Pro with premium with a bunch of downloaded videos is the ultimate flight theater experience. I have always wanted to watch Scott the Was 30 feet tall. Okay, let me have this. There's good videos on YouTube.

You might want to watch YouTube. You might have an hour and a half video on a studio channel, and you want to watch it on a flight, and you have this big screen in front of you, and it's fun. It'd be very funny if, you know how Google last week they released that world model where you can feed an image, and it creates a video game, basically.

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

I guess we'll find out what interesting features it has. I guess we'll find it. It's probably fine. Yeah. Anyway. We're going to find out about the ads in chat GPT. The ads in chat GPT. Okay.

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

ad where this guy is talking to a therapist. And he says, I need help learning how to communicate better with my mom. And then the therapist is just kind of like this creepy smiling, like woman. And she pauses for like three seconds before she answers him. It's all very like you can tell that they're trying to emulate that. And she says like, that's a great thing to do. You should maybe go on a nature walk with her or talk about things that you have in common. Or if you can't mend the relationship, go to golden encounters.

where cougars are matched with young cubs. Where you can spend quality time with other older women. With other older women on golden encounters. And all of the ads just kind of devolve into this. And then the person that's talking to that model is like, what? Very funny, very good ads. This elicited an extremely funny reaction from Sam Alman on Twitter.

He decided to write an essay in a tweet, which is never a good idea. But the first thing that he said was first the good part of the anthropic ads. They are funny. I laughed. Very human thing to say. Nice. And then he wrote 11 paragraphs.

Wrote is like an overstatement for like this is poop. You don't write poop. You poop. And that's what he did. He pooped 11 paragraphs of poop. Do you think he did for chat GPT did it? That's what I was going to say. I assume everything he writes.

Also, I had not seen these ads. Actually, I think you posted it, and your main thing was, why does this seem like it didn't get desqueased properly for one of them, the one online before the Super Bowl? The only reason I watched these ads is because I saw Sam Altman crashing out on Twitter. And I was like, these must be pretty good. Yeah, the first ad, there was one ad where a kid was trying to get jacked and whatever. It was like, how do I get abs as fast as possible?

Yeah, and first, I just noticed, like, it seemed like they used like a 1.5x anamorphic lens, but they desqueased it to like 1.8. That's all I thought. That was the first thing I know. Sorry, that's the first thing I don't. That would bother me a lot. Yeah, it was, it was weird. Anyway, yeah, he crashed out with like 11 paragraphs saying basically it was not what was going to happen and that it was, what was the word.

He was saying that it was kind of misrepresenting the way the ads were going to be shown. But Ellis is about to, is about to chime in. Can I say one thing real quick? Yeah, say. I miss. I like when companies use commercial. to take shots at each other. It's so much more fun.

I liked the like the Samsung notch forehead, like stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. And it's fun because they're in jest, but man, it makes some people so mad. And that's hilarious. Yeah, it's funny. Anthropic typically does have really good ads too.

Like they've been leaning into like the film look and the film aesthetic and everything, like a little grain and everything. It looks like they hire people that knew what they were doing for. I mean, every company on Twitter now basically is just making commercials. Yeah. That's like their whole thing. They have shifted away from just releasing products and now everything has to be a little like movie trailer. Product launch.

Yeah. I think also doing the film look feels more natural and human. And when you're doing creating a product that's as unnatural and unhuman as, as AI, you want to be as opposite as possible. They thought about this. Yeah. Anthropic has a great color grader, by the way. It's all the same color, and it's very good. It's AI.

I don't know if AI would mess up the 1.5X anamorphic squeeze. I think that's exactly what it would mess up. Yeah, that's probably true. All right. All right, Ellis, I'm ready for your crash out. Before I crash out publicly about this, I do want to say, long-time listeners of the show will know we have in the past done anthropic ads. We have read ads that they have done.

This has nothing to do with why we're reporting on this. Also, in case anyone was even wondering, none of us have any AI investments. Okay? We're not invested in these private companies. I don't use that shit at all. Yeah. So this is not like about, this is about, oh my God, dude. That stupid 11.

Okay, first of all, first of all, when Sam Allman in that 11 paragraph's greed said, God, there was so much. What he called Claude and author, or anthropic and authoritarian company, I was like, brother. Like, you need to look at like who's on the open AI team right now. You also said Anthropic makes software for rich people when they're the same price. They're the same price. Expensive software for rich people when they're the same. It's like, do you both offer a free tier? The difference in the pricing is that, and maybe like when you're using it at a developer level, the tokens are like cheaper or whatever.

But it's like you both offer a free and a $20 tier. So don't go calling your competitor an expensive product for rich people. Don't go calling a company an authoritarian company when like all of the techno-fascists are aligned with you, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Dude. And then it's like he keeps going on and on about how like, you know, these ads are not going to appear in chat. They're not going to like like companies are not going to have access to your chat like all this stuff. The truth is we don't know how these ads are going to appear. They started rolling out yesterday by the way. I haven't seen them.

I haven't seen any. I keep looking for people reporting on how they're rolling out. I can't find them. Yeah. I can provide to you the press releases of the companies who are buying these ads. Okay. Target. This is an exact quote. I'm just going to read you the whole thing so that you can't be like, Ellis, you're picking and choosing your words, man. You're an anti-A-I-Luddite. But quote, from Target, ads are served based on keywords in a guest's chat GPT prompt, ensuring they're relevant to the conversation. For example, a guest asking, what are some countertop cooking appliances that make everyday meals more convenient may see an ad for an air friar?

Here's one from William Sonoma. As an early participant, William Sonoma, Inc. will explore how advertising in chat GPT, can reach customers at the decision-making moments, helping surface relevant, high-quality products while preserving trusted and transparent user experiences. I don't want to be devil's advocate because I... You are a devil's advocate. They're like your favorite team.

They are. That's true. I hate them. I hate them this season. By the way, go USA hockey. We destroyed Canada women's the other day. Are they in that new TV show about hockey? Yeah, it's called The Olympics.

I'm just kidding. I'm saying that other one. I don't... Yeah. In terms of the way these are written, it does... None of this is saying that it will affect the responses. It's saying that it will show an ad

that's potentially based on the responses. Sure, but also... I'm just throwing that out there. In his thing, like in the past OpenAI and Sam Allman have said, when we run these ads, these companies will not have access to your chats. And the companies are saying,

we're not only going to know what you want. We're going to know when you're in the decision-making process. That's not exactly what it says. And I think there's a firewall between, so that's the specific verbiage is the companies don't get that data. They get to buy access to the people who are searching certain ways. They don't get to know what you're searching. Chat CBT, OpenAI, they know all the stuff. Right. But similar to the way you would buy Google AdWords, you'd buy ads for people who are Googling certain things. Those ads will show up for those people. I never get to connect to those people. I never get to connect to those people directly or know who searched what, the same way Target's going to pay chat GPT or

OpenAI for a bunch of ads for whatever air friars or whatever their products are. And anytime those get served, that connection will be made. I don't get to know any of that as target. I don't, I could be wrong, but I don't believe that's how Google AdSense works. I think there's a profile based on your credit cards and your IP address and all the other profiles that, or data points that data brokers pick up on you. And they know exactly what you, Marquez Brownlee, have been searching for and buying and are interested in. That may be fair, but I don't see that language in either of these responses from we're going to use chat GPT ads.

Which is like, let's also just be real, this is total legalese and we don't know like what they actually want to do on the background of anything. And I don't trust them. And yeah, and furthermore, that's fair to trust them. The guy who is trying to convince us of all this is like, and this takes a lot of skill, man, Because between like Elon Musk and Mark Andresen, like we have some prolific liars among us these days. Like people who can just, again, poop out non-truths. And Sam Altman is somehow the biggest liar of all of them.

Like the list of lies that this guy has told over the course of his career are so huge and so crazy. And he still is just like, bro, just give me like all of the power in America, all the water in America. give me literally all of your most inside thoughts and feelings. And I'll just like fix everything, bro, because I'm Sam, motherfucking Altman. Go get another job. I don't know. I don't want this guy doing this job. And I get that like I don't have like a say in that or whatever.

But the guy whose job is to like take everything from everyone, I would like to be a truthful guy. That's my crash out. Okay. I'm sorry. It's also just funny to me that every tech CEO decided that they have to have a personality. on Twitter. Like, I mean, Elon kind of started this.

CEOs used to be pretty quiet. They would maybe... I'm sure there's some. There's a lot that don't say anything on Twitter. Yeah, but... I like them better. I don't get, like, corporate savings from Sundar ever. He never says anything.

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

and just like says a lot of stuff. It's probably because that's where all of their customers are. Like as far as how competitive this environment is and how much of a connection you want to have to your potential customers, how else are you going to talk to them? It's kind of like when how YouTube had that sort of, what is it called, adpocalypse, where it's like all the advertisers left YouTube and they realized that the only way to reach these people is to be advertising on YouTube. If you're an AI company CEO, how are you going to reach the most aggressively enthusiastic AI

people on the internet? Probably by tweeting a lot at them and having them read what you're saying and not, you know, looking at the other things other people are saying. So I get why they're so loud on Twitter. But if you're annoyed by that, I don't think it's going to make them talk. I keep trying to reach those people on Twitter. Yeah. I mean, this kind of reaction, though, is very funny because, I mean, they just went and said, like, we have more users in Texas than you have users total. And it's kind of like, I think the best thing to say was nothing.

or you could have just said that was funny and moved on. I'm going to dub this the strysam effect. Oh. Yeah. I was wondering why you typed it like that. Oh, totally. I missed that.

Yeah. Because he just kind of like drew more attention to the fact that he was crashing out about it. And then there were multiple articles written out about who he was crashing out about it. If I made a joke about one of you guys and you tweeted that long about it, and be like, damn, I got him. Yeah. Like that's like. Yeah.

Andrew said something about me that was clearly. Dishonest. Anthropic is so happy right now that this guy is freaking out. The amount of people that didn't even know Anthropics name that New Chat GPT and then saw a bunch of Google, like, Google Words articles on the side of their home feed being like, Sam Allman crashes out about anthropic. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the amount of marketing spend that they put into this was more than the Super Bowl. It's free real estate. Free real estate. I will say Twitter is a very specific audience and a lot of them are the like silence is complicit type. So if Sam Malman didn't say anything about those ads, it would also be really, it'll be fodder for them to be like, I don't know, see, they got them. So no matter what you do, you lose, but he chose this path. So that's his choice. I guess so.

Screw you, Ellis, for making it seem like I was kind of defending it. I promise that's not how I thought. I know, I know, I know. Andrew loves open air. It just feels to me like the entire premise of this company is like dog water. Like seriously, like what? Like you've made a trillion dollars in spending commitments. And you genuinely are like, no, no, no. In the next like 10 years, we're going to 100 X our revenue. Despite the fact that we like won't tell anyone how we make any money right now.

Despite the fact that we literally do not have left electricity in the world to do what we're going to do. It's all the trust me, bro. It's like. Yeah. Data centers in space. Oh. Oh, yeah. Data centers in space.

That's killer. Have you noticed Jensen Wong just like doing all these interviews on the streets of Taiwan? Yeah. I don't know why that keeps happening. I don't know why that keeps happening either. He's just like walking down the street in Taiwan and someone. And then suddenly there's eight mics in his face. He's happening to a press conference.

That's what happens. And if you don't say no to it, it's going to keep happening. It's like that. Why does he keep saying yes to it? Well, it's not even saying yes to it. It's someone sprints up to you with a microphone and asks you a critical question about your company. And no matter what you say it will be published. So do you, A, ignore them and get in the car, to which it looks like, ooh, he's avoiding it.

He knows the answer. Or B, do you, like, try to answer because you think you have a good answer? And then suddenly seven more people with microphone. That's the whole point of a year. You cannot win. If I had that much ignoring it. People are going to sprint up to you, like, my life savings are in this. Tell me why you're going to win.

Like, okay. Well, it is funny, though, because he has been slowly walking back their commitments to Open AI. Yeah. Like, at first, it was like, Nvidia is investing $100 billion in Open A. And then throughout these on the street in Taiwan interviews, it's been like, we never actually signed a piece of paper. We just said that, you know, over a number of years, we might invest up to $100 billion. Guys, money isn't real. I mean, the money in my bank account is real, of course.

But like, your money isn't real. And then randomly Oracle put out a tweet that was like, we are committed to our investments and it was like, nobody asked you. Yeah. In other authoritarian of news. Yeah. That's right. Ring company owned by Amazon. This is funny.

Okay, there's a couple. Was it funny? Yeah, yeah. Can you explain everything because I did not watch the Super Bowl, which you all will find out from my crash out later why I didn't. Wow. Okay. Yes, some of these are Super Bowl things.

I've kind of seen people talk about online, but I would like the full explanation. Okay. I only watched the half-time show. As you can imagine during the Super Bowl of 2026, people are all wondering which companies are going to make a splash and make a big statement. Are there going to be any crypto ads? Are there going to be any AI ads? It's like Metaverse.

CES is the same way. Or like, who's going to have a, what's the theme? Wait, right? The Super Bowl basically is CES. Yes, yes, exactly. That's crazy. Exactly. So 2026 Super Bowl ads, there's a couple AI ads sprinkled in there and people are analyzing

them. Oh, this is their big moment. Okay. So each one of these companies challenge is to speak to the normies who don't pay attention to AI and paint a picture for them of why their AI is good. And it'll either hit your ear as a normie or it'll hit your ear as a critic who's been looking at this stuff for a long time. Amazon ring decides, okay, we've got an idea.

We're going to show this really cool feature, this really cool thing that we've been doing, where if you lose your pet, then there's this neighborhood watch feature where you can go through everyone's feeds and it will recognize all of the ring neighborhoods in your neighborhood. Sorry, all the ring cameras in your neighborhood, you'll be able to find your pet through them

and you'll get reunited with your pet. Isn't that sick? A neighborhood watch feature from your ring camera? That's turned on by default. It's on. Isn't that great? It's on by default. It's on by default? You have to turn it off. And I think for some people, it probably hit their ears like, wow, I've lost a pet. Wow, I have a pet. I hope I don't lose them. But if I do, this feature would really help.

But for all of us, we're like, wait, if you can watch the pets through this feature. And by the way, they're working with flock, which is the company that makes those security cameras that are just placed everywhere and sold to government agencies and law enforcement. And we would know that. People aren't going to know that. Yeah. If you can watch pets, what else can you, find through this. Is the thing you like search for like you say I'm missing this dog and then if it sees that dog you see it or you there's no way you can just go to I'm trying to rewatch the ad because I'm assuming I'm assuming it's like I can comb through my yeah yeah okay ring feet or whatever

but the idea is all of them are connected through this sort of database that yes you find it even though it's not on your camera yeah which means that there are other ways probably for other potentially authoritarian figures to pop in there and find things on people's ring cameras Or like the big flock scandal that just happened recently where it turned out that none of them were not none of them, but a lot of them were not even password protected and you could just go and look at any camera. One funny part I heard about, or not funny,

but it was like, didn't they say like one million dogs are lost a year? And then it said like, we found one dog every day over the year. And it's like, the percentage on that is terrible. $3.65 million. I mean, it's just to be rational. This is a missing pet. This is a pet.

No, it's true. Listen, I'm all for 300 more dogs being found than something bad happening to them. Yeah. Listen, this isn't about the dogs. The ratios there are not going to be. Now, to be clear, a million dogs? I forget what Ring said. That's crazy.

One in the 300 people in America lose a dog a year? That can't be right. I'll find that. So Ring does deny that the search party feature is even able to track human faces and biometrics. And they say it is separate from the familiar faces. facial recognition feature that they have on their That's amazing. Which is a made up fact that a PR person would say.

That they don't have access to the facial recognition thing. They have to know that people just don't trust this stuff. No, of course. Like, Ring is the company that just like gives this, like has given this data to law enforcement before. I think people do trust this stuff. I think that's, that's like, like I know so many people with ring cameras. No, I mean, I'd say. The company is going to do what's in their best thing.

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

I don't think the average person, like, really understands, like. I think it's, maybe trust isn't the right word because I think a lot of people in general know like most of these companies don't give a damn about me and like they don't trust them. But I think it's less of like the benefits for me are something that can make me not really think about the other things that could potentially be. Well, and it's Amazon which makes these products as cheap as possible so that people just like buy them and make a bunch of, you know, put them on their house because they're so ridiculously cheap. I've got a bunch of cameras in my house. Mine's a little different because I'm not pointing it directly at like someone else's door. And I live in a New York City apartment, right? So it's like it would be impossible to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I just want to remind people like, this is, this is Amazon, same company that made the Melania movie, which had a total budget, $75 million, $75 million. They didn't make it. They, well, they donated $35 million or whatever it was. Yeah, $75 million budget, $40 million acquisition fee paid by Amazon to Melania Trump's, production company, and then $28 million went directly to her for licensing.

I think that it's pretty obvious where a lot of this money is going, and I just, I would not trust a company that has security cameras all over the country. The security camera company just gave a giant donation to the... Yeah, anyway. I told you this, Marquette said this was the crashout podcast. I watched, I just rewatched the ad. You watched the Malaena movie? I just rewatch 25x speed right now.

Oh, nothing happens. Wow. Nothing happened. No, I watch the ad. There's not a lot of official UI. There's just kind of like a portal in the ring app to be like, here's the pet's name, here's a picture, here's a description, and then the pet shows up at their door. So it's not like we know how this works at all, but I imagine from the advertising perspective,

they're like, look, it's a great feature. It doesn't matter how it works. It's going to get you your pet back if you ever losing your neighborhood. And then if anyone asks any questions, we just deny, deny, deny. Can I throw something out there? Like, this happens. If you're just in like the Facebook group for your town or like the, what's the website next door or something like?

There's so many things like that. People will just be like, hey, I lost my cat. Here's a picture of them. And someone will post and they're like, oh, I looked on my security. Like people care about each other enough to just say like, hey, I saw them out there. Or like, here's my security camera that saw what looks like your cat. at blah blah blah I'm over here this happens without one company needing to own all of it most of these technology products are just like don't talk to people just let the technology do it for

you I saw I saw something amazing on Twitter which was a test to determine if a new technology is good or bad and the test the test the test is if it would make the plot of a Seinfeld episode not work at all it's a good piece of tech like smartphones Google Maps Like things that would cause the central issue of a Seinfeld episode to like fall apart because a tech just solves the problem. So this fits. Yeah. This is a good feature. Tech that would create the plot of a Seinfeld episode is bad tech.

Think like Polymarket or like or flock cameras. I would say that they could easily. I've never seen Seinfeld so I apologize. No, it's like the greatest show ever. But I could imagine a show like that having an episode about losing their dog and taking a whole. episode to find it. Is that crazy? I feel like the Seinfeld episode would be like, yeah. No, that could totally work. Yeah.

And then this just ruins that because you just, oh, it's, I got a notification, it's three doors down or whatever. Like the band? The cool thing about, I'm sorry, sorry. Okay, little rant. The best thing about Seinfeld is that there's like three interlaced storylines that seem totally separate and then they randomly come in contact with each other like through the episode and they just sort of dance. No, the best thing about it is the sneakers he wears on every episode. Straight heat. Jerry Seinfeld's on it.

What are they? Because he's a sneaker head. Wait, really? Yeah. Has he been on the sneaker shopping show? Is it a tan- I actually don't know. Maybe.

I would assume so. Yeah. Interesting. It might be. All right, will be my introduction to Seinfeld. Oh, look up his sneaker shopping. Dude, that show is so good. You know what else is going to scan your face, but this time be truthful about it?

Yeah, one more surveillance story and then we're done, I promise. You know what's gonna scan your child's face? Yeah. Discord this week announced that they are going to be requiring face face face. scanning or ID uploading for people that they think are probably children. So they are going, what a way to phrase that. They're going to be, okay, basically they're trying to age gate. They're trying to get kids off of the like not safe for work discord communities.

Because there's, that's the, yeah, it's, it's this weird back and forth thing where clearly there have been many, many problems with like, there are many bad things about the internet. that kids just have access to, and that's sort of always been the case. And so there are bad things that occur there, obviously. And so there's sort of this weird tension between, like, how do we stop kids from accessing that without creating a surveillance state? I think the other thing is also people accessing kids. That, yes.

Like, that in the same space is what's really bad. Yeah, for sure. Age gating. The roadblocks effect. Yeah, is like a solution to this problem, but that is very difficult to implement without getting accused of. Yeah. this for sure yeah yeah um famously people that use discord gamers you know people they're very online

not happy about having to scan their faces which i'm not either i don't think i would never give anyway here's what they say uh they say that for most adults age verification won't be required as they're using account information like the games that you play when you're online all of these uh random account tenure too so if you've got a discord account for like 16 i don't know Yeah, which I have, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so they're using a bunch of different metrics to determine whether or not they think you're an adult. And if they think you're an adult,

you won't have to do any of these things. If you have your Discord hooked up to Steam and you play Roblox all the time, they probably are going to make you, you know. Jokes on you, David. I don't think Roblox is on Steam. Oh, damn. I don't know, though.

It might be. I don't know. Is Minecraft like the most popular game on Steam? It's going to be a lot of people getting that. I don't think Minecraft is on Steam either. It's not. It's wrong. It's wrong.

Windows store. What is on Steam? Everything else. Literally every other game you didn't just mention. Fortnite is not on Steam. I'm trying guys. I feel like if the game is big enough to have like its own following where it doesn't need to be on Steam, then it's not on Steam. Unless it's every other game is on. Unless it's owned by Valve. Like Counterstrike and Dota. Yeah. Got it. Um, just got to mention Dota too again. So anyway, users who are not verified as adults will not have access to age-restricted servers, channels, and they won't be able to speak in Discord stages. They will see content filters from friend requests and DMs from unknown sources will be filtered into another inbox. Discord says that the face scan uses an on-device AI model to

analyze and predict your age and never leaves the device. So that is something, if that is true, I think that we need, like, security experts to, like actually try that out and dig into that. There was a lot of backlash to this, and so TeamSpeak, if you need to, if you need to, you know that word, you're, you will not get age verified on Discord. Yeah. If you don't know that word, you probably will. I'm saying, what's the meme of like, if you, if you recognize Ricky Martin at the half time show, like, it's probably time to get your prostate checks.

Like, if you know, TeamSpeak. That was Ricky Mart? Yeah. Oh, my God, that was Ricky Martin. I just, wow. You're good. Youngin. Yeah.

Wow. So, legit. TeamSpeak is like one of the OG voice chat. gaming apps I used to use it when we employed I played Starcraft in high school and it's basically not been updated in the last like 15 years it looks way different kind of sick I mean the website yeah yeah it looks a little bit more like Discord the problem with Discord now is that it's trying to become the everything app like every app including Netflix every app is trying to become the

everything app because in order to scale infinitely you have to just adopt every possible market yeah that's why Netflix is becoming a podcast app and a games app now because they kind of saturated the watching content app. They're going to drop the flicks. Yeah, they're just going to be Net. It's going to be the internet. Welcome to Net. So yeah, people are very angry about this.

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

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

There's going to be a really sad future where we look back on this era and be like, damn, like, Discord and like Sam Altman with WorldCoin, like they were so nice. Like, they let us scan our own faces instead of just like walking into Baskin-Robbins and getting our face scanned without our consent for our ice cream ID. All the flock cameras are already, they already know where you are at all times anyway. Anyway, I did see a very funny thing. Do you guys know what what Gary's mod is? This is another one.

This is another one of those things where if you do know what that is, you won't have to do the thing. but I saw some people who were using Gary's mod characters to fool the face scanning technology and it actually worked. That's crazy. Well, it does and that's the thing because they were like they were like streaming the screen. I mean depth in terms of like the character looks three dimensional and it was turning. Yeah, because it's not using like an IR sensor on your regular webcam. Cameras are all 2D, you know, they just like.

Yeah, but like I, well, I didn't realize. I thought when I was doing, I haven't remember what I was doing a face certification for it, but I had to scan my ID and then do the thing where I look left and right. Yeah. I think that's using the iPhones. Well, maybe it doesn't. The iPhone's IR, right?

It might be iPhones IR, but it might also not be, but Discord is presumably probably using it from a webcam. I guess, like, there is a mobile app, so maybe it could. Probably a webcam. I doubt. They're not going to force you to use your phones. That's just why I figured they would have to use real depth instead of just an image that rotates.

Well, they can't really, I mean, the iPhone, there's some phones that have IR. Yeah. Look, there's also a non-zero chance that this face scanning stuff literally does nothing. And Discord just needed to do something to, like, make themselves not legally accountable for, like, exposing minors. Yeah, I mean. I'm not saying it does. But, like, we're at the point now.

We're like, who's to say everyone isn't lying all the time? I've been lying this whole podcast. I'm not even else. Audio listeners would be shocked to find out. I am like a seven-foot lizard sitting at the mind. and have been this whole time. I'm 12. But you know what?

Demands truth and nothing but the truth. What is that? Waveform trivia. That's facts. Well, good thing we all get the truth wrong. I was going to say when the correction comes next week, that segue is going to hit. Oh, yeah, maybe. Our scores.

Yeah. No, that is... Look, man, I strive for perfection. I know it's been a weird episode, but... It's only going to get weirder, baby. It's only getting it weirder. It's only February. Guys, you want to guess what this trivia question's about?

It's about Sam Alman. Sam Alman has said in the past, specifically on his blog and several interviews, that with 10 gigawatts of compute, we would most likely have to choose between curing cancer or tutoring every child in America. We couldn't have both for 10 gigawatts of compute. The largest power plant by total possible capacity, again, this power plant only runs at 30% capacity, according. to my limited understanding of industrial scale power and this Wikipedia. That's part of a trivia question. Lighter podcast. Running at full hypothetical capacity, how many gigawatts can the largest power plant in America

produce? I don't even- A gigawatt have to do with education. Wait, I'm saying that the compute required- The compute required to train the model that could do either of those things required 10 gigawatts. I don't understand why these people ever make those. Like sometimes you see people ask like Elon like, well, what do you think it would, you

you know, solving world hunger, and he'll go, hmm. And he'll try to answer. Like, why would you try to answer that? Don't say, don't make a promise that you could solve cancer with enough power. That's an insane thing to say out loud. Yeah. But. Yeah.

And, you know, the thing is, is like, I've never been an evil villain, like a super villain, so I can't truly put myself in like the shepherdess. What about when you were the hamburger for Halloween? That's true. I was a supervillain. Is the hamburger really a super villain? I've always thought of him as more of like a Robin Hood, Man of the People type figure. No.

That's if, okay, so. Is Ronald McDonald like big brother or something? No, the hamburger's foil is Mayor McChese, obviously. I'm so hungry. Okay. I thought they were up in paper. Oh, that's good. Anyway, what's the question?

I literally don't know. Oh, how many gigawatts? The hardiest most powerful power plant in America. How many gigawatts does it break? In America. While it's running at 30% capacity. I'm specifically referring to the, Grand Cooley Dam in Washington State.

How many gigawatts did the car in Back to the Future need? Flux capacitor. 7 parsecs. No, I don't know. 100 gigawatts. I have no idea. I don't remember. A 1,000.

How many? A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts. Okay. And a megawatt is 1.21. 1,000. 1,000. 1,000 watts? A 1,000 watts.

No, a million watts. It's a million watts. A million watts. Yeah. Oh, okay. 1.21 gigawatts. So a gigawatt is a billion watts. The flux capacitor needed 1.21 gigawatts.

Damn, he could have cured cancer instead. Dude. Yeah. So you're saying that that damn would let us travel back to the future? I'm saying that. Like seven times. I'm saying that musical comedian Reggie is one watt. Damn it.

Reggie Watts. That's good. We should take a break. Yeah. We're going inside. I think our audience needs a break more than we did. I'm sorry, guys. All right, well, we'll think about it.

Answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Monarch. It's important to have goals, but if you don't have the right tools to make that happen, they're more like daydreams. Instead of just wishing you had that down payment or that you could be living debt-free, you can take action and set yourself up for financial success this year. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool to make your life easier.

It brings your entire financial life, budgeting, accounts, and investments, and net worth and future planning together in one-down. on your phone or your laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this year and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with code Wave. Monarch makes a lot of things easy like tracking your finances with a partner or sharing your transaction history with a financial advisor.

Monarch also has all kinds of visual tools to help you wrap your head around all the way your money is moving. So set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch, the all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use code Wave at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code wave. 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 chatGBT 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 slash wave. That's ZAPI-E-R. dot com slash wave. When the weather cools down, Golden Nugget Online Casino turns up the heat. This winter,

make any moment golden and play thousands of games like our new slot wolf it up and all the fan favorite huff and puff and puff games. Whether you're curled up on the couch or taking five between snow shovels, play winner's hottest collection of slots. From

brand new games to the classics you know and love. You can also pull up your favorite table games like Blackjack, Roulette and Crops, or go for even more excitement with our library of live dealer gains. Download the Golden Nugget Online Casino app and you've got everything you need to layer on the fun this winter. In partnership with Golden Nugget Online Casino. Gambling problem, call ConX Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600. 19 and over. Physically President Ontario. Eligibility restrictions apply. See Golden Nuggett Casino.com.

for details. Please play responsibly. All right, welcome back. Marquez. Yeah. We've talked about a lot of deep stuff here, but I think I have potentially the biggest question possible for you. Sure. Why do you hate One Plus so much? It's a very valid question.

You mean my daily driver that I've been... This has been a question I've seen. Keep your enemies closer, Marquez. No, we did a video on silicon carbon batteries, and this video got a mixed reception and obviously I have thoughts on it but I'll have all the details here basically it's a story of like corporate risk assessment which is not the most interesting thing but it's very connected to technology because there are companies out there using silicon carbon batteries there are lots of companies out there not

using silicon carbon batteries in smartphones specifically and we talk a lot about smartphones so after the year and a half of me making lots of videos on smartphones that have silicon carbon batteries and me raving about them and being like why aren't these other guys doing that, decided to dig a little bit more into why those other guys aren't doing that. And also have been getting lots of emails, as you can imagine, from people going, hey, we're not idiots. We have thought a lot about this. And there's a certain risk tolerance that this company has and a couple concerns that these companies have about potentially using silicon carbon batteries. I'd say it got to the point where over the past year you would mention it

and we would have comments that are like, hey, moron, they're not doing it because of blah, blah, Well, like, yeah. It's come up a few times even on this podcast. We've mentioned, like, oh, I think you mentioned it too. Yeah, the Google engineer at Google I.O. Last year pulled me aside and was like, you guys keep asking why we're not using it. And here are the reasons we're not using it. So I just was like, I just mentioned that he mentioned that to me.

Yeah. That's all I said. And also I had a bunch of versions of that over the last couple of years. So I'm like, all right, let me just put all of this together into one video. Because I imagine not everyone knows this stuff. Not everyone gets pulled aside by a Google engineer at I.O. To hear about this stuff. So essentially put together a video on.

on what some of those companies are thinking about silicon carbon and why they're not using it so that we can have the whole picture. I'm still gonna love silicon carbon batteries and praise them and that's why I'm using this phone and phones like it with incredible battery life. But there were a couple of things people didn't like about the video, probably two main things.

One was the thumbnail totally valid. It was like a little bit spicy and I think this is an interesting enough topic without the debate about clickbait, so I just changed the thumbnail. But then two was that, you know, I didn't name drop the exact people who had been emailing me over the years

which companies who had pulled me aside and said these things, and it kind of felt like, oh, I'm like a mouthpiece for them, like I'm protecting them and justifying them. I'm actually like a secret silicon carbon hater or something like that. I think a lot of people didn't make it all the way through the video and just left with that impression. So I figured it was valid to sort of explain it all with someone who's actually willing to join the podcast and put their expertise in front of everyone and explain. So we have Shen joining us from HTC.

I don't know if he's been on the podcast once before, okay, because we've talked to him. I think twice. And so HTC obviously does lots of different devices now at this point in XR and obviously have done smartphones in the past, RIP, but they obviously work with batteries a lot. So he works with batteries and the corporate risk assessment profile of a company who has to decide what types of batteries to use. So I figured this would be informative and interesting. You don't have to hear it for me, but you get all the information at a deeper level. So let's play that quick interview for you now and then we'll come back.

right after. So, okay, Shen, thank you for doing this. I appreciate the time. I think we should just start off with what are your, what's your position, what are your credentials, because people want to know how you know this stuff first. So who are you? What do you do? Okay, I'm Shen. I look after global product management at HTC. I've been here for almost 11 years now, but I've been running product for the past five and a half years here at our headquarters. So I look after product from conception to all the way to end of life. When we do, you know, when we...

So I don't work on phones anymore, but I work on a lot of things where things like batteries are important. So like X are headsets, right? Generally, what you'll find in the market is about two hours. And I would say also with things like smart glasses that we just launched, the compactness of them is also really important. And then one last thing is considering that they're right on your head, we are actually generally more safety conscious than others when it comes to the battery safety itself.

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

So things like silicon carbon batteries do get me excited, especially the idea of capacity increasing so much. But when it comes to the industry itself, I think because batteries are such a high energy density item, everyone is usually a lot more wary of it. the way a battery can usually go wrong is when it expands, it swells, thermal runaway, usually maybe if like shorts inside. And some of them don't even have to come from any structural, like dropping your phone, right? Like batteries that charge below freezing can sometimes have an issue where the lithium deposits itself as a metal. And that's pretty much a irreversible process.

It can cause gas expansion and it can cause shorts itself. So there are loads of these different things we have to consider when looking at new chemistries. And so it depends on the kind of company you are. Right. So I did see the video and I do agree with you. when you are kind of in the top two or three in terms of market share, it's kind of your race to lose, right? So you're more wary about a mistake happening, especially when you sell tens of millions, hundreds of millions of phones a year. So you're going to be a lot more strict when it comes to

safety standards. And sometimes it might just be the thing that you don't want to really risk. And I'll also say, you know, when we look at something like silicon carbon or even, you know, newer technologies like silicon anode itself, it, what it helps with things like capacity, in terms of battery chemistry, you're playing a lot of other levers instead. So as you go with more and more silicon, it is, you're actually reducing the charge rate as well. So that is another thing you have to balance. And of course, things like longevity. You know, you mentioned in your video, and it's quite accurate. When silicon absorbs lithium ions as it charges, it swells up, right? And there are loads of ways, you know, people, there's like nanolithography ways of making sure those particles are swell up as much. But at the end of the day, it's still swelling.

and that will cause, you know, companies to have certain concerns, and they'll want to test these for longer periods of time. So I expect it to be slower adoption there as well. And I would say, you know, a lot of different companies take things like battery longevity differently. Some will make this their number one thing, and you'll realize that they're the ones that don't really increase charge speed that much, don't really experiment with new new types of chemistry

and that's usually because they actually care about longevity a lot more than others. I know you won't say it, but I'll say that that's the thing we've seen from Apple for years. But what is funny about batteries is smartphones, I talk about smartphones so much we get very few really exciting

new things with smartphones at this stage. They're such a mature category. So when we do get something interesting, like, oh, a way bigger smartphone sensor, or, oh, this really big processor node shift, or, ooh, a huge increase in battery capacity, that's interesting. So, like, we pay more attention to it, and we'd like all of our favorite brands and our favorite phone models we're considering buying to be at the forefront of that. But it's not always as simple as just switching to the new thing. I think one thing that was also mentioned in the video that was, you know, it's obviously very complex, and I did a lot of simplification. but is the testing process, and I'm assuming this is obviously very important to you because you're putting batteries on people's heads.

Like, what is the process of testing, you know, charge cycles and for longevity? What is what is the process like at a big company when trying to assess if a new battery technology is potentially worth it? So usually when it comes to safety, we work with the battery vendor themselves to come out with safety guidelines. And actually, most companies have roughly the same kind of guidelines, the same kind of tests. Some may just pull the criteria a little bit higher. You'll usually see battery specs, for example, it'll retain 80% of its charge after 800 to 1,000 charge cycles. Yeah, we see that.

Things like that. Yeah. So, but one other thing is when you have a new product, the way it fits in also makes a difference in terms of how you should test it. I'll, I'll, I'll give you an example. When it comes to battery tech, when it comes to fitting a battery itself, your manufacturers will always leave kind of an expansion space between the battery and the actual housing. Because batteries will expand.

They'll expand with temperature. They'll expand over time, right? There's always going to be a little bit of off-gassing, potentially that can happen. And a lot of the time, that's within a acceptable range. And that's why you leave that expansion space. It's mostly when that expansion goes beyond what that expansion space allows, that you'll see your phone kind of splitting apart. So we'll test for a lot of different things. We'll test for,

you know, different temperatures. Even during shipping, we have a thing called thermal shock where, you know, something might go from minus something degrees to something that's really hot and really humid. So those are things that you kind of have to test for for all kinds of products. But I'll still say there are a lot of things that is really hard to test for. You know, there are, you know, 20, 30 different combinations that are going to happen. But how do you test those over a long period of time? Right, if you're testing it through for, you can accelerate certain tests, but at the end of the day, you'll always realize you have a certain blind spot when it comes to real-world usage.

So that comes back to what I mentioned. It's all about how do you want to play a at risk. Yeah, I mean, like I said, there's, there's a lot of variables and maybe if it's in something that's in used, it's used in less environments or less situations, and maybe you don't have to test for as many variables. But a smartphone is like, it's with you everywhere. Like there's a trillion different things that can happen to it from temperature to pressure and environments and stuff. So that's, it does seem, I don't envy the task. It seems like a very detailed, complicated one. My last question for you is just, what else do you think people should know about batteries in general. Like there's, it's a complex thing. There's chemistry. There's physics. There's a lot involved. Is there

anything that maybe is commonly looked over by people buying smartphones? Maybe in just when comparing one smartphone to the other, what do you think people should know about batteries that they probably don't already? I will say one thing about kind of, I'll say one that's kind of more supply chain oriented first. And that's specifically, usually with new tech, you have this. one issue where not many people are making it. If, you know, from HCC's past, we have rules in place where we are required to kind of second source everything. And that's for a few reasons. Sometimes, you know, you don't want one vendor for a really cheap component to go out of business or to have an issue and then impact your entire business. Sure. Sometimes it's that, but sometimes it's

it's also more malicious. You have competitors in the space that will attack your supply chain to try and stop you from going to market. That happens more than you'd expect. That is so yeah, so as a big company, whenever you look at new tech, you're gonna wanna try and second source everything.

I mean, in HCC, the only exception by default is the CPU, right? Because mostly in a phone, you're not going to find a second source for like a Qualcomm chip set. Sure. But you can second source most things. And then if we have to waive it, anything for any reason, you know, that usually has to go through an approval process. So that is one thing to consider, which is at the scale of certain companies, they're going to be required to second source those because they don't want their sales to tank because one supplier couldn't make batteries anymore for them.

or any other component. Yeah, that is a really interesting you bring that up because that's been a story sometimes every once in a while in the past there will be a big enough noticeable difference between maybe a single component

from two different suppliers and that'll make a headline like, ooh, I got the iPhone with the LG display or I got the iPhone with the Samsung display and you can actually measure a difference and it's kind of rare that that happens but usually people are pretty good

about matching the things together but that is a fascinating story too. Yeah, I would say most manufacturers will have the same specs for those different companies to try and make sure that it isn't noticeable. But every now and then you all someone notice it. So that's kind of the supply chain side. And then, yeah, I think the one thing about batteries is coming back to there are so many different

levers, right? And you might want capacity, but the next person's going to want charging speed, right? you might be able to have both, but there's a trade-off somewhere. That trade-off could be longevity. I don't think any battery manufacturer will make something that is below what industry safety regulations are. But what I will say is those tolerances will sometimes change how they fit in a product. Also impacts how it's tested. And yeah, different companies will just have their different.

priorities and at the end of the day that is going to be one of the key reasons why they choose a specific battery over another and sometimes could even just be cost right memory is going up crazy right yeah we've been having meetings about memory for all of our products like almost any product with a process is going to have some sort of memory in there and we're trying to figure out okay what else could we do without having to increase prices for certain things. And sometimes, and I'm sure someone in 2026 will end up making a decision that they're not going to invest as much into the newest technologies because they don't want their

retail price to go up. Yeah, like I try to, this has come up now that we've like started make our own products where we realize how many decisions go into these products and every lever is just a trade off with something else. I am rooting for Silicon Car. carbon batteries to be, like we haven't had, thankfully, any issues with them. Longevity seems to be totally fine so far. But, you know, batteries, even just within batteries themselves, have different levers. It feels like an oversimplification, but a lot of things come down to just like capacity, charge rate and longevity, pick two.

You know, that's not even with price and like all the other things. Like there are tons of different levers that will flip based on what your priorities are as company. But yeah, I'm hoping for good things. you might not know what that level will look like. If you pull the other two, you don't know what that longevity level is gonna look like until you've seen that thing run through its entire life cycle.

So I would say, like, those that aren't using silicon carbon batteries, I wouldn't say any of them are rooting against it at all. No, yeah, yeah. As long as nothing happens to it in whatever their, you know, timeframe they're observing it. Like, I'm sure it's gonna be within,

within those discussions. I'm sure it's in their discussions now, but at the end of the day, when they make that decision of which one they use, they're choosing the levers that makes the most sense for them. Awesome, well, this has been super helpful and insightful, and I'm sure we'll have you back on the podcast at some point, maybe even back in the studio,

but we appreciate the insight, so thanks as always. Thank you. All right, so that was it. Thank you again to Shen for spending the time. obviously he's a very busy person and being in charge with a big company like that. There are tons of things to consider all the time. It was cool having the facts from him and the expertise. And again, the risk that we're talking about is not just like the specific safety risk of one technology,

but it's like a corporate risk. It's a financial risk. It's a longevity risk. It's all sorts of things that come with the choices, the levers you pull to use different technologies. So I thought that was interesting to hear. Yeah, I think one of the, a pretty common comment was along the lines of like, like, well, Apple and Samsung aren't going to risk spending more money on it. It's like, yeah, that's part of the risk assessment thing is like it costs more money,

potentially has way more money. You think about Note 7. I mean, how much money Samsung probably lost about this? Like, yeah, all these companies care way more about bottom line and money than they do any of us and getting the best features. So yeah, I thought that was pretty obvious. I was, I am reminded that the guy at IO that told me the reason Google didn't use them at the time. Again, this was a year ago.

Things might have changed since then. It was two years ago. Maybe it might have been two years ago. It might have been two years ago. It might have been to I.O. I.O. I.O. I to Google I.O. we go. What? Old McDonald.

That's what he said. Yeah. The hamburger. Yeah. Anyway, so he at the time, it wasn't, he wasn't saying that they're more likely to explode necessarily. What he had told me was that their longevity. They started to lose their total.

their total ability to charge to 100% much quicker. And after two-ish years, the degradation was a lot higher. I am aware, like, from two years from then, they've actually made the technology quite a bit better. They've made the chemistry a lot better so that it, you know, maintains a lot of charge cycles. I think One Plus has put out a lot of kind of, like, technical stuff about this and how they're able to actually maintain, like, a thousand charge cycles for silicon carbon, which is a lot better than some people.

Yeah. So that's really important. Stuff changes. Yeah. This like assessment of the technology will be constantly changing. And then the way that these companies decide whether to use any of this stuff or not

is also constantly changing. So as it gets better, like, okay, one of the big points in the comments was, well, we haven't had any issues so far with silicon carbon batteries, which is great. That's really good news for potentially getting them sooner in everyone else's phones. But yeah, this stuff is constantly evolving. And it's newish to the point where it's only been out

for like two years. Exactly. So like, yeah. We're not going to see if there are any problems. We're not going to start seeing it until like a year from now or so. And the variable of humankind is so much more insane than anything you can test in a lab. I mean, we've seen how many folds have been folded 100,000 times in a lab and people are breaking them? Broke him within a week.

Two weeks. Yeah, we peeled the screen protector off of the first fold immediately. Like us as humans destroy things. And when it's something that has a little bit of a more. dangerous potential. It's just like even if that's so small, the news cycle of when, if that potentially happens is so big.

And we talk about, we talk about how like, you know, when YouTube makes a change and it's like, oh, we're only testing this on 1% of customers, but then you realize what 1% is for YouTube. Yeah.

And that's like a lot of people. It's the same with like Samsung sells an insane amount of phones, right? So like if 1% of their phones have battery issues, that's a way bigger story than 1% of like, the amount of phones like Google sells having battery issues. Yeah, that's exactly, and what Shin was talking about, like if you're pretty confident that the issues with your phones are one and a million and you only sell half a million phones, you feel pretty good about that.

But if you're Samsung and you sell tens of millions of phones, the risk profile is different. And are also like, yeah, you're just leading everything already. Like, why change anything? I'm already making plenty of money and people aren't switching off me. So why would I give them anything else until I need to? Are you just talking about the S-26 now? I think that's, I think, yeah, literally. That was maybe the most, like, impactful line that he said to me, which is like, it's your race to lose.

Yeah. In all these other competitive markets where there is no true, like, number one runaway with a high market share, they're all very competitive, and that's way more exciting. You get way more advanced product really quickly. And then, like I said in that video, here in the U.S., where market share is kind of stacked for a couple companies, they are, I mean, we see it. They are so passive about a lot of stuff. So yeah, that's their risk assessment profile. The S-23 is the S-24 is the S-25 is probably a S-36. 23 plus-plus-plus-plus.

New boxes. Yeah, no, 3-plus-plus. My thing, too, is like I feel like if there's one thing I can trust and believe in, it's that these companies want to make more money. So if there's an opportunity for them to use this new battery tech, they're going to do it as soon as possible. If they think it'll drive the market share. I mean, the whole reason that Samsung is making a fold-a-volt, allegedly,

making a foldable to compete with the iPhone foldable form factor is because they know it will make them money. Because people are like, oh, I love that shape, but I want to be on Android. Also, Samsung has some pretty bad PTSD with the Note 7 explosion. I was just thinking about that. That was 2016, right? I think it was 2017. 2016, so almost a decade ago.

I always find myself saying like, hey, and you know what happened to Samsung. But for some 15-year-olds watching this, they actually don't know what else with Samsung. Oh, yeah. A lot of people might not even know what the Galaxy Note was. Exactly. Part of the age verification is what happened to Samsung. There was a time where you had to choose between having an Android phone that came with a stylus or air travel. That's true.

Yeah. Because you could not bring Galaxy Note 7 on a plane. For those that don't know, the Galaxy Note 7, notably. Appreciate it. started exploding a lot. Even that is, there's 96 cases total. That's a lot, bro. It is a lot.

It's a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not really that much. I only exploded 96 times. It's not that big a deal. I mean, especially doing that while you're sleeping, your phone could randomly explode like that. I would not, yeah. So they recalled it,

and then they just didn't end up replacing it, which was very funny. They did later release the Note 7 fan edition. for those who... That was really want to note seven. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, lithium ion batteries aren't perfect either.

No. It's just they have some level of risk all the way across the board. Can I throw something out there also just about the video? Just as an explanation, the reason we showed the Jerry Rig Everything fold, like smoking in the video, is because when we were looking over the script, someone at the studio is like, oh, I don't know what the term thermal runaway means. So rather than just putting this big explanation there, we just, I mean, I guess it's not a big explanation, but we're like, we'll show footage of what a thermal runaway is. We don't have that

silicon carbon. I totally get why people think that felt targeted, but that was not the purpose of it. I think it all came, it all, the mentality that a lot of comments that were seeing and some reaction videos people made, a lot of it came from the original thumbnail, which is people going, oh, this is a hit piece against silicon carbon, which if you ignore every other video I've ever made, is a reasonable take. But now that that stumb nails changed, that packaging makes a lot more sense. We are explaining the risk assessment, not going, hey, silicon carbon, bad, lithium ion, good. So if that was your thought, now you know.

And the risk of cement, again, is mostly about pricing and longevity and less about exploding. Exactly. Which a lot of people thought it was about exploding, but it's not. So there we go. Can I say a random thing that Chen pointed out that I thought was interesting? Yeah. Was the more he was talking about it, I kind of, like, in my head, tried to visualize what these levers are that he was talking about that you have to like pull and push or whatever and it just

reminded me kind of like an exposure triangle like with cameras like the more of one thing you do the less of the other like charge cycles or capacity and it's like eventually we'll have sonies that can just see in the dark but yeah but it was also a good point because it's like an exposure triangle where you have to take 10,000 pictures before you can see the light meter you know what I mean because like he made that really good point that it's like you can play with the longevity lever or the charge speed lever but you don't know what that third lever is going to be like until you've had these batteries used for a while for years yeah anyway thank you shen all in the name of shade and light on things thank you again to shen for uh for helping us out with that and i think it's time for a second

trivia more trivia dude so this is a youtube question let's see who gets it you two i should get this like youtube being came and pre-installed on which ipahs no um triggered and you that one. Not including music videos. The top most YouTube video is a GTA six trailer, of course. But one company accidentally broke that record in 2024. Do you remember what company that was? Most viewed YouTube video that's not. In 24 hours. In 24 hours, that is not a music video. That is not a music video. Accidentally. One company accidentally broke that record? Yep. Oh, it wasn't. Was it? Or was it? Really? Was it? Was it? I think I know.

You think? Well, I'm trying to put the pieces together. It was very well-worded. Well-worded question. Thank you. It took me this whole... People go back 20 minutes and just look at me at the desk like this. And that was me trying to think about how to freeze this question.

Well, done. Accidentally. Okay. We'll think about that. It was intentional. Answers at the end like usual. We'll be right back. All right.

Welcome back to Wayform, the Waye Forum podcast, as you know it, where we talk about EVs. Two EVs to talk about this week. The cheap one or the expensive one? Expensive. The expensive one or the cheap one? Cheap is relative to the expensive one. Of course.

Yeah, let's do the cheap one. Okay, all right. Rivian R2 reviews dropped this week. Sort of reviews, including ours. Yeah. First drive. Reviews, first drive. Final prototype evaluation.

We don't have full pricing of all the trims yet, but our video went up, CarWile video went up, Jerry, everything video went up, Doug DeMiro video, a bunch of us got to actually hang out and drive these cars. R2, as many of you know, is the slightly smaller and roughly, roughly half the price Rivian R1. It's the second generation product. It's their 2O SUV.

It's their Model Y fighter. It's their mass market competitor to, like, put them on the map and save them, blah, blah, blah. All these expectations for R2. I thought it was really, really good. I thought it was really impressive. The software was good. The steering wheel haptics were like PS5 controllers with the like spring weight. Relax.

It was really relaxed. I'm just saying. It looks like an R1. It's just smaller. It's nimble. It's 2,000 pounds lighter. It's simpler. It also was the highest end trim version of it.

So it's obviously not going to be the base $45,000 one. But it was a dual motor all-wheel drive, 600-something horsepower, 0 to 163.5 seconds. Very, very capable machine. We off-rooted in it. We drove it on streets. Got roughly 300 miles of range. Lots of good things to say about it.

But we don't know the price of the one that I tested. That won't come out for another month or so Which everyone is now You know, doing their theorizing about how much they think it will cost But I'm curious if you guys are thinking good things about Artuna Well, with the RAM shortage, you know, it's gonna be way more expensive I'm kidding Every car has...

I mean, not that far off Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of, yeah, there's a little bit of memory Yeah, I'm curious, do you know which trim you drove? Like, did they tell you? Yes. So I am not allowed to weigh on the prices Yeah But yes, I drove the highest end trim that they plan on shipping in 2026.

And when they announced it however many years ago, what was the price for the people that put into pre-order? Andrew, I believe you did that, right? Well, the pre-order, though, was... It was like $100 down payment. It was like $100? But for which trim, do you know? No, no, you didn't pick a trim. Oh, you didn't get to pick.

No. You picked that. I thought the whole thing was under 60. That was what I was trying to ask. Like, what was the number that you said back in the day? I don't remember. I thought back in the day there was an under 60. What I mostly see is 45,000. This whole promise of like this is their $45,000 competitor.

If I remember correctly, and it could be totally wrong, is everyone is saying under 60 a few years ago, which makes most people assume that higher trim would be 59. But that was like, you know, the like 59-95 or whatever that is under 60. I don't know. That was two years ago. A lot of stuff has changed. These things never come out the price.

And to be clear, the R2 is only coming in the R1S trim, where it's smaller. I mean, it's a smaller SUV. It's a small to or SUV. There's no pickup truck version. Right. Which, yeah, this is like the common shape of vehicle that especially America just buys a lot of in general.

And model-wise, most popularly vehicle on Earth for a reason. Like there's a shape and a two-row SUV higher off the ground type of thing that people like and this is competing directly with that. So that's out. That's, you know, not too many hot takes about it. I just want the Earth 3. Dude, I want the R3. It's like a Subaru.

This is cute. This is cool. Thank you. Now do R3. The R3 is like a foot and a half to two feet shorter than the model three. It'll be even easier to park in Brooklyn. You mean lengthwise, right? Lengthwise.

Yeah, front and wide. You got to really get down to get into that thing. The thing about the R2 was they had like the decals on it as like the like R2D2. Well the like camouflage quote unquote like it didn't cover any lines. It just still looked exactly the same. It just looked like it had like a silly paint job on it. Yeah, we all know. I mean, they showed me in that studio like two years ago, whatever,

what the R2 was supposed to look like. So this is now technically an updated final version, but it's like we already, we can see it. It has a couple stripes on it. Okay, whatever. But we know what the R2's going to look like. So, yeah, R2, they got very clever with it. I will say they had some nice Easter eggs.

You can see some of them in Doug Demiro's video, some of them in Zach's video. The charge flap, which is the back left corner, has a maze in it. People did screenshot the video and fill out the maze doesn't seem to mean anything. It just seems like a lot of it.

Top posts on our subreddit just says this maze fucking sucks. Because I remember when I was there and I'm sure someone from Ruby was watching this, I was like, please show me all the Easter eggs and they're like, we can't. All I can tell you is there's a bunch

and I can't explain any of them or show you where they are. And we were like, all right, well, I found the maze. So can you at least tell me what the maze means when people fill it out? They were like, it's just a maze.

It's just a maze. I was like, what do you mean? It's just a maze. You spent all this effort, like, building and designing your own maze and the molding to, like, hide in the charge port. What is it? They wouldn't tell me. So now that people have filled it out, it seems like it actually is just a maze and nothing special having to do it. Unless it's like a...

It's just for the whimsy. Topographical map or something. I don't know. There ain't nothing wrong with something that doesn't mean anything. That's fair enough. Well, here's some things that did mean something. In the window lining of the windshield, there's. There's a little smiley face that looks like a little Yeti smiley face.

In the back windows, in the window lining, there's a little climber. Do they mean anything? Well, it's an adventure vehicle. Why are people so mad at the maze? Just a maze. Well, it's not really adventure themed until it means something. Underneath the lining of the center storage, there's a little diagram of things I can fit there, like a water bottle and a little camera and a knife, which is kind of cool.

Is there a speaker? They replaced. Sorry, I didn't watch the video yet. They moved the speakers up until like under that front dash. Oh, okay. They took them out of the doors actually. Is there a flashlight? There's still a flashlight in the door.

You know, they know what we want. Doesn't cost the much. The most important part. Well, that was the thing about the R2 is how do you take half the price off and still keep all the character of the Rivian like R1 stuff? And I thought the flagship was obviously going to go and it stayed. So that was actually kind of impressive. They also announced an Apple Watch app that you can use to unlock the doors now. Oh, that's nice.

As if they, I mean, they need better key fobs because that's like my number one. Yeah, that is, yeah. Two other Easter eggs, the molding underneath the windshield wiper fluid canister in the car is a small skunk slash frog hybrid animal. Because that's a frog skunk, which is a fronk. It's a prunk, frunk.

That means something. You should also know that that spot right underneath the front of the windshield where the windshield wipers are is called the cowl or cowling and if you if you peek in there there's also a cow owl outline of a cow owl

okay that's pretty sweet I didn't know David started working at Rivian with all these puns I didn't that joke that's put into this car I love it they know their audience they wouldn't show me or tell me about any of the rest of them but that's as many as I was able to find so wow okay wait this is just to be clear this is going to be on

all our twos not just these models you've reviewed These Easter eggs? Yeah, these easter eggs. I believe this should be on all of them. Okay, that makes me very happy. Yes. Yes. Are you getting an R2 Adam?

Hell no, I'm getting the R3X. Me too, baby, let's go. You're buckled up for that six year weight. I'm ready, right? I mean, I'm still paying off my current car, so by then I'll be ready. As long as you know, as long as you know. I paid my off yesterday. Well, there's another EV I do want to bring up to you guys because there's so many weird, interesting things about it that are connected to Wayform.

Number one, it's a Ferrari EV. We don't know what the outside looks like, but it's called the Luce. I think. Luce. Do you have to say it like that? I'm not even gonna to pronounce it. It's always something Italian with them. Number two,

Luce, Luce, Luce. Number two, this interior was the first with assistance from Love From, which is Johnny Ives firm. So this is potentially the first car interior that Johnny Ive has gotten his hands on. And it's always funny listening to old, I think Nielai has brought this up on Old's Vergecasts,

which is like all the Apple executives drive Ferraris and all they really want is them to have car play and like now they finally gotten to work with Ferrari, so this is the first time they've had a direct hand in this. But there are some videos out there, this like big teaser video, or really not a teaser, they show the whole interior of the car. And okay.

Okay, okay, okay. So many thoughts. Each individual switch and display and UI element is actually beautiful, right? But then when... In isolation. In isolation. Like each button, each switch, really clean, really nicely done.

But then you zoom out to the whole interior and it looks bad. Like, I think pretty bad. It has this, like, retro look to it, which is really nice for my take last week, that nostalgia is ruining everyone's taste. They went a little bit, like, confused with the nostalgia, I think. It's hard to call it nostalgia when it's like, hey, this steering wheel looks kind of old, but also here's an Apple Watch Ultras right next to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The tablet looks like an Apple Watch, a giant Apple Watch Ultra. Yeah, but how long ago did the first Apple Watch come out?

We're on like the three now, so probably four years ago. No, he's talking about the original one. No, not the original Apple Watch. The first Apple Watch. It's 25th. Right? It's been like a decade. Yeah.

So this could still be reminiscent of older times. Yeah. It's just a, it's a. It's a weird... I am guessing this is not going to be a cheap car. This is going to be a car that people... It's a Ferrari. Like, people with a lot of money...

I mean, it's a Ferrari. And I just don't know what type of person wants this. And I say that, knowing that a lot of people do actually want retro future. They just want an electric version of an old car. A lot of people say this a lot. And I'm not sure how many would actually buy it if it's like small phones where we all say we want it, but we don't buy it.

But like the old... Remember the Buick commercial where they show the GNX over and over and over again, which is like super sick? And everyone's like, we just want that but electric. And then you show the new Buick and it's like, I don't want that. So the old Volkswagen bus, everyone loves that. And everyone wishes there was just an electric version of that. But then they had to go modernize a whole bunch of design elements and people want it less.

I think that's still true. Like people seem to really like the idea of an old design that's just electrified. 100%. But this is, yeah, it's, I really want to know what the output. of the car. I mean, that's kind of why Hyundai, Hyundai, Hyundai is making the, that card that it uses the Ionic 5. No.

No. What is it called? Oh, the N-74. N-74, which they did say is going to be a production car. But then they aren't doing it. Aren't they? They keep saying they will. Yeah, they keep saying they will.

That was the hydrogen. It had like hydrogen fuel cells also. Yeah, like a high- or whatever. That was years ago. I've been talking about that like. I mean, that car is like. At first they're like, it's a concept, and then they were like, maybe we might do it.

And they're like, but we probably won't. And then they were like, it's going to go into production. And then we just haven't heard anything. I just think it would be such a huge PR win if a company would actually do what everyone says we want. Yeah. I just, there's probably some amount of surveys that they've run or people who just say they would buy it but wouldn't actually buy it. Yeah. You know what's the best thing about this interior that I'm seeing is just that there's buttons and knobs.

Yeah. It turns out if it's just not an eye. iPad, people get excited, which is hilarious from Johnny Ive. I will say like the giant Apple Watch iPad thing, kind of just looks like a knockoff iPad. I don't know. All of this, and I'm not a designer, obviously. But a lot of this to me is very ugly.

Each individual piece is sick. The dynamic clock dude that like you can- Are all the clock's dynamic? The torque meter that- All buildings outside, David. The torque meter that changes- just based on what mode you're in is sick. I will say if I was able to just like buy this tablet and stick it into my car,

I would 100% do it. It's so ugly. No, it's sick as hell. Oh my God. This is like so on the line of like good and bad that I feel like if I have any response to it, it'll either be like, you don't like it because you can't afford it. Or you don't know anything about Ferraris. Yeah, like what?

I lose saying anything about this car. The launch mode, did you see the thing about the launch mode where you're, like you pull the handle in hold on, do you put, yes. And then everything like turns orange. Yeah, I mean, it looks sick in isolation. It looks awesome. This is the key, I think.

Yeah, the key is a little mini, like juice box. It fits in like the little piece. Like this is the key because later down here it shows the key. That's pretty cool. There's a lot of scrolling on this website. Yeah, something that I did think was cool is that they made like a book series about the development of this car

that's like four books that, like Johnny I've like developed with his team. And apparently they do that on every project and I think that's very cool and you know I'm happy for them Remember when they announced CarPlay Ultra and all the things popped up in the in the ad and they were like oh this is so cool it looks so pretty And then all the car makers were like no we're not doing that we don't know where we got that from Does this actually exist or are these just a bunch of pretty renders that they did and put on a website? This is the interior reveal of Ferrari has said that they're going to make an electric car This is the interior reveal of their eventual electric car

They will at some point reveal the exterior and the price and the specs and all the rest of that stuff, but this is a car that they've said they're going to actually make. But none of these are pictures. They're like three-d-renders. There are videos? Yeah, I'll show you. I'll send you on on Twitter or something. Of like an actual. Like someone driving it or inside it?

No, just they've like taken the interior and like put it in a studio and like people hit the buttons themselves and they sound really nice and stuff. We got to talk about the binnacle, man. What's that? What's the binnacle? These dials are sick, man. The binnacle is what they're calling the gauge cluster behind this steering wheel. A binnacle is, you ever seen on like an old-timey boat? There's like that tower right by the helm.

Yeah. That has like a compass and maybe like a clock. Oh, does it have one of those? No, but they're calling the gauge cluster the binnacle. And I like saying the word binnacle. Because it's like pinnacle sort of. Yeah. Sure.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, man. I like each individual piece. I hate the whole thing, though. I'm also very curious. Like, there's so many screens that are sort of hidden in this car. And I'm very curious if you're going to be able to see bezels.

That's a great That's gonna make a big difference about how tacky it looks. Is this just running Android? Bowleds. That would be really funny. Definitely is. It almost definitely is.

You would be rational to think that such an expensive car has to use the latest tech and screens. But if you look at any other Ferrari, are they all CDs? They don't look great. Yeah, I would not trust Ferrari to go and write horse OS.

You know, like that's not what I would want to use. Yeah. I, it's weird. Anyway, that ends my Ferrari crash out for now. All right. My turn. Yeah.

Andrew brought you guys another game. Buckle up guys. Yeah, it's called How Long Can You Listen to Me Crash Out about a Super Bowl. Yo, Andrew, did you see like Olympic figure skating the other day? I have not had Internet for a very long time. And that is the start of my crash out. Well, sure. But I want to open this with a question to you guys.

Okay. If at your house a wire can. to the telephone pole. I'm going to stop you right there. Three of us don't have house. I know, but just imagine. Okay, just imagine. Fair.

Imagine. Uh-huh. You and your family live in a house. I'm going to stop you right there. I do not have a family. A wire is down across your driveway and you contact the company that deals with that wire. Three of us do not have drive. Sorry.

I'm so sorry. How fast do you think that company should come to deal with that wire? Is it a live? wire. How am I supposed to know? I'm not an expert. Well, this is the internet, your internet went down. So it's not like a power line. Okay. So, I'll, oh, a wire has come down from a cell. A wire has come down from a telephone pole. Okay. Do you feel confident enough that that is a power wire or a cable wire? I don't know. Sounds like it's cable. Okay. I only know it is a cable wire because, here, I'll paint the picture. Andrew, in the video, in the video showed me there's a transformer on the

pole. Yeah, yeah, okay. Well, so I'll explain a little further. This is the, this is on Saturday. Remember, we're recording this Wednesday. That will help in this story. On Saturday, this big tree in front of my yard, it's a very tall, skinny tree. It's probably like 50 or 60 feet tall.

Pine tree is swaying in the winds because we have had super, super cold days, lots and lots of ice. And on Saturday, we had one of the coldest days of the year, including wind gusts of like 40 to 50 miles an hour. So like 11 a.m. There's two of these trees standing next to each other. And I noticed one is significantly leaning more than the other. I also have pictures at them.

I'll give them to you. If you're watching, you can see this. To the point where there's this like bulge coming out of the ground. And I'm like next to the tree. That looks bad. And I realize that the root system is pulling up on this tree. So I immediately call our power company and say this tree is going to fall down and is most likely going to hit a telephone pole.

Within an hour, I'm sitting at my bay window. and I hear the gust of wind and I look out and I watch this tree come down and snap the telephone pole in half. Yeah. It hit the wires, not even the pole. The wire is so hard that the telephone pole about a third of the way up

snapped clean off. The whole telephone pole flips upside down because the transformer and all the wires are at the top. It is now hanging in the road and a tree is across my driveway and across the road. So I do what I should have done. I first call 911

one, because there's active wires down in the middle of the road. Then I call the power company, tell them what's happening. Then I call Xfinity. Did you leave power? Immediately. Also, so at the telephone pole, it's technically across the street. No sparks. But it's across the street, but there's a wire that comes and then runs into a telephone

pole between me and my neighbor's house to then split off how we get our utilities. So dispatcher obviously picks up. I talk to a real person. Power company. I talk to a real person. Xfinity, who's my cable company, I tell them about it. And through their automated services at 1-800 Xfinity is just, you think it literally is like, would you like to report a down and potentially dangerous wire?

Do you want me to text you a way to submit this? And at this point, I'm like, I just want my power back. I will just take the ticket and submit it. So that happens. The power company fixes this telephone pole by 10 p.m. It was still a really long time of being really cold at home because I had no power. But they get that stuff done then. The next day my wires...

Also, like Saturday was the coldest day we've had. It was the coldest day we've had. It was, I could see my breath inside my house. We sent Claire and Lane to someone else's house and they stayed there. This is all going to end with me talking about customer service and how every large company is a bunch of fucking cowards. And that they use customer service to just deal with all of it. But, okay, I'm going to try and go as fast as I can here. Next day, Sunday, I realize there's still a wire across my driveway.

The only reason I know this is not a dangerous wire is because I personally talked to one of the power company people. And they say, we did all our wires. The wire left down on your driveway right now is the cable companies and we're not going to deal with it. Sorry. So then I call that day Xfinity. The problem with Xfinity's horrific call answering service or whatever it is is it connects

you to pretty much no one until you, at some point, can get to technical customer support, the people who are like trying to help you troubleshoot your router and everything. First guy tells me someone will be there today between six and 11. And at that point, I'm like, that feels like way too long for a wire to be down. So I get mad. And then no one shows up that day. And so then I call the next day. And they were like, oh, no one showed up. They're supposed to be here at 10 to 12. Call us later if no one shows up. I call them later. No one shows up. They're like, oh, it's scheduled for tomorrow. And then yesterday, I call again.

They're like, oh, 10 to 12, 12 o'clock. I actually did get an automated thing saying, like, they'll be a little late today. I call again at 5 p.m. Oh, the schedules for tomorrow now. No one can connect me to the like... Actual person. The technicians that are doing the exterior things.

Every time they're just like, well, we're just technical support. There's nothing we can do. And I go, what's the line for customer service? And they say, it's $1,800 X-Finity, which is how I got to those people in the first place. Super TLDR. I'm not proud of how many times I freaked out at people on the phone. I mean, I probably have spent six to eight hours on the telephone in the last three or four days.

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

But this is not just them. Like, if you think about it, most places now, if there's customer service, you get this crappy answering machine of like, here's a bunch of different options that take you nowhere, hang the phone up on you all the time. And when you talk to someone, it's a call center that probably can't help you. and those poor people on that side are definitely just getting screamed at for nothing that they can actually do. That's what they paid for. We have plenty of options. Oh, my God. I literally don't have any other provider option in my area except for, I think they're spectrum, and it offers 25 down as their max.

So I don't have another option. California has a lot of laws around this. I would kill for a lot. In San Francisco and Santa Cruz, in Santa Cruz, we had Cruise net, and we had gigabit before anybody else had gigabit because there was like 20. different options just in Santa Cruz, which is like a town of like not that many people. If I had to say that having multiple options creates competition, which then... Marquez's careful. Yeah, it's like...

Competition is bad. Competition is bad. We need to own people. Are you saying you could bust trusts? Is that what you're saying? Wait a second. Wait, what if we did that? I...

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

Wait, how do you win that game? You don't. You just hate each other. Everyone gives up. Oh, I know how you win. You just make sure you're the only option. I think it's called Monopoly because it means one... That's why there's only one poly market.

There are two. There's Colchie as well. I want to say I appreciate you guys because I'm still fuming thinking about this and it's like helping me not look like as much of an idiot. It's crazy. Can I tell you some of the funniest things that I dealt with in these calls? one of them was me on the phone with somebody and then getting a text message from Xfinity saying

service in your area has been restored. That really helps. I had one person say, I kept just asking, they were like, oh, the appointment with the external technician is for 10 to 12 tomorrow. And I was like, can I get any confirmation for that? Can you send me an email?

No, we're not able to do that. And then one of them said, we can do that. And I said, well, I haven't gotten it yet. And she said, internet working. I said, no, the wires down across the road. And she said, well, you didn't get the email because you don't have internet. And I was like, I'm calling you on my phone. Like, this is the, this is the point where I tried to keep my cool for so long because I knew and I was just hoping someone could give me a number somewhere. But then they basically just lie to me. And like, basically

call me an idiot. And then I just start freaking out. And I was not nice. And I feel bad because it's not their fault because Xfinity is using a bunch. of labor somewhere else as punching bags. As punching bags to completely dodge any responsibility, which then just makes me even more mad. So honestly, anyone out there, if you have Xfinity and can change, do it because that place sucks. Even though everywhere else probably sucks,

but what I would give, I know, what I would give for Verizon Fios who are probably almost just as bad. Yeah, Verizon, as a Fios customer, I promise you, Defiah's customer service is so laughable, like the ways they have managed to screw me over. Dude, but I have an, Andrew, I have an Affinity story for you. But I think I told once, like, years ago on the podcast, but we know we're just going to tell it again because I hate Xfinity. Yeah. I was paying an insane amount of money for Xfinity Gigabit, like $80.90 a month.

Oh, I pay for a gig more than that for their like $1.200, yeah. I never, ever, ever got more than 100 megabytes down. Ever. Most of the time I was in the low 30s. And we would complain to Xfinity every day. Like, why are we paying all this money if you just cannot deliver the right service? And every day they'd be like, we don't know what's going on. It must be you somehow. Like you need to get a new router. You need to do this. We'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't lie to me. And after months of this, we were talking to someone via the like live chat at Xfinity. And they go, hold on. Give me one sec. Test your internet speed now. Gigabit, gigabit, up gigabit. It was like crazy. We were like, wait a second. How did you do that?

They were like, I can't really say. Yeah. And chat. Four days later, internet speed goes back down to 30. What happened? We get back on the live chat talking. We're like, no, no, someone fixed it last time. They're like, they know how to fix it.

Finally, we got them to admit why we texted them. You have a button on your dashboard that says, give us gigabit. And you're just refusing to hit it because your boss said not to. And the guy goes, yes, period. I'm sorry, period. Ends the chat. Oh, my God. That's similar.

Not with all the proof, but I had similar story briefly in college. I had like horrible, there was like two possible service whatever providers. And I pretty sure it was Comcast was the first one. And Comcast with a wig on in the second one. Yeah, basically. I was like three down or whatever. And it kept going in and out, have like, internet outages. And I just called them and I was like, cancel my service.

Cancel it now. Cancel it. I don't even want to bother working with you. Just cancel it. And they're like, no, please, please, we can upgrade you for free. And that's when they start like offering bargains. They're like, we'll upgrade you for a discount. I was like, cancel it.

I don't care. And they're like, okay, we'll just put you on the highest tier plan and we won't have to change anything else. And I was like, fine. And I hung up. And immediately my internet was like 300 up and down. It was zero changes to price or anything else. I was like, this could have been my situation the entire time.

but they hold you in the little box as long as they can. Yeah, so it's true. So real quick then, I, my neighbors who also are missing internet, when they called them, they said, oh, we don't see any other outages. It must be something in your house, but we can't get a home technician there until Wednesday. This is on Sunday. While I'm screaming at someone on the phone saying there's wires down and they know the, they're telling me there's no reported outage.

Right now, I think it actually got fixed, and I only know that because my neighbor texted me during this podcast saying, hey, our internet's backup. I think it might be working. Still not a single technician has called me or done anything. If I go home and that wires on the ground, boy, I don't know what's going on. When I got my files installed, they didn't show up on like the first three days. They said they were supposed to show up. And I kept being like, hey, they said they were going to show up between these hours and they didn't. And then when the guy eventually came, he's like, oh yeah, like, if we take too long in another job, we just don't come. And I was like, but do you tell anyone who tells me?

And they're like, no. My Fios technique, okay. My Fios technician took nine and a half hours to put Fios in my house. I don't know why. Like, he didn't do anything. And then there's a bunch of other stuff that happened while he was there that was like so crazy. I was like this insane.

But I will say, I got a lot of really nice tools out of it because he left like half of his stop at my apartment, including his hard hat. So I have a Verizon hard hat now, which I'm like really into. That's cool. Do you know the hours they gave me 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. and then say someone must be home when they show up. I was like, that is not happening. You're fixing the shit.

That is silly. Wow. I'm sorry about that. So they basically have expected me to miss three days of work. Yeah, they often assume you don't have a job. They're like, you must just be home all day, right? You're good? You're home all day?

Cool. Because yeah, we'll show you anytime. Honestly. Wait, you have a job, just use the internet at work. Idiot. I mean, I guess I was thinking of the scenario where if I didn't get to talk to the power, person to know that that wire down was not electrically charged. At this point, I would have had to call the fire department probably to come get it.

But like, I ask every single person I talk to you, like, is this, is this wire dangerous? And they're usually like, yes, it's dangerous. So like, do you think you should get someone to come here right away? And they're like, well, I guess if maybe it's just the power or if it's just the cable line, then that doesn't have electricity flowing through it. And I was like, do you trust me knowing if that's the power? I didn't tell them. I knew it was the.

But like I had people basically telling me, oh, you could cross over the power line. Don't worry about it. Which seems like an insane liability for us. So is your car not in the driveway? I've, I knew it was safe. So I've rolled over it since then. But it's, but that's only because of the power people. But I wasn't telling them that.

I was trying to get them to fucking clean up a wire or actually show up. Wow. I feel it. I'm titling this, the crash out episode. Thanks for you. Thanks for tuning into our crash out, our weekly crash out podcast. The one where everyone crashes out. That felt good.

Surveillance. Um, fuck you X-Finity. Seriously, like I, I... Plus one. Yes. That, fuck you, Sam Altman, too. Wow, we're at it.

I don't like any of your Ferraris either. And fuck your binnacle. I need Adam to say, Adam, who you're mad at? Ring cameras. Right now, WhatsApp. But that's the story for another podcast. I thought he was going to say all of you for making this an impossible episode to edit afterwards.

That too. Wait, what did WhatsApp do? Really quick. Pro, I can't get into this right now. Tune in next week. Subscribe to find out what WhatsApp did. Really quickly, related to WhatsApp, really quickly. There's a funny thing that happened where, do you guys remember when ChatGBT

GTBT was in WhatsApp randomly all of a sudden? Well, it was. I don't remember. Well, it was. I only remember Meta AI being in WhatsApp all of a sudden. Also ChatJBT was. And then Meta was like, oh no. And then they took it out.

Because they were like nobody else can have AI's in what's up now. Isn't that like anti-competitive or something? Yeah. And then the European Commission very quickly was like, uh-uh, uh-uh. And now they are passing legislation to force META to allow AI other humans. I know they're saving our asses about everything, Greenland. Come on. A lot of stuff.

Competent government is crazy. It's crazy. Anyway, it would be great. Come get your boy Xfinity over here. We need you at EU. Yeah, European Union, please. Come break up Comcast. Can we have the city of Philadelphia somehow join the EU so that podcast is like under EU jurisdiction now?

That would be crazy. They've just moved it. There was a jersey now. There's New Jersey. New Philadelphia. New Philadelphia. New New New York. It's about time for some trivia.

I forgot we had trivia. This is a crazy episode, dude. God. You know, I am feeling like I went a little too far. So because I said, fuck you, Sam Altman, I'm going to change my trivia question. I feel like at a certain point I got to draw the line. So today's new trivia question. What was the answer?

The answer was 6.8 gigawatts, which is, so we can round it up to 7. So that's 70% of what Sam Altman says it would take to cure cancer or tutor every child. Is that with the full capacity or the 30% capacity? That's full capacity. That's with the flux capacitor. That's with the flux capacitor. Very cool. Very cool.

How that translates to gigawatt hours, I don't know. But the trivia question I do know the answer to is, was inspired actually by something David Melsa earlier this episode. Uh-oh. Which was about the band. Straightlight manifesto. No. Three doors down. U-2.

U-2. You-2. Specifically, U-2 is now forever associated with Apple because they put that one album out. And there was a U-2 edition iPod. God, they got sold. That's different than the red edition, though, right? I think so. The product red.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You two, Apple, like this. Yeah. Homies. It's like Tim Cook and that guy with the shoes. However, Samsung and U2's lineup share one thing in common. What is that thing? What do you mean by the lineup?

That's it. That's the question. Oh. David, I'm not going to give you the answer. Stop staring at me like that. I don't know anything about you too, so that's going to be tough for me. What I'm really confused about is I kind of thought David would nail this one. I kind of thought this was a David, a David layup.

That means it's a pun. I wrote down the only thing I know about you too. Please, I hope it just says Bono. I just don't know anything about you two. So is that it? No. Andrew? I didn't write anything. All right. David?

Galaxy. No. Sunday, bloody Sunday. You were the closest. The answer is the edge, which is the name of the lead guitarist in the band. That's cool. You two and the thin phone. The S-25. I mean, Viva, LaVita, you know.

Somebody else is listening the podcast and immediately, because they know a lot about YouTube, they immediately went through and they're like, oh, yeah, the edge, I know. They're all going to get this. You would have to both know a lot. about you too and be aware of the current lineup of Samsung Galaxy folks well the edge line thing has been in the lineup for a very long time galaxy X edge galaxy no edge shout out to the note edge but I was insane I didn't know that his guitarist was named the edge or that their guitarist was named the edge I thought Bono just played all of

the instruments is Bono has a real name is Bono Jovi that's gonna trigger someone I can ask next question but first quick update on the score of course wait did Marquez get that point? No. No. Marquez with 14, speaking of which. 14. David, with 16.

Whoa. Andrew's still carrying the one with 17. I don't think David and I's points have changed in a very long time. No, it's been a while. I think ever since, no, you had to agree. Yeah, yeah. Ever since you complained about not getting any points, I don't think David and I have gotten any.

It's voodoo magic. That's hard. Okay. The next question. Yeah. In 2024, one company accidentally broke the record. Four, the most viewed. YouTube video in 24 hours. What was that company?

Was this in 2024? It was in 2024. David, can you put that down because you keep locking your face? Sorry. I know, me too, me too. I was wondering if they would remember because I completely blanked on it. I feel like I remember the story, but not the specifics. You know?

Oh, that I'm wrong. I didn't even write anything. Flip him and read. What do you got? Well. Marquez, what did you put? Rockstar? Like the energy drink?

No, though. The JETA trailer? I didn't write anything. You didn't write anything? I panicked. F*** Xfinity. He was just thinking about it. I put one plus for when they ran Marquez's entire video as an ad.

Oh, yeah. No, not that. That's a good guess, though. But that was like the one plus six years. I didn't know you're such a one plus show, Marcus. That was like the one plus six or something. Yeah, it was a while ago. It was not a published trailer for something.

It was a April Fool's joke that Discord did that it was a 17 second video that was on loop in their servers and it accidentally crossed over the line. And YouTube had to like take away that. It was like a pop-up thing. So it's like it's, they basically bought it the views because like it was embedded into it.

In Discord. 1.4 billion views in 24 hours. Oh my God. Not hear that story. Whoa, Infinite Martin Galich unlocked. The worst thing Discord's ever done, maybe next to this face recognition stuff, is adding these stupid little pop-ups in the corner

that you always have to be like, I don't want to do a quest right now. Shut up, it's an ad or whatever, a new feature. Wow. That kind of defines 2026. Yeah. Side quest. Is it an ad or a feature? Do a quest to find out.

It's 2026. Well, thank you for tuning into the Crash Out podcast. We appreciate your time. Next week we'll be crashing out about a slightly different set of things. Yeah, WhatsApp. Possibly. WhatsApp will be on the list, of course. And then just keep in touch with the news.

Maybe we'll get an idea of what we're going to crash out to next. If you're still here, kudos. Quadfold. That means we appreciate you already because you're probably already subscribed. But if you haven't already, get subscribed. See you guys in the next episode. Peace. Goodbye.

Wait for it misproduced by Adam Alina and Ellis Rovan. We're a partner with Vox Media Podcast Network, and our trashal music was vain cell. Am I the only one in this room who has not met Reggie Watts and or knows who he is? He was at Mark's birthday party, right? No.